The Spectacle of Safe Migration in Southeast Asia
Over the past two decades, “safe migration” programs have expanded rapidly across Southeast Asia, reshaping how migration is governed and experienced. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research from Cambodia and Thailand, this talk examines how these programs define and seek to produce “safety,” and what those definitions obscure. More specifically, I suggest that safe migration initiatives frame migrant precarity as a technical problem, shifting responsibility onto migrants while legitimizing new forms of state control. While presented as protective, these programs often function as a spectacle of care that serves development and state interests more than they deliver meaningful forms of care for migrants.
Maryann Bylander is a sociologist whose research sits at the intersection of migration studies and development studies. Drawing on a long history of ethnographic engagement in Southeast Asia, her recent research has focused on three interrelated strands of inquiry: how debt shapes migration experiences; the consequences of changing documentation regimes; and the social impacts of microfinance/microcredit. In addition to publishing over a dozen peer-reviewed articles, her first book, The Trade-Offs of Legal Status: Safe Migration, Documentation and Debt in Southeast Asia (U. Hawaii Press) came out in 2024. She has a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark College.
This event is organized by Institute for Asian Studies and co-sponsored by Department of Sociology.