Date and Venue
January 15 (Wednesday) | 17:00-18:30 JST
In-person at Waseda University and Online via Zoom
REGISTRATION REQUIRED HERE
Room 711, Building 19, Waseda University
Event details:
Speaker:
Professor Lan Anh Hoang (University of Melbourne)
Lan Anh Hoang is Professor in Development Studies, School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is author of 'Vietnamese migrants in Russia: mobility in times of uncertainty' (Amsterdam University Press 2020), winner of The Association of Mainland Southeast Asia Scholars Book Prize in 2022, and co-editor of ‘Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances, and the Changing Family in Asia' (2015) and ‘Money and Moralities in Contemporary Asia’ (2019). Lan’s research on migration and gender has also been published in many prestigious journals including Gender and Society, Gender, Place and Culture, Global Networks, Population, Space and Place, Geoforum, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Mobilities, Asian Studies Review, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Lan recently completed a project on brokerage and migrant networks in the Vietnam-Australia migration corridor, and is currently doing fieldwork on Vietnamese undocumented migrants in Japan.
Abstract:
The burgeoning literature on migration and information and communication technologies (ICTs) provides rich empirical evidence of how social media and networking platforms are becoming integral to cross-border migration, increasingly blurring the boundaries between physical and virtual worlds. Drawing from a qualitative study conducted between 2019 and 2023 on the Vietnam-Australia migration corridor, I discuss how virtual communities and digitally mediated migration infrastructure shape the ways migrants navigate the restrictive, but also defective, neoliberal migration regimes in the Global North. Social media facilitate brokers’ access to a wide range of potential clients but challenge their previously dominant position in migration mediation. Digital divides create uneven mobility pathways, reproducing and exacerbating social inequalities among people on the move. A focus on migration mediation at the intersection of social-digital spheres generates vital insights into the continually evolving relationships between the state, market and migrants in the Digital Age.