New Perspectives on Gender and Migration: Livelihood, Rights and Entitlements

This book discusses recent theoretical and empirical developments in international migration from a gender perspective. Its main objective is to analyse the diversification and stratification of gendered migratory streams with regard to skill level, labour market integration, and legal status. In turn a migrant’s position in relation to these axes influences access to entitlements and rights. Conceptually, the book builds upon the recent shift in scholarly research on migration, with women-centred research shifting more toward the analysis of gender. Migration is now viewed as a gendered phenomenon that requires more sophisticated theoretical and analytical tools than sex as a dichotomous variable. Theoretical formulations of gender as relational, and as spatially and temporally contextual have begun to inform gendered analyses of migration. The contributions to this book elaborate in more detail the broader social factors that influence migrating women’s and men’s roles, access to resources, facilities and services. Empirically, all major regions are discussed, pointing to common trends such as the increasing significance of the regionalization of migration flows as well as some noteworthy differences.

Nicola Piper is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, the National University of Singapore. She was previously researcher at the Australian National University and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen and has also worked as consultant with UNRISD. She has written extensively written on gendered aspects of migration, especially in the area of governance, rights and empowerment, and on the human and labour rights of migrant workers. She has previous experience with editing inter-disciplinary volumes (Women and Work in Globalising Asia, 2002, Routledge; Transnational Activism in Asia, 2004, Routledge; Wife or Worker? Asians’ Marriage and Migration, 2003, Rowman & Littlefield). In her own work she has promoted a broad inter-disciplinary conception of migration research and has also. Despite having mainly worked on Asia, she has more recently begun to take a more global outlook, especially when consulting various UN affiliated institutions (UNRISD, Global Commission for International Migration, the IOM).