Abstract
Reproduction mobilities (RMs) are the movements of people for the purposes of maintaining, reproducing and enhancing life; reproduction migrants include migrant care givers, care seekers, students, retirees, marriage partners and would-be mothers. Transnational RMs are increasing significantly faster than that of productive labour across the Asia Pacific. This talk examines the rise of RMs a part of an emerging “life-making economy”: an economy centred on the maintaining and reproducing human life on a daily and generational basis, which activities have become a main target of financial investment and a new source of profit. The life-making economy redefines relations between family relations, market transactions, state regulations, and normative aspirations. RMs are a manifestation, as well as a critical means, of how the new relations work themselves out on a transnational scale.

Bio
Biao Xiang is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He has worked on various types of migration – internal and international, unskilled and highly-skilled, emigration, left behind and return – in China, India and Australia. Instead of taking migration as a distinct phenomenon to be explained, he sees migration as a particular means of social change that reveals larger forces at work. Through the lens of migration, he has examined the changing Chinese state, labour relations in the high-tech sector in India, and other political economy issues in Asia. Currently, Xiang is trying to understand why commercial recruitment intermediaries have become so prominent in unskilled labour migration in east Asia, given that modern institutions and technologies are supposed to be dis-embedding and dis-intermediating.

This lecture takes place on the second day of a two-day conference that is open to the public. For details, please visit the event page: talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/series/id/e0e7395c-496a-4e04-a68f-17b8cae9757b