Tonan Talk “Burmese women migrant workers in Thailand: Managing productive and reproductive responsibilities”

Title: Burmese women migrant workers in Thailand: Managing productive and reproductive responsibilities

Speaker: Dr.Kyoko Kusakabe, Associate Professor, Gender and Development
Studies, School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology

Date: July 25 (Fri.), 12.00-13.30, 2014

Place: Meeting Room (Room No. 107) on the 1st Floor of East Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Abstract:
This presentation is a case study of Burmese women migrant workers in Thailand, and it argues that even in increasingly unstable circumstances women migrant workers have to continue to balance their reproductive
responsibilities as mothers and daughters with their on-going roles as wage workers and economic providers, often managing complex trans-border care arrangements. The paper extends the global care chain framework to investigate the ways in which Burmese migrant factory workers in Thailand organise reproduction and childcare in the place of destination and in the in-between places at the international borders between the two countries. Migrant women factory workers adapt and strategize to achieve daily, generational and biological reproduction needs and the
links between these strategies and the pattern of capital accumulation in Thailand’s border industrialization strategy. The elaboration of multiple forms of control and regulation from the state to the factory as well as community highlight the structures of constraint as well as ways women negotiate around these constraints.

Moderator: Mario Ivan Lopez, CSEAS, Kyoto University