Mobilities, Communication, and Asia| Precarities of Migrant Work in Singapore: Precarities of Migrant Work in Singapore: Migration, (Im)mobility, and Neoliberal Governmentality

Abstract

Building on this dialectical relationship between mobility and materiality, and drawing on our collaborations with foreign domestic workers (FDWs) and migrant constructions workers (MCWs) in Singapore in cocreating communication infrastructures, we theorize resistance as mobilities in Asia. Technologies of mediation, as markers of mobility in Asian neoliberal marketing campaigns and academic celebrations of the Asian century, strategically erase the possibilities for labor organizing and collective bargaining through which migrant workers in precarious jobs can secure access to fundamental economic rights and basic working conditions. Paradoxically, then, drawing upon our ethnographic collaborations with FDWs and MCWs in Singapore, we attend to the interplays of the symbolic and the material that are reproduced through artifacts of mobility or immobility, offering Asian resistance as a mobile trope.