Rachel Silvey

Engendering Social Capital: Women Workers and Rural-Urban Networks in Indonesia's Crisis

Recent approaches to social capital have cautioned against the view that social networks are resources to be called upon in times of crisis. We contribute a feminist perspective to this argument and call attention to the gendered power relations of social capital and social networks. We draw on field studies that examine women migrants’ rural–urban networks in two regions of Indonesia during the 1997–99 economic crisis period. Our findings direct attention toward the gender-specific limitations of social capital as a resource for development, and identify some ways in which the costs and benefits of social capital are organized by gender.

Geographies of Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference†

This article provides a review of the contributions that the discipline of geography is making to gender and migration research. In geographic analyses of migration, gender differences are examined most centrally in relation to specific spatialities of power. In particular, feminist geographers have developed insight into the gender dimensions of the social construction of scale, the politics of interlinkages between place and identity, and the socio-spatial production of borders. Supplementing recent reviews of the gender and migration literature in geography, this article examines the potential for continued cross-fertilization between feminist geography and migration research in other disciplines. The advances made by feminist geographers to migration studies are illustrated through analysis of the findings and debates tied to the subfields central recent conceptual interventions.

Beyond States and Markets : The Challenges of Social Reproduction

Introduction Part 1: Social Reproduction and Economic Globalization 1. New Constitutionalism and Social Reproduction 2. Towards Globalization with a Human Face 3. Global Integration of Subsistence Economies and Womens Empowerment 4. Limits to Empowerment: Women in Microcredit Programs, South India 5. Human Trafficking as a Manifestation of Globalization Part 2: Transnational Social Reproduction and the Crisis of Biological Reproduction 6. Working Women, the Biological Clock and Assisted Reproductive Technologies 7. Reproduction, Re-Reform and the Reconfigured State: Feminists and Neoliberal Health Reforms in Chile 8. States, Work, and Social Reproduction through the Lens of Migrant Experience: Ecuadorian Domestic Workers in Madrid 9. Managing Migration: Reproducing Gendered Insecurity at the Indonesian Border 10. Afterword

Stigmatized Spaces: Gender and Mobility under crisis in South Sulawesi, Indonesia

The economic downturn in Indonesia (1997‐99) has changed the context of gendered spatial mobility in South Sulawesi. For low-income migrants in the region, the monetary crisis has not only reorganized the labor market, but it has also brought about an intensification of the stigma placed on young womens independent residence in an export processing zone. Household surveys and in-depth interviews with migrants and members of their origin and destination site neighborhoods, both before and during the economic retrenchment, illustrate that ideas about womens sexual morality are a key part of the context within which migration decisions are gendered. The article situates survey and interview findings within an overview of Indonesias recent development history, economic crisis, and official state gender ideology. The article argues that migrants and their communities have identified the ‘prostitute’ as a female-gendered metaphor for the crisis, and finds that post-1997 narratives of womens mobility increasingly revolve around normative judgements regarding young womens independent mobility and sexual behavior.

Spaces of protest: gendered migration, social networks, and labor activism in West Java, Indonesia

Abstract This article examines the gender geography of labor activism through a comparative investigation of two communities in West Java, Indonesia. Based on in-depth interviews and a survey of workers carried out in 1995, 1998, and 2000 in the two sites, it explores the place-specific meanings attached to migrants’ social networks and gender relations, and their roles in mediating the gendered patterns of labor protest in the two villages. Previous analyses of labor protest in Indonesia have occluded scales and processes that are critical to understanding how gender dynamics are linked to the geography of protest. By contrast, attention to the gender- and place-based contexts of women’s activism illustrates the complex interactions between migrants’ local interpretations of gender norms, social network relations, household roles, state gender ideology, and global neo-liberal restructuring. Through examining these interactions, gender is conceptualized as ontologically inseparable from the production of specific activist spaces, rethinking the uni-directional spatial logic and deterministic views of gender and place put forth in theories of the New International Division of Labor.

The Effects of Children’s Migration on Elderly Kin’s Health: A Counterfactual Approach

Recent studies of migration and the left-behind have found that elders with migrant children actually experience better health outcomes than those with no migrant children, yet these studies raise many concerns about self-selection. Using three rounds of panel survey data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey, we employ the counterfactual framework developed by Rosenbaum and Rubin to examine the relationship between having a migrant child and the health of elders aged 50 and older, as measured by activities of daily living (ADL), self-rated health (SRH), and mortality. As in earlier studies, we find a positive association between old-age health and children’s migration, an effect that is partly explained by an individual’s propensity to have migrant children. Positive impacts of migration are much greater among elders with a high propensity to have migrant children than among those with low propensity. We note that migration is one of the single greatest sources of health disparity among the elders in our study population, and point to the need for research and policy aimed at broadening the benefits of migration to better improve health systems rather than individual health.

Migration under crisis; household safety nets in Indonesia's economic collapse

Abstract Based on research carried out in South Sulawesi, this article examines the influences of Indonesias economic crisis on low-income womens spatial mobility, and the consequences of these womens increased rural-return migration on household “safety nets”. Specifically, the investigation focuses on changes in migration patterns and household compositions since the beginning of the crisis, and the ways these changes are re-shaping the operation of rural safety nets for particular household members. Findings indicate that within the researched group of low-income households in South Sulawesi containing female rural-return migrants from an export processing zone, the working-age women who have returned to their origin site households face disproportionately heavy labor burdens. In addition, changes in household compositions and divisions of labour and resources since mid-1997 have tended to privilege men and the elderly. More broadly, these findings suggest that the local impacts of the economic crisis are best understood as culturally negotiated and gender differentiated processes that are taking shape in linked rural–urban socio-spatial networks.

Mobilizing Piety: Gendered Morality and Indonesian-Saudi Transnational Migration

This paper focuses on the emotional discourses invoked in efforts to frame and control Indonesian womens labor migration to Saudi Arabia. Based on interviews with migrant recruiters, state officials, and migrants in West Java, as well as data collected by migrant rights activists, the paper examines the emotional vocabularies and imagined geographies of gendered piety that are deployed in attempts to mobilize, direct, and discipline womens transnational labor migration. It explores articulations of womens virtue as a key dimension of the moral geographies of Indonesian womens overseas migration. More broadly, it suggests that such attention to struggles over the regulation of emotion can serve as a lens onto the ways in which gender articulates with the religiously‐inflected transnational labor market linking Indonesia with Saudi Arabia.

Development geography: Critical development studies and political geographic imaginaries

This article offers a selective slice into the wide-ranging scholarship in critical development studies. It reaches outside of ‘development studies’ proper to explore points of intersection and complementarity with cognate fields, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry, analysis, and practice. It attends in particular to the political geographic imaginaries that frame contestations over the 2010 G20 Summit. These struggles represented both the extremes of anti-democratic neoliberal governance, as well as diverse and creative tactics aimed at building alternative alliances and social movements. The strength of recent critical development studies lies in its capacity to connect analysis of the violence and exclusion characteristic of both old and new imperialist geographies with practical and normative commitments to the creation and sustenance of spaces of political possibility. In making this call, we seek to expand the conversations of critical development scholars by paying particular attention not only to senior scholars in the field, but also to some important new research by emerging scholars.

Unequal Borders: Indonesian Transnational Migrants at Immigration Control

This article analyses the Indonesian states efforts to manage returning overseas migrant labourers. It examines state practices in the airport terminal for returning transnational migrant labourers (“Terminal 3”) in Jakarta. “Terminal 3” segregates returning overseas migrant contract workers, separating them out from the other travelers who pass through the “regular” terminal to enter into Indonesia. The article explores the spatial politics of the terminal through interviews with government officials and observations made at the airport terminal. Located in the context of long-term research on Indonesian migration, the case study illustrates specific ways in which the Indonesian state, through its selective and irregular application of regulatory procedures at the point of immigration, reproduces social inequalities through the repatriation process. In addition, it demonstrates the place-based nature of efforts to govern the transnational labouring class.