Nicole Constable, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh

This talk focuses on the everyday challenges faced by temporary migrant workers, especially migrant women from the Philippines and Indonesia who become pregnant in Hong Kong. Various factors – especially the migratory status of their partners – deeply color their own and their children’s opportunities and vulnerabilities. Migrant mothers’ stories point not only to their creative tactics for survival, but also to ever-growing global patterns of economic inequality and to the wider politics of privilege and precarity that define and limit their life choices. The stories of migrant mothers and their babies in Hong Kong may seem unique, but they echo many contemporary problems and vulnerabilities faced by temporary migrants the world over. This talk draws from recent anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork, and from my forthcoming book entitled: Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor (University of California Press, 2014).

Co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies.