Immobilized Migrancy: Family, Labor, and the Law for Migrants in the Gulf

June 24, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Mānoa Campus, East-West Center Research Program, Burns Hall, Room 3012 Add to Calendar

Immobilized Migrancy: Family, Labor, and the Law for Migrants in the Gulf


Dr. Pardis Mahdavi

Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology, Pomona College
Friday, June 24, 2016 12:00 noon to 1:00pm
John A. Burns Hall, Room 3012 (3rd floor)

Many migrant families across the globe are caught in the web of laws and policies regulating forced labor, migration, and human trafficking. Children of trafficked individuals may live in countries where they do not have citizenship. Migrant women who become pregnant can be forcibly detained, deported, and separated from their children in some host countries. Nonetheless, women and men frequently remain in trafficking situations to support their children back home. Their stories are rarely heard. Although the past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in questions of human trafficking, statelessness, and the feminization of migration, few scholars have positioned the family at the center of analysis. I introduce the concept of immobilized migrancy to refer to people whose movements as migrants are halted because of their status as parents or children. I study migrant women and men who face challenges within migration to the Gulf because of their familial ties. I draw on over ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in migrant receiving countries of the Gulf and migrant sending countries of Southeast Asia and Africa to foreground the lived experiences of migrants and their families. This presentation looks at how familial relations can immobilize migrants while migration immobilizes family life.


Pardis Mahdavi, PhD, is associate professor and chair of anthropology and director of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College. Her research interests include gendered labor, migration, sexuality, human rights, youth culture, transnational feminism and public health in the context of changing global and political structures. She is the author of four books: her first book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution was published with Stanford University Press in 2008, and her second book, Gridlock: Labor, Migration and ‘Human Trafficking’ in Dubai, also Stanford University Press, was published in 2011. Mahdavi’s third book, entitled From Trafficking to Terror: Constructing a Global Social Problem was published by Routledge on October 1, 2013, and her fourth book, Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives also Stanford University Press was published in April 2016.

Pardis was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the Asia Society, and has received fellowships and awards from institutions such as Google Ideas, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Drug Research Institute, the American Public Health Association, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. She has consulted for a wide array of organizations including the U.S. government, Google Inc., and the United Nations. In 2012, she won the Wig Award for teaching at Pomona College.


Event Sponsor
East-West Center, Research Program, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Laura Moriyama, (808) 944-7444, Laura.Moriyama@eastwestcenter.org

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