You are cordially invited to a CSEAS Tonan Talk, a Brown Bag lecture series. The talk is open to the public, and you can bring your lunch bag to the place. The details are as follows.

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

This Tonan Talk is supported by “Southeast Asian Studies for Sustainable Humanosphere” Research Program, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University