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Theme: 8. Negotiating Margins: Representations, Resistances, Agencies
Sylvia Tidey
University of Virginia, United States
Sylvia Tidey
University of Virginia, United States
Sylvia Tidey
University of Virginia, United States
Nicole Constable
University of Pittsburgh, United States
Sahana Ghosh
National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore
What happens when different regimes of valuation, knowledge, governance, and care cross paths? What are the unintended effects of such encounters, and how are those involved affected in disparate and unequal ways? This book panel brings together three anthropologists whose recent books, based on ethnographic work conducted in South, East, and Southeast Asia, engage these questions. In her book Paper Entanglements, Nicole Constable (University of Pittsburgh) asks how attempts to regularize passports for female Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong undermine, rather than strengthen, these workers’ rights and legal status. In her book A Thousand Tiny Cuts, Sahana Ghosh (National University Singapore), furthermore, analyses how Euro-American-styled borders and security regimes interrupt and reorder gendered, social, and physical geographies across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands. In her book Ethics or the Right Thing, Sylvia Tidey (University of Virginia) examines the ways in which Good Governance programs unintentionally facilitates new forms of corruption among Indonesian bureaucrats, who are desperately trying to do the right thing. All three books show the complex entanglements of transnational attempts to instigate change for the better in particularly situated places with contrasting conceptions of value, care, and precarity.
Presenter: Sylvia Tidey – University of Virginia
Presenter: Nicole Constable – University of Pittsburgh
Presenter: Sahana Ghosh – National University of Singapore (NUS)