Back Next GRITIM-UPF Research Seminar by Adriana Kemp on May 31: Labor Migrants' right to family life - between state and social biopolitics

Next GRITIM-UPF Research Seminar by Adriana Kemp on May 31: Labor Migrants' right to family life - between state and social biopolitics

25.05.2018

 

Adriana Kemp (Chair of the Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology Tel Aviv University, Israel).

Date: 31st May 2018

Place: at IEMed (Carrer Girona, 20, Barcelona)

Time: 18:00

Title: Labor Migrants' right to family life - between state and social biopolitics

Abstract: Literature on global care work deals with biopolitical tensions between care markets and exclusionary migration regimes leading to the formation of transnational families. Nevertheless, it disregards how these tensions produce “illegal” families within countries of destination, catalysing the mobilization of moral claims over their recognition in the local civil society. To fill this lacuna, the lecture looks at the interface between migration policies controlling the reproductive lives of migrant care workers and the mobilization of ethical claims and moral constructions of care from below (i.e., movements and organizations advocating for care workers). Based on extensive fieldwork in Israeli advocacy NGOs and anti-deportation campaigns, I suggest that the socio-legal position of migrant care workers’ families in destination countries is shaped not only by state policies and by market dynamics, but also by the types of social mobilizations, ethical evaluations, and pragmatic strategizing they spur in civil society. The lecture is part of a broader comparative research on civil society’s social and moral agency and its role in the shaping of migration policies in ethnic “non-immigration” regimes.

BIO: Adriana Kemp is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Her research addresses scholarship conducted at the crossroads of labour migration, citizenship and civil society and scholarship on the re-scaling of politics and urban governance. She has published on these topics in journals like International Migration Review, Gender and Society, Political Geography, IJURR, Law and Society Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Social Problems, among others. She is the author of more than twenty refereed book chapters, the co-editor of two collective volumes and the co-author of a book on Migrants and Workers: the political economy of labour migration in Israel (Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press). She is currently completing a 2 years project on “planning decisions” and the construction of public interest, funded by the Israeli National Science Foundation and co-directed with Talia Margalit. Her latest research is titled “Do papers matter? Legal liminality in the life-course of migrant workers and refugees’ children (ages 12-25) in Israel” funded by the Israeli National Science Foundation.

Recommended readings:

Kemp, A. and Kfir, N. (2016) Wanted Workers but Unwanted Mothers: Mobilizing Moral Claims on Migrant Care Workers’ Families in Israel. Social Problems, 63, 373–394.

Kemp, A. and Kfir, N. (2016) Mobilizing Migrant Workers’ Rights in Nonimmigration” Countries: The Politics of Resonance and Migrants’ Rights Activism in Israel and Singapore. Law & Society Review, 50 (1), 82-116.

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