Organizer: Cornell University

Description:

The prevailing neoliberal labour migration regime in Asia is underpinned by principles of enforced transience: the overwhelming majority of migrants—particularly those seeking low skilled, low-waged work—are admitted into host nation-states on the basis of short-term, time-bound contracts, with little or no possibility of family reunification or permanent settlement at the destination. As families go transnational, ‘family times’ become inextricably intertwined with the ‘times of migration’ (Cwerner, 2001). In this context, for many migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian source countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, parental migration as a strategy for migrating out of poverty or for socio-economic advancement requires the left-behind family to resiliently absorb the uncertainties of parental leaving and returning. Based on longitudinal research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households in migrant-sending villages, the presentation investigates the vital links between the time construct of seriality in migration on the one hand, and the temporal structure of family-based social reproduction on the other. By drawing attention to the co-existence of and contradictions between multiple temporalities in the lives of migrants and their families, a critical temporalities framework yields new insights for understanding the sustainability of transnational families in the liminal times of migration.

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