Relational Precarity, Migration and Global Cities: differentiated inclusion through social, temporal and spatial connections
Organizer: Junjia Ye, Lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand
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This panel aims to discuss how migrants and migration processes are intimately entangled with the constitution and governance of precarity in wealthy, key nodes of the global economy, ie. global cities. Precarity is understood here in relation to “life worlds that are inflected with uncertainty and instability” (Waite, 2009). This panel includes but also moves beyond discussing changes in the migrant divisions of labour to address the breadth of migrant trajectories into global cities. Recent migrant-led diversification – such as documented/undocumented workers, students, marriage – of various backgrounds into some of the world’s most globally connected and economically dynamic cities is not only raising new questions about (super)diversity but crucially also about the study of social and economic inequality in urban life. Forms of neoliberal management processes that drive migrant-led diversification in these cities are also contouring the growing precarity in populations comprised of long-term residents and newcomers. Whether in the labour market or, more broadly, in the governance of migrant mobilities, these processes are altering the ways in which instability and uncertainty are envisaged and experienced. That is to say, the diversification of peoples in the city is also paralleled by the diversification of social and economic inequality. Yet, as the work of Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood on relational poverty demonstrates, we need to speak against the conventional and economic-centric ways of understanding how disenfranchisement is constituted. By casting relational poverty as precarity, we open up the more nuanced and relational structures that constitute and manage precariousness. The intellectual space we will co-create in this conversation departs from the conventional focus on migration and exclusion. Instead, this panel examines inequality by discussing how various migrant groups are differently included. This focus looks beyond repression and discrimination and pays more attention to the wider processes of production and differentiation in contemporary migration.
In this panel, we will critically discuss the notion of precarity as a differentiated and relational experience with particular attention to migration and the global city.
Questions that our conversation will address include the following:
1. How is precarity expressed and experienced through migrant mobilites? Where and what are its concrete manifestations?
2. How is precarity constituted? How does precarity persist in cities of dynamic economic growth and prosperity? What are the specific political/power relations and/or modes of governance that give rise to relational conditions of precarity? Who are the agents that co-constitute precarity (e.g., state institutions, transnational capital, multilateral institutions, individuals themselves?)?
3. How do people navigate precarious conditions?
4. What are the spaces for resistance/renegotiation/personal autonomy which precarity can engender? What political possibilities might emerge from the challenge of existing norms of precarity for staving off social, spatial and economic inequalities?
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