The Leeds Migration Research Network is pleased to announce that Dr Brenda S.A Yeoh, National University of Singapore, will deliver this year’s Annual Lecture:
Postcolonial Migrations and the Cultural Politics of Plural Diversities in the City of Migration
When: Mon, 17 June 2019 16:00 – 19:30 BST
Abstract
Sandwiched between the large polities of China and India, Southeast Asia has a long history of migrations, mobilities and circulations connecting diverse societies, ranging from merchants, monks, sailors, rebels to the coolie trade (Nyiri and Tan, 2017). In postcolonial times, one of the primary tasks of nation-building among the new Southeast Asian states is to transform a motley crew of diasporic orphans into a “settled” people who inscribe their belonging onto a single home-nation, while selectively marking out other migrants who arrive later as part of renewed diasporas as transgressors of the nation-state. In this context, urban encounters do not just engage difference, but are underscored by a wide spectrum of familiar-but-strange plurality that shifts with each turn of the postcolonial kaleidoscope. Affective practices that develop between the older “settled” (once-migrant) population and the newer streams of “current” migrants are hence ridden by the contradictions of sameness and difference occurring simultaneously amidst new varieties of pluralism. Using the context of the city-state of Singapore, this presentation examines three interlocking sets of diversity politics in the light of increased flows of differentiated transnational migration: (a) Multiracialism logics, pluralising diversity and unanticipated encounters; (b) Transient ‘spaces of appearance’ and the spatial politics of control and care; and (c) Intimate encounters in negotiating difference in home-spaces.
About the Speaker
Dr Brenda S.A. Yeoh read geography at Cambridge and went on to complete her doctorate at Oxford University. She also holds a Diploma-in-Education from the Institute of Education, Singapore. She leads the research cluster on Asian Migration at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, and she also has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia, including key themes such as cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalising universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the St George Room – University House 17:30 – 19:30
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