sarah scuzzarello

To care and feel cared for are considered fundamental to what makes us human, and what enables us to live and thrive in this world. Yet for the UK’s asylum-seeking population who is living with uncertainties for the future, care appears absent. In such contexts, it is imperative to understand how care is enacted, experienced, and valued amongst spaces and people often considered to be care-less. Drawing on data collected in four collaborative photographic workshops and photo elicitation interviews with asylum seekers and refugees (ASRs) (N: 7), this study aims to gain insight into how ASRs in the UK care and feel cared for and their relative ability to forge friendships during their migration journey. We show how their relationship to caregiving and care-receiving changes over time and is deeply influenced by asylum policies and the refugee experience more generally. Responding to feminist scholars’ calls to …

Within migration studies, the use of intersectionality as a theoretical, conceptual and analytical tool is increasingly gaining traction. Most of this research provides compelling empirical evidence demonstrating how migrants' intersecting social locations shape their experiences of migration and settlement (see also Clark-Kazak, 2024). These insights are important in understanding how social boundaries operate and the consequences they have for marginalised individuals and groups. While acknowledging the importance of analysing lived experiences of oppression, in this commentary, we argue for the significance of applying an intersectional lens to governance structures and their dynamics to shed light on state boundary politics (re) produced through policies, laws and discourses.While there is a great deal of discussion and contention on its different meanings, applications and aims, intersectionality posits that social locations—with a focus on gender, race and class—in society, at a given time and space cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Instead, these work together to produce unique material realities and social experiences of marginalisation, discrimination and exclusion (Davis, 1981). The term illustrates that single-axis frameworks which focus on either gender or race fail to explain how marginalised women are vulnerable to both gendered and racial discrimination (Crenshaw, 1991). An intersectional lens instead sheds light on the unique, many-layered experiences of discrimination and oppression that arise from intersecting social locations. Subsequent debates within North American intersectional, feminist research …

This introduction bridges the often-separated bodies of research on institutional boundary work in the policy field of “integration” and on migrant minorities’ responses to these boundaries. We engage with the contributions to this Special Issue and demonstrate the relevance of an intersectional analysis in studies on state “integration” policies and the boundaries they draw between communities and on migrant minorities’ strategies to navigate and respond to them. Through engaging with issues of “integration”, boundary-making, and intersectionality, we show how the Special Issue contributes to debates on “integration” and boundary work by presenting analyses of which subjectivities are accepted in “integration” policies’ reproduction of an (imagined) national community and how conditions of national membership do not apply equally to all individuals of migrant origins, nor to all social spaces. We advocate for …

Early iterations of migration research analysed migration through an androcentric bias that either made women migrants invisible or reduced them to the role of passive followers and helpless victims. Gender-sensitive research in migration has since the late 1970s tried to redress this unbalance demonstrating that “birds of passage are also women”–as suggested in Morokvasic’s seminal article (Morokvasic, Mirjana. 1984. Birds of Passage are also Women… International Migration Review, 18 (4): 886–907). This body of scholarship showed that women have been independent actors in international and internal migration flows for centuries, and not only passive followers of their emigrating husbands or fathers. Today, there is wide recognition of the role of women as actors of migration in both policy and academic discourses. There is also empirical evidence demonstrating that the absolute number of female …

This article studies life-trajectories of a specific generation of Kathoey and gay men, born into rural poverty in Northeastern Isaan 30–50 years ago, based on biographical accounts. Subjects are male-to-female transgender Kathoey and cisgendered (masculine-identified or gender-normative) gay men. A ‘sustainable nonheteronormative life’ is one providing sufficient resources of recognition for validating gender identity (Kathoey) or sexuality (gay men), and wealth to be economically viable. How did they strive to make spaces for nonheteronormative living when confronted by ‘blocked’ social opportunities of double discrimination based on transphobia (Kathoey) and homophobia (gay men), and class/status? The research unpacks which strong barriers of discrimination confronted them at distinct life-stages, and their agency and strategies to challenge these. Family, work and place are investigated as core social …

This article studies the aspirations and experiences of kathoey (Thai male-to-female trans* people) from poor rural Isan in enduring cross-border relationships with Western men. Drawing from biographical life stories, we try to unpack the cultural script through which partnering a Western man is seen as a plausible pathway for a better kathoey life in Thailand. We study the opportunities such partnering presents for achieving goals of gender affirmation, social advancement, and re-gaining merit within family relations. In the face of significant discriminatory barriers, kathoey in our study managed to build lives that they saw as self-validating, materially successful, and significantly conferring gender recognition. They understood their relationships as socially and personally much more than access to financial resources and drew important sources of emotional support, especially for gender validation from them. Western men were seen as more dedicated to partnering, caring, and being publicly seen in social settings (including family), compared to Thai.

This article explains why significant Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migration pathways have evolved, grown and sustained over the last decades. It introduces a set of research contributions on transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and ‘the West’ – countries from Europe, North America and Australia. While Thai and Western people’s social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, we consider it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Specifically, we argue that the growing ‘both-ways’ Thai-Western migration pathways can only be understood by reference to three features of globalisation processes specific to Thailand: first, cross-border connections and social networks generated by massive West-to-Thailand …

The chapters in this volume study transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between ‘ordinary’people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and ‘the West’. While Thai and Western people’s social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, this book considers it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Even though a focus on the ‘personal life stories’ of marriage migrants provides valuable insights, it can also mask consideration of the structural context of socially embedded cross-border connections and exchanges, as well as state restrictions, that, first, make people’s decisions to move a possibility in the first place, and second, shape a migrant’s post-migration life-trajectory and experiences, relative to others in their origin and settlement societies. The chapters on Thai women who marry and move with older Western men, Western men and women who move to Thailand to retire or for leisure, and Thai rural families transformed by mobilities and migration, try to draw out their gendered experiences of transnational living. The individual choices that shaped these lives, and the surprising prevalence of lives like these in Thailand and abroad, needs to be understood within context as an outcome of the specific globalisation processes that have shaped Thailand through transnational links to other parts of the world over the last decades. Globalisation and penetration by foreign capital, cultures, and people through mass tourism is key to this explanatory backstory as well as the internal rural/urban …