Mahua Sarkar

In recent years, transnational temporary contract work or circular migration, as it is called today, has sparked much discussion in international academic and policy circles, as more Western European societies join the affluent Persian Gulf and countries in East and South-east Asia, in experimenting once again with foreign guest-worker programmes. This project contributes to this growing interest in temporary contract work/circular migration, by bringing together theoretical insights from a number of fields of research within sociology and history—migration studies, historical debates over the status of labour, and life course research—as well as feminist scholarship on work, and interdisciplinary debates on methods in the human sciences to bear on a study of temporary contract labour and circular migration, the fastest growing trend within international migration. While temporary contract work involves both ‘high-skilled’, highly paid professionals and ‘low-skilled’ manual workers, this study focuses exclusively on the latter, specifically on male contract workers from Bangladesh—a major source of migrant labour in the world today. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research among Bangladeshi contract workers in Singapore, on-going research in Bangladesh among return workers and their families, as well as archival and secondary sources on the history of work, the study aims to develop a critical understanding of what constitutes ‘normalcy’ in the context of ‘low-skilled’, transnational temporary contract work today, in the absence of explicit coercion or physical confinement. A key argument being made here is that circular migration produces specific forms of alienation and potentially long-term life-stage specific challenges for contract workers.  Theoretically and substantively, the study engages critically with larger scholarly discussions about the migration-development nexus, the human rights abuses rampant in contract work, the unclear divide between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour and work and non-work, the increased entanglements among different regions of the world, and new ways of thinking about linked lives, across geopolitically structured space. Methodologically, the project is interdisciplinary, reflecting my long-term interest in the epistemological issues underlying debates within sociology, critical ethnography, and oral history. The aim, in short, is to produce a monograph that is substantively relevant, theoretically both robust and nuanced, and methodologically innovative.