Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable looks at how these instruments determine legal status and prescribe rights. The book explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy as they reinforce violent structures on often already vulnerable women. Constable finds that new biometric technologies and surveillance do not lead to greater protection, security, or accuracy, but rather produce new vulnerabilities and reproduce old ones.
Passport Entanglements Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations
Recommend to Your Library (PDF)
RightsLink
Rights and Permissions
The pandemic has created major supply chain challenges for publishers, manufacturers, warehousing facilities and shipping companies. Please allow for a minimum of 15 business days to receive your order. If you need your order sooner, consider purchasing from one of our retail partner links in the buying options. Thank you!
About the Book
Reviews
"There are few discussions specifically about passports among migrant workers, so this is a very welcome contribution and important investigation."—Gordon Mathews, author of Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong"Passport Entanglements is a necessary and concrete intervention in critical studies of mobility and migration. Through rich ethnographic work and sharp analysis, Nicole Constable manages to bring together the urgent question of identification and its relation to hegemonic mobility regimes through the specific artifact of the passport and its extensive, complex, and entangled role within the everyday lives of Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong."—Mahmoud Keshavarz, author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent