Making Mobility a Market: Actors and Interests in Organization and Governance of Circular Migration Markets

Sandhya A.S

While people migrating from one place to another is not a new phenomenon, having a market dedicated to services pertaining to migration is. A wide range of commercial actors, including – but not restricted to – employment intermediaries (or “brokers” in more common parlance), constitute the backbone of this market. While part of the aim of the project is to understand the functional role and institutional necessity of these commercial actors in cross-border exchanges of labor, it is also to understand the role and interests of the state, especially the sending state, in co-creating migration corridors with specific labor-importing countries. Taking the Nepal–Malaysia corridor as the case study and exploring the interaction between the state(s) and the intermediaries on both sides of the market, the project uses qualitative research methodology to understand the public–private partnership in organization and governance of migration markets across borders. By approaching migration markets as cross-border institutions-in-the-making, the project will contribute directly to a transnational sociology of labor markets and labor governance.

 

Publications by Sandhya A.S

AS, Sandhya, Chitra Adkar
Humorous Masculinity: Nepali Men in Mediated Indian Male Gaze. In: Sasanka Perera, Dev Nath Pathak (eds.), Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times. Routledge: London, 2022, 139–155.
Waiting: Social Meanings of Immobility in Kathmandu, Nepal. In: Asien: The German Journal on Contemporary Asia, 162/163, 2022, 58–76.
Basnet, Chudamani, Sandhya AS
Female Employers and their Maids in New Delhi: "This Is Our Culture". In: South Asia Research 40(2), 2020, 282–298.
Basnet, Chudamani, Sandhya AS
Nepali Domestic Workers in New Delhi: Strategies and Agency. In: Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 13, 2019, 49–57.
Making Mobility a Market: An Economic Sociology of Migration Brokerage. PhD Thesis, University of Duisburg-Essen. Studies on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy. IMPRS-SPCE, Cologne 2023.
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