This thesis examines how South Korean international marriage brokers discursively romanticize the objectification of migrant brides and legitimize practices of control through their YouTube content. Drawing on theories of commodified intimacy and migration infrastructure, it employs Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to analyze 30 broker-produced and broker-featuring YouTube videos and their thumbnails. The analysis examines how brokered marriage is represented as authentic love and destiny, how broker authority is constructed through discourses of care and expertise, and how migrant brides are positioned as selectable, evaluable, and manageable subjects. It finds that romanticization makes the objectification of migrant brides emotionally acceptable by presenting brokered marriage as genuine romance, while broker authority is framed through care, expertise, protection, and responsible management, making practices of control appear professional, necessary, and legitimate. This thesis argues that broker discourse repackages a brokerage process that produces migrant brides' vulnerability by romanticizing objectification and legitimizing control, thereby reframing the violence embedded in international marriage brokerage as emotionally persuasive, professionally managed, and socially legitimate..

Contemporary migration is increasingly shaped by digital content creators who mediate migration through social media platforms besides states, recruitment agencies, or diasporic organizations. While existing scholarship on migration infrastructures has primarily focused on institutional, commercial, and regulatory actors, comparatively little attention has been paid to the role of migrant influencers in facilitating mobility and settlement. This paper examines how Turkish immigrant influencers in South Korea function as digital migration infrastructures that shape migration imaginaries, produce practical knowledge, and foster transnational forms of belonging between Türkiye and South Korea. Drawing on Migration Infrastructure Theory developed by Biao Xiang and Johan Lindquist (2014), the study conceptualizes social media influencers as informal migration brokers who translate bureaucratic procedures, negotiate cultural differences, and construct accessible narratives of everyday life in South Korea. Methodologically, the research employs qualitative digital ethnography and interpretive content analysis of Instagram content produced by Turkish immigrants residing in South Korea, alongside audience interactions in comment sections. The analysis investigates how influencers produce migration-related knowledge concerning visas, employment, education, language learning, housing, social integration and culture while simultaneously cultivating digital communities that extend beyond national borders. The paper argues that Turkish immigrant influencers occupy a significant yet underexplored position within contemporary migration infrastructures by reducing uncertainty, legitimizing migration aspirations, and mediating immigrants' everyday experiences through platformized forms of expertise. In doing so, they blur the boundaries between personal storytelling, entrepreneurship, and migration brokerage. The paper contributes to emerging debates on digital migration, transnational mobility, and the changing governance of migration in and beyond Asia, while offering new insights into the evolving relationship between migration, social media, and diasporic community formation by foregrounding digital platforms as critical infrastructures of migration

South Korea’s Employment Permit System (EPS) manages the hiring of temporary low-skilled migration through a government-to-government scheme, shifting away from costly private recruiters and brokers. However, the EPS employs a point-based recruitment that, first and foremost, requires passing a Korean language exam. This has created a regulatory paradox—although private recruiters and brokers are eliminated from the migration process, Korean language centers (KLCs) training aspiring migrants have flourished in origin countries. This paper examines and situates KLCs’ role as intermediaries within this structural contradiction. Empirically, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with 14 migration stakeholders, including eight KLC operators based in the Philippines. The findings indicate that KLCs emerge as essential mediating actors, providing services beyond language training, and stewarding aspiring migrants through a regime of uncertainty, prolonged waiting, and limited control over outcomes. Theoretically, the analysis pays particular attention to how these forms of immobility serve as catalysts for KLCs’ mediating role, which involves relational work and ethical boundary work to transform entrepreneurial transactions into interpersonal care, while still defining and sustaining the structural contradiction within the EPS ecosystem. The paper argues that the role of KLCs as intermediaries in temporary low-skilled migration should be understood through their engagement in services that blur the lines between profit- and care-oriented motivations in order to navigate legally and morally contested grounds

How does the Taiwanese state intermediate the migration of student-workers by skill? Why have universities emerged as the dominant migrant broker for state and capital? Research on educationally-channeled labor migration in East Asia has primarily suggested that state-supported programs for international students function as de-facto low-skill guest work programs, but demographic crises now create a situation where East Asian states are seeking international students for high-skill work. The scholarship on skilled labor migration has long relied on a national-level analysis or the individual migrant and their networks, but relatively little is known about how the state and the emerging cohort of actors that intermediate this migration pathway. Moreover, while the migration infrastructure literature has presented insights into the meso-level organization of migration in and across Asia, previous studies primarily highlight the role of the “commercial” dimension of for-profit brokerage in facilitating migration. As such, other dimensions of the migration infrastructure—notably the regulatory and its corollary practices of “state brokerage”— have been left to the background. Utilizing three qualitative methods, including a historical policy review and newspaper analysis, an ethnography of Taiwanese universities’ recruitment and promotion across Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, as well as interviews with state actors and university administrators, I find that when more-skilled talent is involved, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education intensifies its delegation of power to higher education institutions to serve as intermediaries across states, institutions, industry, and students. Universities are incorporated into the national development project and are delegated as state brokers to handle migration processes typically handled by private actors in other Asian contexts, such as selection, recruitment, employee-employer matching, training, and aspiration-making work. This case can contribute to current knowledge of brokers and brokerage by illuminating a case where the receiving state’s role in organizing migration takes on an intensified role due to variations in skill

This paper examines Japan's immigration system with a particular focus on international students. The number of international students in Japan has been steadily increasing, surpassing 400,000 for the first time in 2025. While enrollment in universities and graduate schools increased only slightly compared with the previous year, the number of students enrolled in specialized training colleges and Japanese language institutions rose significantly. Previous studies have indicated that a significant factor behind this increase is the desire to find employment in Japan. Although students from China constitute the largest group, increasing attention has been paid to the growing number of students from Southwest Asia. Furthermore, because international students in Japan are allowed to work up to 28 hours per week, many participate in the labor market. As a result, it has become common to encounter international students working in convenience stores and other service-sector businesses in Tokyo. Information on study in Japan, as well as part-time job opportunities, is now available through digital platforms. In addition, information is provided directly through orientation sessions and explanatory meetings conducted in prospective students’ home countries. Additionally, Japanese local governments and other entities offer multilingual portal sites providing essential information on daily life—including tax and social security systems—as well as guidance for disaster situations. In short, a migration infrastructure that facilitates diverse forms of international mobility is taking shape.

Bilateral labor agreements and migration governance scholarship routinely assume that a state's institutional capacity to regulate migration predicts the strength of protection it codifies for migrant workers. This paper tests that assumption across five interconnected Asian jurisdictions and introduces a diagnostic for measuring where it breaks down. Design/Methodology/Data: We construct a Migration Governance Decoupling Index (MGDI) from the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (2015-2024), Enterprise Survey firm-level data, Asian Barometer survey data, and verified primary legal texts across Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore. The MGDI quantifies the gap between measured governance capacity and codified migrant-protective content in national labor law. The assumption does not hold true in a systematic manner. The largest capacity-protection gaps are found in Singapore (MGDI 63.4) and Hong Kong (42.0), which are the highest capacity destinations in the corridor. However, the smaller difference in South Korea (10.6) despite less capacity suggests a certain policy direction. The negative score for China (-20.2) indicates that protection is coded, but not measured. Bangladesh, the main sending state, is a fourth type: a statutory aspiration that exceeds enforcement capabilities measured by the sending-state protective architecture score. MGDI refines the theory of “selective regulatory export” (i.e. “selective” migrant protection in a “bounded” subset of protection, in contrast to the weakness of under-protecting), and is transferable and comparable to other migration corridors. For Singapore and Hong Kong, the index identifies specific protection domains withheld despite administrative capacity to extend them. For South Korea, it benchmarks the Employment Permit System's rights architecture against higher-capacity peers. For Bangladesh, it grounds bilateral labor negotiations in enforcement capacity rather than statutory language alone. Hong Kong's post-2020 constitutional changes are proposed as a testable extension, pending direct evidence on codified protection shifts

South Korea surpassed 300,000 international students in 2025, meeting its Study Korea 300K target two years ahead of schedule. Indian master's students, doctoral scholars, and postdoctoral researchers form one of the fastest-growing and most strategically prioritised segments of this inflow. Attraction, however, is not retention. Many Indian academics accumulate credentials and capital in Korea and then return home or move onward to a third country, a sojourner pattern that attraction-focused policy does not address. Recent retention reforms, including the K-STAR fast track and a shortened permanent-residency pathway, signal that Korea recognises the problem, yet whether these reforms reach their intended population remains an open question. This study examines why destination attractiveness fails to translate into permanent settlement among Indian academic migrants in South Korea. Framed within push-pull and aspirations-capabilities perspectives, the study models destination pull, settlement capability (a higher-order construct spanning career permanence, socio-cultural belonging, and family settleability), and home-country return pull as determinants of settlement aspiration, return intention, and onward migration intention. Settlement capability is further tested as a moderator, and family status serves as a grouping migrants recruited through scholarship cohorts, university networks, and research laboratories, and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling, complemented by necessary condition analysis and multigroup analysis. The study positions settlement capability as the missing link between attraction and retention, offering Korean policymakers and universities evidence on where retention policy binds and where it fails

Recently Japan, similarly to South Korea, is undeniably becoming “international,” “multiethnic,” and “multicultural” in its demographics. The influx of migrants, especially from various regions in Asia, is filling the labor force, schools, universities, and entrepreneurship and business sectors. In 2025, Japan’s foreign population exceeded 4 million with the largest ethnic groups being Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. The growing presence of ethnic migrants who are temporary, mid- to long-term or permanent residents, and naturalized citizens is indisputably changing Japan’s demographic landscape. Social discourse and debates highlight the complex implications of a multiethnic reality, transforming a nation-state that has historically perceived itself as a monoethnic, homogeneous country. The majority who migrate to Japan to work, study, or build businesses sojourn with aspirations for educational, economic, and social mobility. How do subjective voices tell their stories of migratory pathways, forging new lives, actively negotiating both positive and negative experiences, maintaining transnational family and relationship practices in their countries of origin, building ethnic community networks, facing discrimination and a sense of exclusion, overcoming hardships, and weighing factors for continuing aspirations in Japan, returning to their home countries, or seeking better opportunities elsewhere? This paper focuses on young Vietnamese migrants, the fastest-growing foreign demographic in Japan, and seeks to establish retainment strategies. Semi-structured interviews of university students, laborers, entrepreneurs, and children of migrants elucidate the following: 1) Collaborating parties for migration are diverse and include acquaintances, supervisors, families, university exchange programs, and agencies, highlighting the importance of third parties and their roles in supporting the lives of migrants. 2) Resilience and coping strategies involve host (local government, institutional, grassroots) support, ethnic community networks and friendships, and various individual mechanisms. 3) There is a need for stronger migrant assistance, i.e., language support, information awareness, identifying possible cultural and social barriers, and building practical knowledge to navigate everyday life. 4) Long-term educational opportunities and career prospects. 5) Greater recognition of migrants’ social and economic contributions. The paper argues that advanced language acquisition, cultural awareness and socio-structural knowledge attainment, heightened educational opportunities, and occupational, career, and entrepreneurial prospects can secure and retain Vietnamese migrants in the face of rapid population aging and intensifying global competition for human capital

The number of Indonesian citizens (WNI) in South Korea was recorded at 75,734 as of March 31, 2025, according to official South Korean immigration data cited by the Indonesian Embassy in Seoul, with 72% of them classified as migrant workers predominantly employed in the manufacturing and fisheries sectors. This growing migrant population has emerged amid an era of global multi-crisis, yet research on how Indonesian migrants develop cultural literacy as capital for survival and advancement in South Korea remains limited. This study aims to examine the process of cultural literacy acquisition, its utilization as dynamic cultural capital, the role of migrant agency, and its contribution to social integration and the transformation of Indonesian migrants into transregional actors in South Korea. This study employs a mixed-method approach (sequential explanatory design), integrating quantitative data from structured questionnaires administered to 100 Indonesian migrant respondents in South Korea with qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 15 selected informants. The sample was determined through purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and correlation tests, while qualitative data were analyzed thematically. This study is expected to find that the majority of respondents undertook Korean language preparation through courses or language training institutions (LPK) prior to departure, while cultural readiness is anticipated to develop primarily after arrival, through interaction with the local population and diaspora communities. Statistically, it is hypothesized that cultural literacy is positively and significantly correlated with employment access (H1) and migrants' level of self-confidence (H2). The study is also expected to identify the proportion of migrants actively engaged in promoting Indonesian culture as a form of transregional contribution. These anticipated findings are expected to reinforce the argument that cultural literacy is not merely a static competency, but a dynamic cultural capital continuously reconstructed through migrant agency in response to multi-crisis conditions. For South Korea as the destination country, this study is projected to contribute to mapping the social integration patterns of Indonesian migrants, providing an empirical basis for more responsive migrant integration policies, and advancing understanding of migrants' role as agents of people-to-people diplomacy that strengthens Indonesia–South Korea socio-cultural relations.

International migration carries biological consequences that are rarely examined, particularly from the perspective of the host country. Migrant bodies moving from Indonesia's tropical climate to South Korea's four-season climate undergo immunological adaptation that directly affects healthcare burden and labor productivity in the receiving country. As of March 2026, 75,734 Indonesian citizens were recorded as residing in South Korea, most of them working in manufacturing and fisheries sectors that involve sustained outdoor labor across all seasons. This study employs a quantitative descriptive-correlational design using a questionnaire survey administered to 102 respondents comprising Indonesian migrant workers, students, and marriage migrants in South Korea. The instrument measures the frequency and severity of seasonal health symptoms, length of stay, and survival strategies covering clothing, diet, and community-based coping mechanisms. Data are analyzed using descriptive statistics to map symptom patterns across seasons, and Pearson correlation to examine the relationship between length of stay and symptom severity. The study finds that 43 of 102 respondents report at least one winter-related health disturbance, with upper respiratory complaints affecting 34 respondents, the most dominant category, while 32 respondents report psychological symptoms such as anxiety and low mood linked to reduced winter sunlight exposure. Correlation analysis reveals a significant negative relationship between length of stay and symptom severity (r = -0.36; p < 0.05), indicating that migrants with longer residence periods report milder symptoms than those who have stayed less than one year, confirming a gradual and consistent thermal adaptation process. Regarding survival strategies, layered winter clothing is the most common coping mechanism, reported by 46 respondents, followed by adjusted warm-food dietary habits among 39 respondents and reliance on Indonesian community networks among 36 respondents. These findings provide a measurable basis for healthcare facilities in areas with concentrated Indonesian migrant labor, particularly industrial and coastal regions outside Seoul, and serve as a reference for employers and local governments in designing seasonal occupational health policies for migrant workers

Artificial intelligence (AI) and the rapid expansion of the platform economy are transforming labor markets and migrant integration across Northeast Asia. In response, governments increasingly promote AI-related vocational training as a pathway toward digital inclusion and employment. However, little is known about whether these initiatives actually enable migrants to secure decent work, strengthen community participation, or develop a sense of local citizenship beyond short-term employment outcomes. This paper presents a one-year longitudinal qualitative study of marriage migrant women who participated in the Migrant AI Annotator Training Program in Anseong, South Korea. Building on an earlier participatory study that followed the entire policy process—from recruitment and Korean language education to AI annotation training, workplace practice, and project implementation—the research revisits participants one year later to examine how they evaluate the program in relation to their work, family, and community lives. Rather than measuring employment outcomes alone, the paper asks three questions: Why did marriage migrant women, including naturalized citizens and permanent residents, choose to participate in AI training? Did AI annotation provide a pathway toward decent work or merely another form of precarious platform labor? Has participation contributed to their identity as members of the local community? The findings demonstrate that participants' motivations extended well beyond economic income and varied across the life course. Women raising young children viewed AI work as a flexible occupation compatible with childcare responsibilities. Mothers of adolescent children regarded the program as an opportunity to better understand AI and support their children's future education and careers. Women approaching later life after more than two decades of residence in Korea perceived AI annotation as a physically less demanding alternative to agricultural and manual labor. Across these groups, participation reflected aspirations for self-development, technological competence, family wellbeing, social recognition, and meaningful participation in local society. The one-year follow-up, however, reveals a significant gap between participants' expectations and the realities of AI platform work. While the program improved digital literacy and confidence, annotation projects remained temporary, irregular, and economically limited. The paper argues that AI-related migration policies should be evaluated not only by employment outcomes but also by their contribution to decent work, community participation, and local citizenship. Drawing upon the concepts of Care Democracy, Light Community, and Rooted Cosmopolitan Citizenship, it proposes an analytical framework that links digital capability, life-course transitions, and community resilience. Although grounded in South Korea, the findings offer broader implications for comparative research on migration, AI-driven labor transformation, and local citizenship across rapidly aging societies in Northeast Asia

Across Asia, intensifying climate pressures, uneven economic development, demographic transitions, and labour market transformations are generating new patterns of mobility. Yet increased movement across borders has not necessarily been accompanied by deeper forms of regional integration. The relationship between mobility and integration remains more unsettled than prevailing accounts of regionalism suggest. The India–Nepal borderlands offer a useful vantage point from which to examine this tension. In towns and transit corridors along the border, movement is woven into everyday life. Traders move goods through formal and informal channels, workers circulate between labour markets, transport operators negotiate regulatory systems, and families sustain social worlds that extend across state boundaries. These practices create dense forms of connectivity that persist despite limited institutional integration and periodic attempts by states to regulate mobility. Seen from the borderlands, mobility appears less as an outcome of integration than as a social process that frequently precedes, exceeds, and sometimes bypasses formal regional frameworks. This observation raises broader questions about the ways mobility is governed across Asia. Comparisons with labour migration corridors in Southeast Asia and managed migration regimes in East Asia reveal different configurations of movement, rights, and belonging. While some forms of mobility are organised through state-led regional arrangements, others rely on informal infrastructures, social networks, historical ties, and everyday negotiations with authority. The concept of everyday regionalism helps illuminate these dynamics. Rather than treating regions as products of interstate cooperation alone, it directs attention to the practices through which migrants, traders, and borderland communities produce connections across political boundaries. At a moment when multiple crises are reshaping movement throughout Asia, such practices offer important insights into the changing relationship between borders, mobility, and regional life

Over the course of Modern history, many things have changed, but the reasons for forced migration on the Turkmenistan-Iran border have mostly remained invariable. Those reasons can be subsumed under political turmoil, wars, natural calamities, and the search for better arable green lands for pasture in certain seasons of the year. The period of the study starts in the 18th century and continues to date. The study uses both descriptive and explanatory methods while analysing historical events. Both primary and secondary data will be used. The study aspires to fill the research gap, taking into account the latest developments. The study confines itself to a certain geographical area that Turkmenistan-Iran border and its vicinities. The scale of the forced migration in this area draws one's attention in the given period of time compared with other bordering areas of the country. The findings of the research will be discussed in the conclusion. The research is an attempt to shed light on further research on this topic

Based on semi-structured interviews and mental-map sketching, this article examines the construction of identity and relatedness for Kurds in the borderlands of Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey through the two adjacent towns of Zaxo and Silopi on either side of the border. Divided across multiple nation-states, the region of Kurdistan has come to be defined through partition, wherein borders and their navigation are entangled with everyday life. Aiming to fill a gap in partition and border studies literature, this article considers the long-term effects of colonial borders in the production of social and political subjectivities of people in previously contiguous socio-cultural spaces, prioritising the lived experiences of borderland inhabitants over Westphalian models of belonging. Primarily, it asks: How does colonial partition affect and produce notions of belonging, identity, and relatedness? Building on Benedict Anderson, it proposes the framework of ‘imagined kinship communities’ to understand how people at the margins of the state articulate and practice relatedness across the spatial and bureaucratic restrictions of borders. Drawing from oral histories of a pre-border past against the rupturing of a post-border present, as well as from collective memory, narrative, media, and limited cross-border movement, kin and tribal relations are continually imagined and discursively (re)produced to fill in the gaps left behind by colonial interventions. Crucially, rather than solely fostering relatedness, imagined kinship communities are generative of a relational framework of difference that allows for one to be positioned as an insider and outsider simultaneously. Despite both sides being Kurdish, the binary national logic of borders and the physical separation over a century have resulted in a tension between ‘self’ and ‘other’ that complicates ethnic, linguistic, and national categories of belonging, creating competing notions of ‘Kurdishness’. In this way, relatedness is constructed dialectically, simultaneously reproducing and contesting state- defined categories of relationality. This framework hopes to have applicability and explanatory power for contexts of partition across Asia in general

This study examines the cross-regional mobility of lowland agricultural populations (Han, Tu, and Hui people) seeking refuge in the highland Pari Tibetan region during the Republican period (1912-1949). Driven by multiple crises, including the 1927 Wuwei earthquake, prolonged drought, endemic banditry, and predatory taxation imposed by the Ma warlord regimes, these displaced groups, largely drawn from areas adjacent to the Pari region, faced acute threats to their survival. Although the Nationalist government attempted to provide relief, its efforts were severely constrained by fiscal weakness, limited infrastructure, and the breakdown of local order. As a result, many displaced people turned to the highland pastoral zone of the Pari region in search of refuge. This paper analyzes how these migrants secured their livelihoods through informal governance mechanisms with local Pari Tibetan communities. They adopted diverse strategies, including labor arrangements such as serving as niuhu (pastoral tenants), integrating into local tribal organizations, or accessing land through leasing for cultivation and grazing. The Pari region functioned as a refuge due to three interrelated factors. Ecologically, abundant underutilized land and a low population density created a relatively loose land-population relationship, generating spatial slack that provided sufficient room and resources to accommodate displaced populations during crises. Politically, limited state penetration and fragmented tribal authority created flexible conditions for incorporating newcomers. Historically and socially, the Pari region’s position on the periphery of the Sino-Tibetan cultural sphere, maintaining relatively frequent contact with Han communities and other mobile groups, enabled adaptive mechanisms for accommodating outsiders. Through the case of the Pari region, this paper argues that the Sino-Tibetan cultural borderland was not merely a peripheral zone of weak state control but a dynamic space in which displaced populations navigated crises through cross-boundary mobility, informal governance, and ecological adaptation

In August 2021, South Korea evacuated 391 Afghan nationals—interpreters, medical staff, engineers, and educators who had partnered with Korean government missions—granting them humanitarian protection as "persons of special merit." As we mark the fifth anniversary of their arrival in 2026, this presentation offers a situational assessment of their integration journey, drawing on qualitative interviews and partial survey data rather than a full census of all 391 individuals. Over the past five years, notable changes have unfolded: some evacuees have secured employment and enrolled their children in Korean schools, while others continue to face persistent barriers in language acquisition, credential recognition, and employment stability. This study examines what has improved, what remains structurally unresolved, and what constitutes the most pressing challenges of life in Korea—including social isolation, legal status uncertainty, and the tension between return aspirations and local rootedness. By centering evacuees' own voices, this research aims to bridge humanitarian intent with integration reality, offering evidence-based insights for Korean policymakers and civil society at a critical juncture in the country's evolving refugee governance

The political turmoil caused by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2021 brought an influx of Afghanistan citizens who had previously been associated with Japan. Those who worked for the Japanese Embassy and JICA, former international students, and ethnic minorities fled for their lives. As a result, the number of Afghans residing in Japan has almost doubled. The researcher has been working closely with the community, listening to their voices, providing them with various support and consultations, conducting action research and advocacy. The presentation aims to discuss the experiences of Afghanistan citizens who are struggling between Japan, a typical ethno-nationalist state with limited policies for social integration, and Afghanistan, where security and human rights, especially for girls and women, are not guaranteed. Even though many had high levels of education and hopes to pursue a better life in Japan, the lack of systematic and long-term language training hindered their social integration. Limited language proficiency affected their socio-economic conditions, as many are in irregular employment that does not reflect their educational backgrounds. Moreover, the financial situation of households is discouraging children from pursuing higher education. Combined with the demographic crisis and declining population, Japan’s social policy should be designed to be more inclusive regardless of class, ethnicity, and gender, to invest in the potential of refugee children. Afghans account for 30 percent of those granted refugee status, and whether this group can be successfully integrated into society will have a significant impact not only on Japan’s refugee policy but also on its policies regarding international students and international cooperation.

Following the political changes in Afghanistan in 2021, many Afghan citizens relocated to Japan and have faced the challenge of rebuilding their livelihoods and integrating into Japanese society. Employment and income are important dimensions of this integration, yet limited evidence is available on the economic conditions of Afghan households, women, and young people in Japan. This study uses the data collected from three groups of Afghan residents in Japan: household heads, women, and young people. The analysis focuses on employment status, type of employment, individual and household income, financial conditions, and barriers to employment. This paper examines patterns and differences across employment status, gender, income, and Japanese-language ability. The research findings indicate significant economic challenges among the surveyed population. While many household heads are engaged in employment, a considerable proportion have relatively low incomes or work under less stable employment arrangements. Women experience greater economic constraints, including higher unemployment, lower participation in full-time employment, and substantially lower individual incomes. The analysis also indicates an association between Japanese-language ability and women's employment participation, suggesting that limited language skills may represent an important barrier to labour-market access. Young respondents similarly report considerable financial difficulties within their households, which may affect their educational opportunities and future prospects. The findings suggest that economic integration among Afghan residents in Japan extends beyond access to employment. Employment stability, adequate income, Japanese-language proficiency, access to employment information, and opportunities for women and young people are important factors shaping economic well-being. The study highlights the need for integrated support measures that combine Japanese-language development, access to stable employment, support for women's labour-market participation, and educational opportunities for young people.

1. Highest Number of Refugees in Japan In recent years, Afghan nationals have been granted refugee status in Japan by far the largest group by nationality. According to data from the Immigration Services Agency, Afghan nationals accounted for 102 out of 190 recognised refugees in 2024 and 123 out of 187 in 2025. Following the Taliban's return to power in August 2021, local staff from the Embassy of Japan, personnel from JICA, and their families evacuated to Japan. They were former scholarship students at Universities in Japan. 2. Legal Status After Granted Refugee Status in Japan In principle, they receive a "Long-Term Resident" visa status for a 5-year period, which is also a pathway to apply for permanent residency in the future. However, the Japanese government is rapidly tightening its administration of legal frameworks regarding immigrants, refugees, and permanent residents. Without enacting new legislation, the Ministry of Justice has revised its internal operational guidelines. It has effectively increased the continuous residency requirement for naturalisation from the previous "5 years" to "10 years". This change includes a rigorous, multi-year review of tax and social insurance payment records. The government has also indicated a plan to formally introduce a specific "Japanese language proficiency" standard to the requirements for permanent residency as early as fiscal year 2027. 3. Barriers to Daily Life and Employment Severe challenges stemming from the fragility of the host society's "migration infrastructure" are surfacing. Many Afghan refugees are highly skilled individuals who obtained a master's or a doctorate from universities in Japan and worked as elite professionals for embassies or international organisations. However, due to language barriers and non-transferable qualifications, many are forced into workplaces they do not want. The Afghan community in Japan is relatively small, making individuals highly prone to social isolation. Furthermore, the closing down of the Afghan Embassy in Tokyo in early 2026 has caused significant secondary trauma. This has manifested not only as practical hurdles like the inability to renew passports but also as a severe negative impact on mental health and psychological stability.

In the summer of 2018, 561 Yemeni asylum seekers landed on Jeju Island, South Korea. Their sudden arrival caused the refugee issue to surface in Korean society as they became embroiled in tremendous backlashes, stigmatizing them as fake refugees and sex offenders. The phenomenon instigated domestic scholars’ attention; however, previous studies primarily concentrated on the reaction of the ‘natives’ against the newcomers and discourse analysis. The lived experiences and narratives of Yemeni refugees have not been explored yet. The sudden appearance of Yemeni refugees on Jeju Island seems to be an accidental event that created a new linkage between South Korea and Yemen. However, their migration reveals entanglements of connections that have already been in place. For example, the Jeju government’s decision and Air Asia’s establishment of cheap direct flights between Jeju and Kuala Rumph prompted Yemenis’ hope, aspirations, and migration. Yemenis’ hypermobile life intersects different Asias, such as Yemen, Oman, Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea, crossing borders multiple times and risking their lives for refuge. Simultaneously, their mobility deconstructs the understanding of Asia and (re)constructs the urban and rural landscape of South Korea, where Southeast Asian migrant workers and marriage migrant women, Central Asian migrant workers, Koreans, and newcomers from Yemen coexist. Recognizing limited academic discussion about Yemeni refugees’ narratives, my anthropological research is an act of speaking to Yemeni refugees. The study explores intertwined connections among the migrants’ agency and migration infrastructures (Xiang & Lindquist, 2014) with the transnational analytical framework (Glick Schiller et al.,1992). The study is based on ethnographies through encounters and interactions with Yemeni refugees in and beyond South Korea between 2019 and 2023. It is the first longitudinal project which highlights Yemenis’ experiences and stories about their transnational mobility. Furthermore, the study zooms out their feverish arrival, unfolding the interconnected mechanisms that motivate and constitute their mobility

Second generation migrants are often described as growing up between two cultures, negotiating the cultural traditions of their families and the social norms of the host societies. Existing studies have extensively examined identity formation and integration among second generation migrants, yet less attention has been paid to how intimate relationships intersect with these experiences of belonging. This paper argues that intimate relationships constitute an important but underexplored arena through which second generation migrants construct and reshape their sense of belonging. Based on 27 in-depth interviews with second generation Vietnamese living in Prague and Brno, together with participant observation conducted between 2020 and 2022, the research examines how growing up between Vietnamese family and diaspora community expectations and the wider Czech society shapes experiences of belonging through intimate relationships. The findings indicate that second generation Vietnamese participants do not experience belonging as a fixed attachment to either Vietnamese or Czech society. They have developed senses of belonging reflected in four identity orientations including ‘banana’, Vietnamese, Czech and marginal or European identities. These orientations influence how participants imagine compatibility, intimacy and choose their partners, while intimate relationships become important sites where attachments to family, community and culture are reaffirmed, challenged or reconfigured. Participants with a ‘banana’ identity tend to prefer partners who share similar bicultural experiences, while those identifying as Vietnamese prefer Vietnamese partners. In contrast, participants identifying as Czech or European are more likely to prefer Czech or other White partners. Additionally, the interplay between identity and partner choice is reciprocal. Romantic partners can reinforce existing identities or contribute to redefining them over time. Relationships with Vietnamese partners often strengthen connections to Vietnamese culture, whereas partnerships with Czech partners may reinforce identification with Czech society

Education plays a critical role in supporting the well-being and future mobility of migrant families. However, differences in migration governance and national education policies contribute to unequal educational opportunities for the children of Indonesian migrant workers in Southeast Asia. While existing studies have mainly examined educational barriers within one country, there is limited information on how migration infrastructure affects educational opportunities across different host countries This study compares educational opportunities for the children of Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia and Singapore by examining the role of migration infrastructures in facilitating access to education. The study argues that migration infrastructures extend beyond migration management and encompass legal frameworks, educational institutions, and state-supported initiatives that influence migrants' access to social services. Although both Malaysia and Singapore prioritize citizens within their national education systems, different institutional contexts have emerged for migrant children in the two countries. In Singapore, access to education for Indonesian migrant families is primarily supported through the Indonesian School in Singapore, set up by the Indonesian Government and offers a different access to education for Indonesian citizens who have limited access to local public schools in Singapore. In the case of Malaysia, the high number of undocumented Indonesian migrant workers has led the Indonesian government to build a broader educational infrastructure, including Indonesian Schools, Community Learning Centres and Sanggar Bimbingan, to expand the educational opportunities for undocumented migrant children. The comparative study reveals that educational opportunities are shaped not only by host-country policies but also by migration infrastructures developed through bilateral engagement and community-based initiatives. By highlighting these institutional differences, the study contributes to broader discussions on migration infrastructures, inclusive education, and the protection of migrant children in Southeast Asia, while offering policy recommendations for strengthening cross-border educational cooperation between Indonesia and migrant-receiving countries.

Over nearly ninety years since the 1937 deportation, scholarship on the Koryo-saram in Kazakhstan has focused primarily on deportation, collective memory, ethnic identity, Korean language maintenance, cultural practices, and transnational connections with South Korea. While these studies have substantially advanced understanding of the historical experience of the Korean diaspora, considerably less attention has been paid to the life narratives of the second generation of Koryo-saram—children of deportees who grew up in Kazakhstan. Despite its historical importance, this generation has rarely been examined as an independent analytical object. This study draws on a corpus of 46 life-history materials, including biographical interviews, family histories, written memoirs, and archival reconstructions. Generational mapping showed that the corpus is dominated by second-generation respondents, defining the analytical focus of the study. The materials were then systematically coded, followed by a full corpus audit to reconstruct the criteria through which respondents retrospectively evaluate their life trajectories. The analysis identified a stable system of evaluative criteria, including family responsibility, family continuity, children's achievements, education, professional accomplishment, social respectability, and contribution to others. These elements function not merely as recurring themes but as interconnected standards through which respondents assess the outcomes of their lives. Memory of deportation remains present throughout almost the entire corpus and constitutes an important component of family history. However, the analysis demonstrates that deportation more often provides the historical framework of biographical narratives than the principal criterion for evaluating one's own life. Instead, retrospective evaluations are predominantly organised around family, professional, and intergenerational achievements. The study proposes treating the second generation of Koryo-saram as an independent analytical object. It extends existing scholarship on the Korean diaspora in Kazakhstan by complementing studies of memory, identity, and historical experience with an analysis of the evaluative criteria through which this generation interprets the outcomes of its own life trajectories

Age of Multi-Crisis Negotiating Self and Homeland: The Korean Reverse Diaspora Amid U.S.-China Rivalry and Geopolitical Multiculturalism Southeast Asia, South Asia, Northeast Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, North Asia, Asia-Africa, Comparative Research, Mobility, Migration, Borders) 1 This presentation examines the growing phenomenon of ethnic Korean reverse migration from Western countries to South Korea since 2020, focusing on the racial, geopolitical, and multicultural contexts shaping these migration experiences. While existing scholarship on co-ethnic return migration has largely focused on Korean Chinese and post-Soviet Koreans in relation to labor migration and economic incorporation, less attention has been paid to Korean Americans and other second- or later-generation overseas Koreans returning from Western societies. This study situates contemporary reverse migration within broader global transformations, including the rise of anti-Asian racism, increasing U.S.–China geopolitical rivalry, and changing forms of migration governance and multiculturalism in East Asia. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many diasporic Koreans have encountered shifting perceptions of opportunity, safety, identity, and belonging, while South Korea has simultaneously faced demographic decline, labor shortages, and ongoing debates surrounding national identity and multicultural inclusion. To that end, this study asks three questions: (1) What factors contribute to ethnic returnees’ decisions to migrate from Western countries to South Korea after 2020? (2) How do interactions with native Koreans and other social groups shape experiences of identity, belonging, and difference? (3) How do returnees interpret their experiences within broader processes of racialization and geopolitical change? The project employs a qualitative, multi-stage analytic design combining Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Drawing on theoretical frameworks of anti-Asian racialization, U.S.-China rivalry, and “geopolitical multiculturalism,” this study examines how migration policies and social hierarchies selectively incorporate different co-ethnic groups based on nationality, class, ethnicity, and geopolitical positioning. The presentation argues that reverse migration among diasporic Koreans from Western countries reflects broader transformations in global power relations and challenges traditional assumptions about Koreanness, belonging, and multiculturalism. By examining the lived experiences of ethnic return migrants, the project contributes to existing scholarship on migration, diaspora, race, and geopolitics while offering insights into the future of multicultural governance and social inclusion in contemporary Korea

Feminist scholarship on migration has long argued that mobility is gendered. Women's migration is shaped by, and in turn reshapes, care economies, embodied labor, and household structures across borders. Building on this scholarship, alongside theories of aesthetic labor and racialized embodiment, this paper positions beauty and care work not as peripheral to migration but as a central site through which gendered agency is exercised under conditions of precarity. African migrant women in Delhi's interstitial neighborhoods like Khirki Extension and Kishangarh navigate a city where their bodies are rendered hyper-visible, racialized, and often criminalized. Dominant media discourses cast them as connected to "illegality," drug peddling, or sex work, discourses that constrain their mobility and social belonging. Within these constraints, hair-braiding salons, skincare rituals become spaces where women exercise economic autonomy, build support networks, and assert their agency against externally imposed narratives. Rather than reading these practices solely as responses to marginalization, this paper foregrounds women's active strategies of care as a form of migrant agency. Salons operate as informal economic infrastructures that generate economic independence of formal labor markets that are often closed to precarious visa-holders. Simultaneously, they function as relational spaces of solidarity, where knowledge about housing, safety, and immigration bureaucracy circulates alongside beauty services. ‘Beauty parlors’ further become tools of respectability politics, through which women negotiate racialized and sexualized stereotyping in a city that marks them as the perpetual ‘other’. By centering women's own practices of care for their bodies, their peers, and their communities, this paper contributes to a gendered rereading of African migration to India, one that shifts analytical focus from state-centered "illegality" frameworks toward the everyday, embodied, and relational labor through which migrant women sustain themselves and each other.

This paper examines the gendering of migration through livelihood strategy in the context of the Indo-Myanmar Border. Predominantly, the present scholarship interprets migration from India’s Northeast through the lenses of armed conflict, militarisation, political unrest, ethnic identity, and economic marginalisation. While these structural explanations have enriched our understanding of borderland migration, gendered livelihood conditions shaping Indigenous women’s migration decisions remain underexplored. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Indigenous Tangkhul Naga women in the Indo-Myanmar border region, this paper conceptualises ‘gendering migration’ through the lens of livelihood strategy. It argues that migration is not merely a response to structural constraints but is mediated by livelihood precarity emerging from the intersection of conflict, inadequate infrastructure, unemployment, socio-cultural expectations, household economic pressures, and unequal access to productive resources such as land and education. These interconnected variables collectively shape the gendered conditions under which women negotiate migration. Instead of treating Indigenous women as passive victims of poverty-induced displacement, the paper foregrounds their agency in responding to precarious livelihoods through migration as a deliberate livelihood strategy. It demonstrates that migration represents an aspirational pursuit of financial independence, personal autonomy, improved employment opportunities, and enhanced life prospects within neoliberal service sectors in India’s metropolitan cities, including hospitality, retail, wellness, and cruise industries. Building on a conceptual framework that links structural conditions, gendered livelihood precarity, changing aspirations, and women’s migration as a livelihood strategy, the paper advances the concept of ‘gendering migration’ to explain how migration is simultaneously constrained by structural inequalities and enabled by Indigenous women’s aspirations and strategic decision-making. It concludes that understanding women’s migration in the Indo-Myanmar border requires a more nuanced understanding of migration as both a livelihood strategy and a process of negotiating gendered social and economic transformations in the borderlands

Enrollment of Vietnamese students in Taiwan has surged in recent years, particularly in STEM fields, and the number of women among these students has increased as well. However, a gap remains in our understanding of these women’s experiences in graduate STEM education. This paper explores whether moving to another country for education reinforces or challenges the values these women bring from Vietnam. It uses the River of Life visual-narrative method and semi-structured interviews with 29 participants in total. Seventeen Vietnamese female STEM graduate students in Taiwan form the primary group. Three smaller reference groups serve as points of contrast, clarifying what is distinctive about this group’s experience: Vietnamese men in Taiwan, on gender; non-migrant Vietnamese women in Vietnam, on migration; and women from other Southeast Asian countries in Taiwan, on nationality. The findings show that these students arrive with a gendered habitus shaped by Vietnamese gender policy, including Confucian patriarchy, the wartime “superwoman” ideal and its double burden, and contemporary pressures to be globally productive. In the laboratory, they enter a new environment with unfamiliar norms and real structural vulnerabilities. Here, their inherited dispositions encounter a different context, and their gendered practices shift along a spectrum. These shifts range from unreflective action, through strategic redirection and interior undoing, to a slower process of undoing that accumulates over time. The outcome is neither a complete replacement of values nor a simple confirmation of existing ones; the study calls this process “additive transformation”. New layers of values are added to older ones without erasing them, and both are held in a managed tension. The most significant change occurs in their internal frame of reference. The paper concludes by discussing policy in both Taiwan and Vietnam, offering an experiential perspective that clarifies the gap between progressive policy and everyday inclusiveness.

Migration infrastructure was conceived to unpack the mediation of cross-border movement (Xiang & Lindquist, 2014); the arrival infrastructures literature productively relocated the analytic to the post-arrival urban field—"those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated" (Meeus, van Heur, & Arnaut, 2019). Yet this scholarship remains anchored in the Global North metropolis and in refugee trajectories, sustaining an "arrival city" imaginary that Collins (2012) critiques as teleological and territorial. This study shifts the lens on three axes: from the liberal welfare state to a (post-)developmentalist migration state; from the gateway metropolis to a regional city where local governments actively recruit migrants amid regional depopulation; and from forced migration to education migration, a status neither fully labor nor asylum. In Cheongju—a regional city in central South Korea, far from the Seoul metropolitan area—many Mongolian international students, most arriving with no Christian background in a country where Protestants number barely one percent, begin attending Korean churches and present themselves as "Christians." Drawing on ethnographic interviews with students and church workers, we make three arguments. First, the church operates as an arrival infrastructure at the intersection of Xiang and Lindquist's humanitarian and social dimensions, furnishing housing, jobs, language help, care, and co-ethnic networks where the (post-)developmentalist state, treating students as temporary human capital, provides little support—and in doing so it facilitates students' embedding in the locality. Second, its operating logic is nonetheless the protection of a faith community rather than of migrants, making it a selective, conditional arrival infrastructure that channels particular forms of arrival. Their turn to a "Christian" self is thus a means of securing membership through which they scale up their emplacement from church to city and nation—an active reterritorialization understood not as final settlement but as a temporary, negotiated territorialization. Third, students do not merely receive church-provided resources passively: they selectively form relationships, mobilize resources according to their needs, and thereby reshape the functions and meanings of the church. Their reterritorialization is therefore best understood not as a unilateral process through which infrastructure embeds migrants, but as a negotiated one in which migrants and infrastructures shape one another. The paper thus extends migration infrastructure research from the facilitation of mobility to the mediation of local embedding, theorizes religion as a normatively bounded arrival infrastructure, and recasts embeddedness not as an accumulated outcome of social ties but as an ongoing process produced through the intersection and negotiation of infrastructural conditions—repositioning migrants who are so often "moved by others" as agents who negotiate, appropriate, and reshape the infrastructures that receive them.

Taiwan's labor migration regime has been widely examined through the lenses of state regulation, brokerage systems, labor control, and legal precarity. While this scholarship demonstrates how migrant workers become structurally vulnerable under temporary labor migration, it pays less attention to the non-state infrastructures that enable migrants to survive when formal systems of welfare and protection fall short. This paper argues that a Thai Buddhist temple in northern Taiwan constitutes a religious infrastructure of care that has become an integral, though unofficial, component of Taiwan's migration regime. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a Thai Buddhist temple in northern Taiwan, the paper examines how the temple provides temporary shelter, food, interpretation, ritual support, information, and social mediation for both documented and undocumented migrants. Rather than treating these activities simply as expressions of religious compassion, I analyze them as infrastructural practices that materially organize migrant survival. Through these practices, the temple connects migrants to legal processes, healthcare, employment networks, and transnational social relations, thereby sustaining forms of everyday life that neither the state nor the labor market adequately supports. Building on recent scholarship on migration infrastructures and religious Infrastructure, I argue that migrant survival depends not only on state institutions but also on religious organizations that mediate between migrants, employers, brokers, immigration authorities, and transnational Buddhist networks. Religious care therefore operates as a form of governance that both mitigates and reproduces precarity by generating new relations of dependency, obligation, and institutional negotiation. By repositioning a Thai Buddhist temple within Taiwan's migration regime rather than at its margins, this paper contributes to debates on migration infrastructures, the anthropology of religion, and the politics of care. It highlights the significant, yet often overlooked, role of religious institutions in sustaining migrant life under conditions of structural precarity.

This paper examines the emergence of Latin American restaurants around U.S. military bases in South Korea as spaces where mobility, settlement, and belonging intersect across changing historical contexts. While scholarship on diasporic restaurants has largely focused on multicultural cities in North America and Europe, little attention has been paid to Latin American foodscapes in East Asia or to the role of military infrastructures in shaping diasporic settlement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Dongducheon and Songtan—two communities historically shaped by the U.S. military presence—and a comparative case study of Hongdae in Seoul, this paper explores how Latin American restaurants acquire different meanings for different groups of actors within distinct urban settings. The study situates these restaurants within the longer transformation of South Korea's camptowns. As base-dependent commercial districts declined from the 1970s onward, new forms of migration associated with changing military demographics, marriage migration, and labor migration contributed to the emergence of Latin American-owned restaurants. In Songtan, these restaurants have become part of a newly multicultural commercial landscape, while in Hongdae they have developed outside the direct influence of military infrastructure and serve a predominantly Korean clientele. Theoretically, the paper brings together Marc Augé's concept of the non-place and the notion of anthropological place, arguing that these spatial forms coexist within the same physical setting and are experienced differently by different actors. For U.S. military personnel, the restaurants function as temporary spaces of familiarity; for Latin American owners, they are places of livelihood, social networks, and long-term settlement; for Korean customers, they represent sites of authenticity, cosmopolitan consumption, and cultural exploration. Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews with restaurant owners, and analysis of online reviews, the paper argues that U.S. military bases have functioned as migration infrastructures whose historical restructuring has generated new diasporic foodscapes. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on how migration infrastructures produce historically contingent and differentiated experiences of mobility and belonging

The World Expositions (EXPO) represent the quintessential spectacle of cosmopolitanism, designed to project global modernity that transcends borders and to welcome “everyone” – by bringing the world to the host city, and the host city to the world. Yet the physical infrastructure through which these events are produced reveals a different narrative with enforced territorial boarders, restrictive migration regimes, and systematic relegation of migrant populations to the periphery of their vision. Moving beyond the state-level narratives, this paper examines such dissonance through a comparative ethnographic lens, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the Dubai EXPO 2020 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Osaka EXPO 2025 in Japan. While the UAE and Japan represent seemingly distinct migration regime typologies, categorized through kafala sponsorship system and fixed-term contract labor frameworks respectively, the comparative analysis reveals a structural converges: both mobilize migrant populations as the essential foundation of their labor force while simultaneously managing, and at times suppressing, their visibility within the host city’s cosmopolitan performance. In situating the EXPO as a state-engineered mechanism through which cosmopolitanism is performed for a global audience, I examine who is included within this narrative, and to what degree. The everyday experiences and narratives of migrants reveal the migration infrastructures that delimit their belonging in contrast to the EXPO’s celebratory globalism; this tension is particularly visible among the long-term migrants in Dubai and the Zainichi Korean residents in Osaka, who have resided in these host cities across generations yet remain differentially positioned within these competing cosmopolitan registers. In doing so, this paper contributes to the comparative study of migration infrastructures and urban space in Asia by theorizing the EXPO as a site where states negotiate the terms of cosmopolitan membership, determining whose mobility is celebrated and whose, though deemed indispensable, is managed out of view

The bilateral relationship between Japan and Romania has been discussed primarily in terms of economic and trade relations. Beyond these connections, however, significant transnational mobility exists between the two countries. Japan’s economic expansion has facilitated the movement of Japanese expatriates and their families to Romania, contributing to the establishment of institutions such as the Japanese School in Bucharest and the Japanese Association in Romania. At the same time, migration from Romania to Japan includes international students, skilled professionals, and other migrants, reflecting the diversity of this population. Organizations based in Japan, such as the Japan–Romania Society (JRS) and the Japan–Romania Friendship Association, further demonstrate the depth of ties between the two countries. Despite these connections, transnational mobility between Japan and Romania remains underexplored in existing research. To address this gap, this study presents findings from a pilot interview with a Japanese student residing in Romania. The participant’s narrative illustrates how linguistic interests and cultural curiosity motivated the decision to relocate abroad. It also highlights how his position as an Asian minority in Romania shaped his everyday experiences, including encounters with discrimination and social challenges. At the same time, sustained interactions with local residents fostered a sense of belonging and attachment to Romanian society. This paper argues that migration trajectories are complex and multifaceted, encompassing both opportunities and challenges that shape migrants’ identities, perceptions, and future mobility aspirations. By examining an individual case, the study provides insights into the lived experiences of Japanese migrants in Romania and contributes to a broader understanding of transnational mobility between the two countries. (

Economic sanctions constitute one of the principal policy instruments for promoting the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Although sanctions have not produced an immediate effect in halting North Korea’s nuclear development, sustained enforcement has contributed to the temporary suspension of Pyongyang’s nuclear tests and military provocations. Since the Six-Party Talks, sanctions relief has also been discussed as a policy instrument for creating a more favorable environment for negotiations and encouraging North Korea to pursue denuclearization. Policymakers have therefore proposed adopting the Libyan or Iranian model of denuclearization and sanctions relief as a means of persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. However, Pyongyang has rejected both models following the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011 and the unraveling of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018. In fact, even if sanctions on North Korea were lifted, they could be reimposed if Pyongyang were perceived as insincere in its commitment to denuclearization. Against this background, this study employs the Two-level game framework to examine the role of sanctions relief in denuclearization negotiations in the cases of Libya, Iran, and North Korea. It further assesses whether alternative designs of sanctions relief could contribute to advancing North Korea’s denuclearization. This study argues that sanctions relief is more likely to be implemented when a denuclearization arrangement is not only credibly enforced at the international level but also supported by sufficient domestic political recognition within the negotiating parties

Indonesia and the Philippines share a resource endowment and a common exposure to Chinese capital, but their nickel sectors began this century structured quite differently — the Philippines conglomerate-dominated from the outset, Indonesia’s nickel sector fragmented among small district-licensed miners while its coal sector concentrated in the hands of a small number of oligarchs. Twenty years on, Indonesia hosts the world’s largest integrated nickel-processing complex; the Philippines remains an ore exporter. This paper asks why. Using a most similar systems design, the paper draws on fieldwork conducted in Manila in 2026 — interviews with the Board of Investments, the Chamber of Mines, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Science and Technology, the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, the Philippine Nickel Industry Association, and the World Bank — and on Takahiro Kamisuna’s parallel Indonesia case study, built on interviews in Jakarta with industry associations, a former cabinet minister, and an anti-corruption investigator. We argue that ownership structure cannot explain the divergence, and nor, on closer inspection, can a simple story of nickel capital capturing the state. What explains Indonesia’s downstreaming is the entry of a different capital fraction — coal oligarchs holding no nickel-mining assets of their own — into the cabinet and into downstream processing, captive power, and EVs, backed by an export ban and an integrated-smelter law that compensated rather than displaced existing nickel miners. The Philippines has produced no equivalent capital fraction willing and able to force that reallocation, and the state has consistently encouraged rather than compelled upgrading. We hang the comparison on the concept of developmental statecraft — the repertoire through which a state attempts to convert resource endowment into industrial capability — operationalised on four dimensions on which both cases can be scored: reallocation instrument, risk allocation, capital-and-technology brokerage, and coalition management. Indonesia practises a coercive-brokerage statecraft; the Philippines a courtship statecraft. The modes are not free choices: which one is available to a state depends on its coalitional foundation, which we formalise as adjacent-fraction developmentalism — resource economies industrialise not when their resource incumbents grow powerful, but when a politically dominant capital fraction adjacent to the resource sector, holding the complementary inputs, the cabinet access, and a portfolio interest in reallocation, captures industrial policy and buys the incumbents in.

While poverty has reduced in many parts of Asia and the Pacific, inequality remains a pressing issue. Approximately 45% of the population in Southeast Asia is classified as having a low income or being poor. In addition to the traditional notion of income inequality, wealth inequality and newer manifestations of inequality such as the digital divide and risks associated with climate change impacts have become more prevalent. Furthermore, the spatial dimensions of these inequalities are relevant as well. High disparities exist within cities and between cities and rural spaces. In this paper I provide an analysis of socio-spatial and socio-environmental inequalities in Southeast Asia, currently home to about 686 million people. According to an Oxfam briefing paper published in October 2025, ‘[t]he data shows that ASEAN’s poorest 50% continue to receive a negligible share of national wealth, with the majority of countries seeing only minimal progress over the last two decades.’ This is a very sobering and unfortunate situation for an economic community that has often been portrayed a relatively successful part of Asia. In addition, the middle class is increasingly finding it harder to maintain living standards. In this paper, I focus on the ‘where’, ‘who’ and ‘why’ of socio-spatial and socio-environmental inequalities. The empirical parts shed light on floods and droughts in Thailand and the Philippines. I argue that national policies addressing inequality of wealth should not only address simple differences between rich and poor, but include socio-spatial and socio – environmental dimensions. This is important because poverty and inequality are embedded in specific sub-national settings and are increasingly related to global economic and environmental shocks. Policymakers and practitioners could decide on what the priorities are and what kind of territorial, sectoral, and universal policies are feasible given available budgets. Southeast Asian countries should be careful not to alienate fishers, farmers, people living in slums, and the aspirational middle class

Existing frameworks for analyzing climate-induced migration and environmental displacement have developed largely without attention to caste as a structuring mechanism that determines who is forced to migrate, where displaced populations settle, and what labor and living conditions await them upon arrival. This paper addresses that gap through multi-sited feminist and anti-caste ethnographic fieldwork with Dalit and Pasmanda women waste workers in Delhi's and Mumbai's urban peripheries, conducted between July 2022 and April 2023. The paper argues that for caste-oppressed communities in India, environmentally driven migration does not represent a rupture from prior conditions of dispossession but a spatial reconfiguration of them. Floods in Bihar, drought in Maharashtra, and agrarian crisis in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal expelled landless Dalit-Pasmanda households from rural livelihoods already precarious because caste had historically denied them land ownership, educational access, and occupational mobility. Arrival in neoliberal cities did not dissolve these hierarchies but rearticulated them through urban labor markets that concentrated migrants in informal settlements adjacent to landfills, assigning them to waste work on the basis of inherited caste designation rather than individual circumstance. The paper advances three claims. First, the category of environmental refugee systematically undertheorizes how caste pre-structures displacement, channeling caste-oppressed households into the most hazardous urban environments at the point of arrival. Second, informal settlements around urban landfills function as internal sacrifice zones where environmental harm concentrates on populations whose caste designation has rendered their proximity to pollution cosmologically appropriate rather than politically actionable. Third, the women whose testimonies ground this paper are not passive victims but producers of situated knowledge about environmental degradation, migration, and urban governance, knowledge that policy frameworks consistently extract without recognizing as such. Integrating caste into climate migration scholarship requires treating it not as a contextual variable but as a constitutive mechanism built into the foundational categories through which displacement is theorized, governed, and addressed

Climate change has begun to alter coastlines across Asia in ways that profoundly affect both ecosystems and human communities. Among the regions most exposed to these changes are the mangrove landscapes of the Indian Sundarbans and coastal Thailand. Rising sea levels, coastal erosion, salinization, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events have weakened traditional livelihoods and compelled many people to move in search of security and survival. Yet environmental change alone does not explain why some communities experience displacement more acutely than others. This paper examines climate-induced displacement in the Indian Sundarbans and coastal Thailand through a comparative lens. It argues that migration emerges not simply from ecological decline but from the interaction of environmental vulnerability, socio-economic inequality, and uneven access to state support and adaptive resources. By comparing two of Asia's most important mangrove regions, the paper explores how similar environmental pressures generate distinct mobility patterns under varying institutional and social conditions. The study finds that households in the Indian Sundarbans increasingly rely on seasonal, circular, and permanent migration as survival strategies. In coastal Thailand, by contrast, migration often coexists with livelihood diversification and state-led adaptation measures that reduce, though do not eliminate, vulnerability. Despite these differences, both regions reveal important gaps in the protection of populations displaced by environmental change. Existing legal and policy frameworks continue to struggle with forms of mobility that do not fit conventional categories of migration or refugeehood. By bringing together experiences from South and Southeast Asia, this paper contributes to contemporary debates on climate mobility, environmental justice, and human security. It argues that effective responses to climate-induced displacement must combine ecosystem conservation with social protection and locally grounded adaptation strategies. Such an approach offers a more just and sustainable path for communities living on the frontiers of climate change

Research on the climatic and agricultural impacts of the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption in Qing China has focused on regions that experienced severe crises and famine (most notably Yunnan), overlooking regions that faced comparable climatic stress but demonstrated relative resilience. This study addresses this gap by investigating Taiwan’s agricultural response to the climatic anomalies associated with the 1815 eruption, focusing on rice production and food-supply conditions under Qing rule from 1815–1816. Although precise annual rice yields or prices are unavailable, a synthesis of data from local gazetteers, Qing administrative records, ClimeApp climate reconstructions, disaster records from the REACHES database, and long-run quantitative estimates of population, rice output, and rice exports reveals that Taiwan experienced substantial climatic and food-supply stress, including frost, snow, elevated grain prices, robberies, and relief activities, yet avoided a catastrophic collapse of rice production or a large-scale famine like that in Yunnan. This relative resilience may have been supported by pre-existing structural conditions, including migrant agricultural labor from Fujian and Guangdong, the diffusion of iron tools and draft animals, and the cultivation of rice varieties with diverse growing cycles and partial tolerance to cooler conditions. By distinguishing direct evidence of production shortfalls from indirect indicators, this study demonstrates how long-term factor endowments and agricultural structures shaped uneven regional responses to the Tambora climatic shock. This paper is at the Revise and Resubmit Stage at Social Sciences and Humanities Open. The long edition of the paper will be one of the chapters of the monograph (The 1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora-Climate Impact and Transnational Agricultural Resilience)

Climate change is increasingly transforming patterns of human mobility across Asia, creating new forms of displacement that challenge conventional understandings of borders, sovereignty, and human security. Bangladesh and Myanmar rank among the region's most environmentally vulnerable countries, facing recurrent floods, cyclones, sea-level rise, riverbank erosion, and ecosystem degradation. These environmental pressures, when combined with poverty, uneven development, weak governance, and political instability, have intensified migration and displacement across the region. This paper examines the dynamics of climate-induced displacement in Bangladesh and Myanmar and assesses their implications for India. It argues that environmental displacement cannot be understood solely as a consequence of ecological degradation; rather, it emerges through the interaction of climate vulnerability, governance capacity, and political conditions. Through a comparative analysis of the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP) and the Myanmar Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (MCCSAP), the study explores how different state responses shape resilience, adaptation, and mobility outcomes. The analysis suggests that while Bangladesh has developed relatively stronger institutional mechanisms to address climate risks, implementation challenges continue to constrain adaptation efforts. In Myanmar, climate vulnerability is further compounded by prolonged political instability and ethnic conflict, which undermine both resilience and governance. Consequently, environmental displacement in both countries increasingly transcends national boundaries and generates significant regional implications. The paper contends that the combined effects of climate change and political insecurity are likely to intensify migration pressures on India's eastern and northeastern border regions, raising critical questions regarding border governance, humanitarian protection, and regional cooperation. By situating climate-induced displacement within the broader context of Asia’s overlapping environmental and political crises, the study contributes to contemporary debates on climate mobility, environmental justice, and transboundary governance in an age of multi-crisis, highlighting the need for coordinated regional responses to emerging forms of environmental displacement

This paper examines how the displacement of female agricultural and aquacultural workers in the Mekong River Delta challenges existing analytical and conceptual borders due to their spatial intersectionality, and the applicability of these findings to similar physiographic regions within Asia. The Vietnamese Mekong River Delta is highly vulnerable to environmental stressors due to increasing saltwater intrusion, severe flooding and land erosion, with a highly gendered spatial displacement contemporarily taking effect. This research addresses the critical gap in gender- differentiated climate data. It analyzes how localized climate adaptation strategies, such as shifting from rice to shrimp farming, have disrupted traditional female agricultural labor pools, leaving women in a cycle of socio-economic vulnerability. This case study is split into four parts. First, it assesses the environmental vulnerability of Mekong Delta through Participatory GIS analysis in order to understand the forced agricultural shifts caused by climate change. Secondly, the gender dynamics within agrarian work are analyzed, specifically how climate shocks have altered the feminization of agriculture as women take on heavier, often unpaid burdens, to manage failing crops while primarily men migrate for industrial work. In the third section, the push-and-pull factors driving rural women to urban industrial hubs, like Ho Chi Minh City or the southeastern economic zone, as well as the socio-economic risks and boundaries they face, are examined. Lastly, these findings are connected to Mega Asia and the transnational relationships existing within; by understanding marginalized perspectives, existing within intersectionally restricted regimes, rigid boundaries can be transcended. Based on both a comparative studies methodology and an interdisciplinary approach to feminist geography, the case study of the Mekong River Delta challenges traditional conventions of refugee studies and appeals to a new era of transnational understanding

The Philippines, among the world's most disaster-exposed countries, has increasingly turned to planned relocation as a policy response to recurrent typhoon devastation. Following catastrophic events such as Typhoons Haiyan and Odette, government and humanitarian actors resettled displaced communities into permanent housing sites intended to reduce future risk. This paper interrogates the gap between the policy promise of planned relocation and the lived reality of displaced communities who find themselves neither safely resettled nor able to return. It argues that state-led relocation, though designed to enable protective mobility, frequently produces new forms of immobility: households stranded in distant, under-serviced resettlement sites, severed from livelihoods, and compelled to move again or return to hazard zones. Drawing on NDRRMC and local government reports, NGO evaluations, and community-level interviews with resettled households, the study traces how relocation policy is negotiated, resisted, and reworked on the ground. It foregrounds the tension between forced movement and forced staying that dominates post-disaster life yet remains obscured in event-centered narratives of climate displacement. By centering immobility as an analytic category, the paper challenges the assumption that mobility is the primary or preferred response to environmental crisis. It contributes to critical scholarship on climate migration by showing how infrastructures of relocation can deepen precarity even as they claim to resolve it, and by situating Philippine experience within wider Southeast Asian debates on environmental displacement and the uneven governance of movement

The Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia is home to a large population of nomadic reindeer herders, the Nenets people, who undertake annual north-south migrations of up to 1,200 km across tundra terrain. While the Nenets have historically maintained one of the most resilient pastoral systems in the Arctic (Forbes et al., 2009), accelerating climate-driven environmental changes are progressively altering the conditions under which migration takes place, raising questions about forced mobility, displacement, and the boundaries between adaptation and abandonment of traditional livelihoods. This paper examines how climate change reshapes the seasonal migration routes of Yamal Nenets herders through three interconnected mechanisms. First, the increasing frequency and severity of rain-on-snow events, linked to sea-ice loss in the Barents and Kara Seas, produces widespread ground-icing that seals pastures and forces unplanned route changes or catastrophic herd losses; five such major events have been documented on Yamal since 2006 (Forbes et al., 2016). Second, shrubification of tundra reduces lichen availability in traditional pastures and pushes herds northward into previously unused terrain. Third, phenological shifts in river-ice timing and snow-onset dates disrupt the established crossing points and camp schedules that structure Nenets nomadic mobility, a movement system whose cognitive and ecological logic has been analysed comparatively for both Nenets and Komi herders (Istomin & Dwyer, 2008). The interaction of climate stress with structural factors (overgrazing, industrial infrastructure, and the long-term pull of sedentarization reinforced by the boarding school system) is further examined through the lens of political-ecological dynamics, in which policy context can outweigh climate signals in shaping herd demography (Klokov, 2013; Lyarskaya, 2013). The study combines an integrative literature review with fieldwork. The empirical data will be collected during a one-week field visit to Yamal in September 2026 at a Nenets camp near the Baydarata river mouth, Kara Sea, a location on the northernmost segment of the autumn migration route and therefore directly exposed to Arctic coastal warming. Methods include qualitative interviews with reindeer herders and expert consultations with researchers and regional administrators. The findings contribute to broader debates on climate-induced migration in the Arctic and subarctic zone of Siberia by arguing that indigenous pastoral nomadism requires a mobility-centered, rather than settlement-centered, concept of climate displacement, and that adaptive strategies span a spectrum from tactical route change to the risk of permanent sedentarization (Terekhina et al., 2024). : Forbes, B.C., Stammler, F., Kumpula, T., Meschtyb, N., Pajunen, A., & Kaarlejärvi, E. (2009). High resilience in the Yamal-Nenets social-ecological system, West Siberian Arctic, Russia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(52) Forbes, B.C., Kumpula, T., Meschtyb, N., Laptander, R., Macias-Fauria, M., Zetterberg, P., & Stammler, F. (2016). Sea ice, rain-on-snow and tundra reindeer nomadism in Arctic Russia. Biology Letters, 12(11) Istomin, K.V., & Dwyer, M.J. (2008). Theories of nomadic movement: A new theoretical approach for understanding the movement decisions of Nenets and Komi reindeer herders. Human Ecology, 36(4) Istomin, K.V., & Habeck, J.O. (2016). Permafrost and indigenous land use in the northern Urals: Komi and Nenets reindeer husbandry. Polar Science, 10(3) Klokov, K.B. (2013). Changes in reindeer population numbers in Russia: an effect of the political context or of climate? Rangifer, 32(1) Laptander, R., Stammler, F., Forbes, B.C., & Stark, S. (2023). The Yamal Nenets' traditional and contemporary environmental knowledge of snow and ice. Ecology and Society, 28(3) Lyarskaya, E. (2013). Boarding school on Yamal: History of development and current issues. Sibirica: Journal of Siberian Studies, 12(3). Terekhina, A., Volkovitskiy, A., Stammler, F., & Mertens, K. (2024). Adaptive strategies of indigenous Nenets reindeer herders for climate change in Yamal. Sibirica: Journal of Siberian Studies, 23(1)

This chapter explores the proliferation of relativism among contemporary Chinese youth. Situated within the contexts of liquid modernity and compressed modernity, relativism has evolved beyond a philosophical epistemology into a pervasive survival strategy for contemporary Chinese youth coping with uncertainty. We argue that China’ s modernization transition, increased social mobility, the massification of higher education, the catalysis of digital media, and the specific life stage of youth have collectively generated a survival environment saturated with uncertainty. Consequently, this uncertainty erodes youth reliance on traditional values and cultural norms. In daily life, this relativistic tendency manifests in four key dimensions: (1) Passive cultural resistance against mainstream narratives; (2) Erosion of traditional norms in behavior; (3) Short-sightedness and refined egoism in value orientation; and (4) Loss of faith and superstition acting as psychological compensation. The shift toward relativism among contemporary Chinese youth is essentially a defensive stagnation in the face of ontological insecurity. Far from a complete abandonment of meaning of life. This chapter argues that such confusion may be a temporary phase. Finally, we discuss how to help Chinese youth to navigate circumvent life’ s uncertainties, return to a stable life, and reshape their life’ s meaning through self-reconstruction

For much of the reform era, the dominant life orientation for Chinese youth was structured around migration to first-tier cities—Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen—where economic opportunity, social status, and a culturally legible “good life” were thought to converge. Yet since the late 2010s, a cascade of youth-generated discourses, including neijuan (involution), tangping (lying flat), bailan (letting it rot), Kong Yiji literature, and quanzhi ernv (full-time children), has unsettled this developmental orientation, opening space for what this paper theorizes as collective acts of reorientation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of orientation and Michèle Lamont’s theories of cultural repertoire, this study reconceptualizes these discourses not as a rejection of the future but as a historical reconfiguration of the direction of a worthwhile life. Employing a digital genealogy of youth discourse on major platforms including Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Zhihu from 2019 to 2026, it traces three overlapping repertoires of orientation. The first is a developmental orientation, in which first-tier cities function as spatial destinations embodying achievement, upward mobility, and self-realization. The second is a disorientation repertoire, represented by discourses such as neijuan, tangping, bailan, and Kong Yiji literature, which collectively challenge the developmental promise that effort, competition, and urban migration necessarily lead to a worthwhile life. The third comprises alternative repertoires of reorientation, through which young people redirect their aspirations toward different objects of attachment: the state, the family, and localities beyond the first-tier metropolis. The paper argues that these repertoires, while internally heterogeneous, coexist as competing cultural resources through which young people selectively assemble and renegotiate life orientations under conditions of mounting uncertainty. In this sense, youth (im)mobility is better understood as an ongoing process of reorienting one’s life amid the erosion of developmental certainties. The study extends this framework comparatively to Japan and South Korea, situating the Chinese case within a broader Northeast Asian crisis of the developmentalist city as the naturalized endpoint of a good life.

Does vocational education steer students away from higher-status occupations, or do its observed disadvantages mainly reflect who enters it? I argue that the answer is institutionally contingent. Selection into vocational education is itself produced by institutions: the incentives associated with a given track, and therefore the selection rules shaping who enrolls, vary across social groups and historical periods. Consequently, the same credential may attract relatively advantaged members of one group while drawing in relatively disadvantaged members of another. I examine this argument through China’s market reforms, which dismantled the state-socialist vocational education package: state job assignment ended in 1996, and higher education expansion began in 1999. Using the China Family Panel Studies from 2010 to 2022, I trace this within-country institutional shift. Before reform, vocational schooling served as a safety net for rural students: it reduced the likelihood of being relegated to agricultural work, provided access to nonfarm first jobs comparable to the academic track despite limiting college progression, and selected students largely by family background rather than measured ability. After reform, ability-based sorting became much more pronounced, and much of the emerging vocational penalty reflected this changed composition rather than the intrinsic effect of the track itself. In urban China, however, vocational penalties operating through blocked access to college remained persistent across both periods. These findings show that the seemingly contradictory effects of vocational education are not separate phenomena, but two phases of the same institutional system. When vocational education expands without the supports that once made it valuable, it changes who enters the track more than what the track itself provides.

This article examines split and chain family migration from North Korea under Kim Jong Un, focusing on how migration decisions emerge through the interaction between authoritarian control and transnational household strategies. Drawing on interviews with 61 North Korean migrants who fled between 2018 and 2020 and resettled in South Korea, it argues that households do not merely respond to migration opportunities but actively reorganize kinship, care, and risk across borders. Families used gendered sequencing, staggered departures, remittances, and selective inclusion of relatives to manage danger and sustain the possibility of reunification. Yet these strategies were increasingly constrained by the consolidation of legal, institutional, and technological mechanisms of control, including criminal law revisions, border surveillance, songbun, and yeonjwaje, the system of kin-based collective punishment. By rendering remaining family members vulnerable to punishment and discrimination, the state turned the household itself into a site of discipline and a mechanism for governing mobility. The article shows that practices once associated with gradual family reunification increasingly produced fragmentation, strategic immobility, and long-term separation. Women often emerged as key initiators and brokers of migration, mobilizing transnational networks and remittances, while other family members stayed behind to protect kin, preserve family status, or avoid collective liability. Through a householding lens, these choices appear not as private family matters but as negotiated practices of survival shaped by both transnational migration and authoritarian state power. The North Korean case extends theories of transnational householding beyond liberal and market-based contexts by demonstrating how authoritarian emigration control operates through family ties across borders. It also contributes to debates on extraterritorial authoritarianism by showing how regimes govern mobility not only through territorial border enforcement but also through kinship obligations, fear, and collective liability.

Starting in the 1990s, art projects have become a prominent feature of urban (re)development and community-building initiatives in Japan. Framed as participatory, socially engaged, and co-creative artistic practices, these projects are often site-specific and provide a platform for polarised discourses surrounding local issues – such as economic restructuring, demographic change, rising vacancy rates, eroding social ties, and disaster preparedness – as well as questions of local identity to come into contact. In Kyōjima, a former light-industrial neighbourhood in Eastern Tokyo, art projects have been a steady presence ever since the late 1990s. Initially intended as an experimental response to the prevalent disaster risk and the neighbourhood’s perceived decline, these artistic initiatives and the ways of life they imagine have since attracted a steady influx of young artists and creative professionals to the area. Over time, these cultural migrants have formed their own communities that now play a role in shaping the neighbourhood’s physical and social environment. Against this backdrop, the Sumida Mukōjima EXPO, a local art project, provides a compelling case study to examine how these transformations are enacted, contested, and mediated in practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kyōjima, I examine the Sumida Mukōjima EXPO as a relational arena in which divergent interpretations of urban identities, pasts, and futures are negotiated among heterogeneous groups, including residents, creative practitioners, municipal actors, and corporate stakeholders. To this end, I conceptualise art projects as relational “spaces of possibility” where opinions and lived realities can meet and, in turn, initiate alternative reimaginations of the neighbourhood, highlighting how sharing creativity can be a first step toward reshaping the city

In contemporary Japan, it is not uncommon for young people to move away from home, and some local governments have organizations designed to encourage young people to move to suburban areas like mountainous area and islands. The most typical and well-known example of such a scheme is the Local Vitalization Cooperator (地域おこし協力隊). However, young migrants do not always feel as they are welcomed in their new communities, so ensuring their psychological safety is critical for both them and the local communities. This presentation focuses on two case studies of creating a safer space for a youth migration community in Japan: Shodoshima in Kagawa Prefecture and Kawanishi in Hyogo Prefecture, which are two contrasting locations. The authors who has personal experience as migrants conducted the autoethnographic documentation and interviews for community organizers. Shodoshima, a remote island in Kagawa Prefecture, welcome youth migrant with the scheme of Local Vitalization Cooperator and they feel their psychological safety in the natural environment like the sea and mountains. However, interpersonal relationships tend to be closer in rural areas, which undermines phycological safety of youth migrants due to neighborhood surveillance. In contrast, Kawanishi City, located about a 30-minute train ride from the major urban center of Osaka, ensures psychological safety for young single migrants despite being a family-oriented suburban city. Community organizers and youth migrants in Kawanishi renovated the abundance of affordable vacant homes and properties that can be used as housings and community spaces. They have ensured phycological safety by recreating vacancies as safer spaces through trial and error. This study contributes to the examination of how space can be used to ensure the psychological safety of young migrants, which varies depending on their geographical location. It also proposes models for safer spaces that are designed to meet the specific needs of urban and island communities.

This article examines how female international students navigate overseas education within intersecting migration pathways involving marriage, family, and work. Drawing on 16 interviews with eight Thai and eight Vietnamese female student-marriage migrants in Nanning, Guangxi during December 2024, it explores how China’s Belt and Road Initiative is reshaping student mobilities in Southeast Asia while reconfiguring the entanglement of intimacy, gender culture, and geoeconomics. Despite varying ages, class backgrounds, and life stages, these women share migration stories connecting overseas education with romantic encounters leading to marriage and settlement in Nanning. Building upon Mignolo’s border cosmopolitanism, we adopt border thinking as the analytical framework to understand how women migrants engage in cosmopolitan self-making projects. We emphasise how personal understandings of futures—both hopeful and uncertain—shape historically gendered migration cultures and experiences. In shedding light on how gender, class, and geopolitical shifts shape young Asian women's uneven migration pathways, this article makes three contributions to the international student mobilities scholarship: providing insights on gendered dimensions of student mobilities beyond education and work; highlighting borders as paradoxically risky yet hopeful spaces of cosmopolitan project-making; and demonstrating the necessity of considering macro- and micro-temporalities in understanding international students' life projects

Japanese citizens tend to be passive when it comes to politics. Rather than resolving issues within their local communities or organizations through social movements or autonomous politics, they are more willing to seek solutions as consumers by purchasing goods and services. This tendency is becoming increasingly pronounced among young people in contemporary Japan, where social movements are becoming less visible and voluntary associations are steadily disappearing. (ISSP 2023; NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute 2018) This research argues that social movements and communities can provide an opportunity for young people to reclaim a sense of autonomy, despite their inability to resolve many issues as consumers. Based on participant observation, this study identifies internal autonomy within a temporary community, focusing on the mobility experiences and political socialization of young participants at the Takayama Architecture Seminar School (TASS) in a mountainous region of Japan. During this seminar school, around 20 to 30 participants of all ages live together in a traditional Japanese house over 100 years old. They share meals, hold meetings and, when necessary, make everyday items and carry out repairs to the building. Through these experiences, participants internalized the autonomy in their lifestyle practices. In this study, the author discusses how autonomy is fostered within TASS as a process of de-consumerization. Overcoming inconveniences through one's own ingenuity or by cooperating with others provides people with solutions that differ from purchasing goods and services or outsourcing tasks with financial resources. Furthermore, the author reveals that this experience of autonomy is internalized by the participants and continues even after they return to their everyday lives from TASS's temporary, inconvenient accommodation. The paper contributes to community development and social movement studies by presenting findings on the creation of spatial autonomy in highly consumer society.

Recently, Japanese society has shifted away from a reliance on public or mutual aid to a society that places a strong emphasis on self-reliance and personal responsibility. However, “independence" does not mean depending on nothing, but rather having multiple sources of support to depend on, from the perspective of Tōjisha-kenkyū [researching oneself] and disability studies. People with disabilities generally have fewer sources to depend on than people without disabilities because society is designed for the latter group. This presentation examines the practices at 'WHO CARES?', a shelter in Sapporo, Japan, from this perspective. A distinctive feature of WHO CARES? is that a relatively large proportion of its residents are young people with disabilities. In Japan, ｔhe number of young people medically diagnosed or non-medically rebelled with developmental disorders is increasing. While the link remains unclear, the issue of housing for young people has become apparent. Consequently, private shelters are gaining importance in supporting and including homeless young people, and initiatives such as WHO CARES? can be regarded as significant in promoting their inclusion. This presentation describes the activities of WHO CARES? based on interviews with its managers. The WHO CARES? provides place to depend on and doesn’t deprive places to depend on from people who use their shelter. For example, it allows the use of smartphones and the internet, drinking alcohol, smoking, and bringing their friends. Meanwhile, it avoids strict controls on money management or curfews. In addition, it allows residents to live there with their children and keeps guinea pigs in their shared spaces. These open up the possibility for residents to become a source of depend on for others and living creatures. WHO CARES? is not merely a protective facility, but a place that fosters independence by expanding the sources on which people can depend

India is connected with South Korea in many aspects like technology, culture, skin care cosmetics and religion. Korea is one of those countries which has considerable number of followers of Buddhism, a religion that originated in India. Buddhism dates back to 6th century BC, was founded by Gautam Buddha. It spread to other countries like China, Japan, South Korea, Nepal just to name a few. India became a site of Buddhist centers of learning and the first monk who came from Korea during 704-787 BC was Hyecho who came to India as a traveler and reached India through the "Five Kingdoms of India and spent many years of his life understanding the religion by exploring various places in the country pertaining to Buddhism. Interestingly, it was when the first migration took place from Korea to India. After that Buddhist monks continued to travel India for studying Buddhism. Some of them like Bhante Dhammadana stayed back in India and spent his whole life here propagating the principles of Buddha. Koreans started to migrate in the early 1950’s and by the year 2000, the population increased considerably and it stands as the 25th largest Korean community in the entire world staying in India There is a place in Varanasi near the Ganges ghat in a province called UP which is quite famous as “ Little Korea”. It has a silent thriving Korean population with Korean cafes serving Korean food. A peek into this place ignite the passion for K-culture, and cuisine. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to explore the “Little Korea” their lifestyles, and the causes of their migration

Named after the indigenous Chepang community, Chepang is a Nepali grind-core/extreme death metal band from Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. With most of the members belonging to the Chepang and Newari communities, which are among Nepal’s most marginalized Indigenous communities, historically subjected to land dispossession, state neglect and developmental violence, their music resonates the same values. Currently all the members are in foreign lands. Focussing on migration from cultural circles of Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, the paper focusses on migration of pioneers of Grind Core music in Nepal. Their music, which they call IMIGRINDCORE (Grindcore music by migrants), is deliberately political, thus articulating and embodying migratory experiences shaped by internal displacement, labour precarity and transnational cultural circulation. While migration studies in Nepal have largely focused on foreign labour migration and remittance economies, factors which are of course encompassing the migration of these hardcore bands, this paper argues that underground music scenes – particularly grind-core – offers a critical cultural archive through which less visible forms of migration can be theorized. Drawing on first-hand ethnographic research with Nepali grind-core band Chepang, the paper conceptualizes grind-core as a form of sonic ethnography, which registers the affective conditions of migration. Rather than offering lyrical narratives of departure and arrival, grind-core communicates the violence that precedes the very act of migration. The experiential temporal rupture is sung as a form of structural neglect and social abandonment and displacement – through sonic extremity. The analysis traces the visionary mindset of these artists through their art-form, viz. Grind-core, as a subaltern archive of mobility. The paper contributes to migration studies by foregrounding cultural production as both evidence and theory of migratory life and associative challenges

Studies of migration have largely relied on broad frameworks such as state policy and economic logic, so that the lived experiences and memories associated with human displacement are often overlooked. This research does not examine migration directly but traces its footprints through a unique approach: exploring how literary texts that do not explicitly address migration can nonetheless evoke memories, longing, and a reinterpretation of displacement among their readers. The selected texts-three short stories and a play script from the SAKTI Digital Health Literacy Platform—are thematically centered on cancer, HIV/AIDS, and adolescent depression, addressing stigma and bodily alienation that may resonate with the experience of living far from one’s hometown. The diagnostic labels associated with these themes are treated as a form of “note” that categorizes the sick body. At the same time, the stories behind them are read as “narratives” that bring to life experiences that transcend those categories. This study involved fifteen members of the Indonesian diaspora and fifteen people residing in Indonesia as readers of the three texts. Data were collected through a readability questionnaire and open-ended reflective questions for each text, and were subsequently analyzed thematically and interpretively. It is suspected that the geographical distance from their homeland makes it easier for readers in the diaspora to project experiences of alienation and homesickness onto the narratives of stigma presented in the three texts, while readers living in their home countries tend to interpret them through their social proximity to the local healthcare system. Thus, this study positions digital health literature as a new terrain for literary and cultural studies to reexamine the tension between institutional records and lived narratives in contemporary Asian migration experiences

Migration in colonial India has largely been interpreted through state-centered frameworks such as surveys, census reports, labor records, and administrative documentation. These colonial archives were deeply male-centric, representing migrants primarily as laboring bodies, economic units, and subjects of governance, while overlooking the emotional and social consequences of migration within everyday life. This paper seeks to reinterpret migration through Bhojpuri Bidesiya traditions, examining how folk songs and performances functioned as alternative narrative archives that preserved voices and experiences excluded from official records. Rather than treating migration solely as physical movement, the paper approaches it as a process of emotional rupture, social transformation, and cultural negotiation. Focusing particularly on the works of Bhikhari Thakur, especially Bidesiya and Gabarghichor, the paper explores how women emerge as central figures within migration narratives. While colonial documentation reduced migrants to categories of labor and mobility, Bhojpuri folk traditions foregrounded the socio-emotional realities experienced by those left behind. Characters such as Pyari Sundari embody the pain of separation, waiting, and abandonment, while the heroine of Gabarghichor reveals the moral and emotional complexities produced by prolonged migration. Similarly, Saloni’s character complicates conventional understandings of female social position by representing an alternative urban identity and agency. Through a close reading of folk narratives alongside colonial records, the paper highlights the tension between official documentation and lived experience. The paper also situates Bidesiya within the wider context of migration from Bhojpuri-speaking regions to Calcutta and further to Caribbean plantations under the indenture system. Bhikhari Thakur’s social location as a member of the Nai (barber) caste gave him intimate access to village life, caste hierarchies, domestic tensions, and ritual spaces. His performances therefore emerged as subaltern archives that recorded gendered suffering, caste realities, and the human consequences of colonial mobility beyond the limits of administrative documentation

This paper argues that migration studies can be expanded beyond the movement of people to account for the transnational circulation, translation, and archival reclassification of artifacts across imperial borders. Focusing on the displacement of Korean shamanic material culture into early twentieth-century American museum archives, the paper examines how Korean ritual artifacts were detached from their ceremonial contexts and absorbed into Western systems of ethnographic knowledge production. The paper centers on the 1916 United States National Museum record, “Paraphernalia of a Korean Sorceress,” a collection originally belonging to a Korean mudang (female shaman). The objects entered the museum through transpacific networks shaped by names like Horace N. Allen (U.S. Minister to Korea) and William W. Rockhill (U.S. Minister to China); diplomatic rivals who famously clashed over U.S. policy regarding Korean sovereignty while operating from East Asian outposts. Through these predominantly male intermediaries, Korean material culture was interpreted within colonial frameworks that reduced the mudang’s ritual authority to the exoticized figure of the “sorceress.” By analyzing museum records, object photographs, handwritten inscriptions, and catalog cards preserved in the Smithsonian archives, this paper examines how official taxonomy reformulated shamanic practices into ethnographic knowledge for imperial consumption. The designation “paraphernalia,” employed by curator Immanuel M. Casanowicz, systematically reduced ritual implements to ethnographic curiosities, while the translation of mudang as “sorceress or exorcist” obscured her various communal roles. Bringing together migration studies, museum studies, gendered archival critique, and Korean religious history, the paper argues that museum archives functioned as transnational border-making institutions that reshaped Asian spiritual traditions and female religious authority through imperial networks of mediation and translation

Whether or not she has died, she is absent, is present in memory or merely imaginary, mothering and the dead mother is a persistent shadow and central narrative strategy of displacement in Korean Diaspora Women’s Writing (e.g. Krys Lee’s Drifting House, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko) and Contemporary Korean Literature in general (e.g. Hwang Sok-Yong’s At Dusk, Sohn Won-Pyung’s Almond, Nam-Joo Cho’s Kim JiYoung, Born 1982,). Because of this, daughter-protagonists in Korean Diaspora Writing express their diasporic identities by taking on tremendous existential and spiritual responsibilities (which mothers often share). This presentation is an adaptation of writing about daughter-protagonists timeless existential encounters with their mothers, ancestors and their own futures in E.J.Koh’s The Magical Language of Others, Han Kang’s The White Book, Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face and Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart. These texts, all written in the last ten years, prioritize experiences of Korean Diaspora motherhoods. Though there are continuities across texts, each narrative reveals a distinct interpretation of contemporary migration challenges and disrupted ties to home or belonging as a result of a woman’s experience with a dead or distant mother. The daughter-protagonists in these texts reconfigure their identities across borders in response to their mothers’/ mother figure’s histories and relational impasses. An existential or even phenomenological lens is valuable to our reading of Korean Diaspora Literature in that it prioritizes how our hidden histories exist in the body. This presentation offers a new existential and phenomenological understanding of Contemporary Korean Diaspora writing, one that asserts that the spiritual anxieties and connections in mothering across the Korean Diaspora are linked to self-estrangement or estrangement from the mother(land). Additionally, mothering (and its alternative forms outside of the traditional sense) bring emotional ties and buried family histories into psychic and existential focus. This existential focus carries with it the burden of translation, not only to remember but to hold onto, to plead for, the continuation or survival of familial emotional histories. They are held in marrow and blood, and just like biological traits, they’re shared among family members and passed down, recirculated and relived. ***I believe my presentation fits well with Professors Tu Huynh and Carey McCormack's submissions (my colleagues at George Mason University, Korea). If it is possible, we would appreciate being on the same panel

The presence of the Korean diaspora in Europe is often overlooked by researchers, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Most scholars trace the movement of Korean migrants back to the economic migration agreements with West Germany in the 1960s. In the regional context of Central and Eastern Europe, Korean migration has attracted attention primarily in relation to the ongoing phenomenon of foreign direct investment (FDI)-driven migration that began in the 2000s. However, the history of people moving from the Korean Peninsula to these countries began much earlier. This paper aims to reinterpret the history of the Korean diaspora in Central and Eastern Europe by highlighting its beginnings - the story of Korean War orphans who arrived from the Korean Peninsula and were relocated to the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, former Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in the 1950s. The paper analyses and compares the images of Korean orphan refugees in the media of the time by analysing historical sources, including newspapers, newsreels, and photographs from the destination countries, highlighting the different approaches to and memories of the Korean War orphans in each country. Additionally, it examines the recent commemoration of the presence of Korean War refugees in this region through contemporary cultural events, films, books, and other forms of media

This paper examines how the conventions of Hong Kong crime cinema rendered unrepresentable the mainland Chinese migration history embedded in the Kowloon Walled City, and how the short film No Law, No Heaven (2021) fractures that genre memory. Built by refugees who fled to Hong Kong after the 1949 Chinese Civil War, the Walled City was othered as a ‘City of Darkness’ governed by no state. With its demolition in 1993–94, residents' lives went largely undocumented, excluded from official history. Even after its demolition, the Walled City has continued to be represented on screen. Chiefly through Hong Kong crime films, this genre memory of the Walled City took shape around narratives of male loyalty and power. In films such as To Be Number One (1991), The H.K. Triad (1999), and Chasing the Dragon (2017), the Walled City recurs as a homosocial space where male bonds (義) are forged and tested. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024) extends this loyalty toward communal solidarity yet concentrates the role of protecting the community in male figures, repeating the genre's gendered limits; moreover, its communal sensibility evokes the 2019 Hong Kong protests, re-inscribing the Walled City as a space of Hong Kong identity. This homosocial genre memory kept the migrant community's complex everyday experience from entering representation. No Law, No Heaven contests this genre memory from within. Directed by a third-generation Hong Kong American filmmaker, the film turns diasporic distance into the very condition of its counter-memory: working from the postmemory generation's position—beginning from gaps in family oral history—it imaginatively reconstructs a past it never lived through. Recasting the Walled City as a space of one migrant's everyday life and repressed queer desire, it renders visible what homosocial male bonding long suppressed. The film thus both inherits and subverts this genre memory, functioning as a counter-memory that summons the long-invisible memory of migration and desire

In Sikkim a piece of paper could determine whether you could own land in Sikkim, remain in the valley you had farmed for a generation, or be expelled across a border that had itself only recently been drawn. To hold the right document was to belong and the absence of it, would make you an alien, settler, or refugee. These categories confined mobile communities within a legal geography embodied with strategic anxiety. This paper examines the politics of documentation and memory around migration into Sikkim across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The legal ordering of mobile populations was shaped by competing imperial and postcolonial claims to the region, from the 1890 Convention between Britain and China, through the 1950 Indo-Sikkim Treaty to the absorption of Tibetan refugees following the 1959 crisis. The Nepali agrarian and labour migration’s settlement history in Sikkim reveals an archive that simultaneously enabled and obscured a prolonged contest over land rights, authority, and belonging. Tibetan displacement following 1959, generated entirely new surveillance regimes as states sought to distinguish refugee from subject, asylum from infiltration. In both cases, instruments such as Revenue Order No. 1 (1917), the Sikkim Subject Regulation (1961), and its 1969 amendment actively produced the legal condition of migrants and did not merely record them. The paper recovers counter-memories from literary sources against the carceral logic of official documentation. Tenzin Tsundue's Kora (2002) and his essay "Temporarily Out of Service" offer a precise account of documentation as dispossession, three papers, none of which confer citizenship. Bhuchung D. Sonam's Muses in Exile (2010) extends this counter-archive across three generations of exiled Tibetan poets. Drawing on Stoler (2009) and Arondekar (2009), the paper argues that the gaps internal to official documentation are themselves historical evidence of the contests that no carceral documentary regime could fully contain.

This paper examines how Chinese newspapers in the early twentieth century translated and republished reports from British newspapers on Chinese indentured labor in South Africa between 1904 and 1907. Focusing on reformist, commercial, and official newspapers, it shows how translation functioned as an editorial practice through which foreign press coverage was reorganized into distinct affective framings, shaping how overseas labor was experienced and politicized within late Qing China. Rather than merely transmitting information about labor conditions, translated reports structured the moral and emotional intelligibility of distant suffering, embedding physical accounts within registers of indignation, pity, and critique that circulated within existing reformist and revolutionary discourse. The paper highlights a sharp tension within the archive between state-centered records and alternative public narratives: official gazettes prioritized administrative reporting and descriptive flattening, while reformist and commercial papers amplified moral urgency, using the plight of overseas laborers to expose domestic political failure. The paper argues that through these differentiated practices, translated news produced a transnational field of moral perception in which overseas labor conditions became actionable evidence of imperial violence and Qing political crisis. In this sense, Chinese newspapers operated as infrastructures through which global information was transformed into localized anti-colonial and anti-Qing political critique. By foregrounding the affective organization of translated reportage, the paper contributes to scholarship on print culture and transnational media by showing how conditions for revolutionary and reformist critique were produced through the mediated reconfiguration of global news across linguistic and institutional contexts

Movements and migrations illustrated in colonial encounters were replete with moments where human lives have been brought together to create a history that categorized them for asymmetrical purposes. Situating Mahmood Mamdani’s semi-, political memoir Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State (2025), which traversed Uganda’s postcolonial statecraft evoking the sublime portrait of ‘home’ as an antidote to homeland, as a critical entry to the 1972 expulsion of South Asians from Idi Amin’s Uganda, this paper attempts to understand both the reckoning and ambivalence in the social and political articulation of obliterated identities of belongingness of South Asians who lived over generation in the gendered, racialized and segregated Uganda under British empire and later, in independent postcolonial state of Uganda. Mamdani’s auto-bio-historiography offers both a personal historical metanarrative through “archival, historical and ethnographic” methodology to detail his lived experiences of loss of citizenship, expulsion from his “home” and life in exile as a South Asian “immigrant.” Mamdani’s return to a racially non-reconciled postcolonial nationalist politics of Uganda, the book exposes the possibilities of studying effects and affects in the consequences of that expulsion in the discerned memories and lived experiences of those who witnessed that even unfold in 1972. Weaving this work with Uhuru (2023), the translation of T D Ramakrishnan's Malayalam novel Mama Africa, is the touching story of a woman, Tara Vishwanath, in her struggle for survival in Idi Amin’s Uganda hewn through historiographic metafiction entwined in Vishwanath’s letters and diary entries, this paper through the arc of decolonial methodological craft examines the expulsion of “immigrant” South Asians as colonial politicization of culture and identity that was not an exception, but one that transcends boundaries in a shifting geopolitical times unsettling dynamics of community, citizenship, and identity through racially pluralistic knowledge production in the Global South.

This study investigates the BBC/Netflix drama series Giri/Haji (2019) to analyse how transnational mobility is imagined and confronted in contemporary media. Existing reviews frequently approach the programme either as a stylish genre hybrid or as a culturally exotic thriller. This study demonstrates that both readings overlook the central premise of the drama. The movement across borders does not dissolve interior structures of obligation and shame but rather renders them more visible. Drawing on the anthropology of honour and shame, the paper argues that giri (duty) and haji (shame) are not polar opposites but are structurally interdependent. Duty operates as the public form through which existential shame is socially managed and reproduced. As the protagonists move across borders, their mobility fails to produce liberation. Through the parallel experiences of a detective pursuing his fugitive brother, a daughter following her father, and a constable adrift in her own city, each geographic crossing exposes how formal institutions of law and justice are systematically hollowed out by private moral debts, kinship loyalty, and economies of affect. Within this framework, public authority ceases to be a neutral apparatus and instead becomes an instrument for subjects to manage reputation and settle accounts of shame. Utilising Homi Bhabha’s concept of unhomeliness, the paper examines this dynamic within a transnational geography structured by repetition rather than escape. The drama illustrates this condition through a central monologue where characters are compared to atoms orbiting one another and chess pieces moved by a mad conductor. The subjects remain mobile yet non-autonomous, interconnected yet unmoored, crossing borders only to discover that the most consequential border runs through the self. The paper concludes that Giri/Haji presents mobility not as transcendence but as exposure, representing a journey that strips away the public performance of duty to reveal the underlying economies of shame

Often, today, mobility in academic discourse is primarily a framework to understand how people cross nation-state, socioeconomic, and now, thermal boundaries to reach a kind of “good life.” Such movements are often studied around the most dispossessed; families fleeing violence and war, warming temperatures propelling communities elsewhere, individuals seeking safety from cyclical economic precarity, and more. These processes are abled, gendered, and racialized, and scholarship has well-documented the ways mobility is curtailed by how your body is vetted by the biopolitical calculus of western border regimes. Mobility has also been studied through the ways capital opens up education and entrepreneurial pathways for a country’s development as well as “frontier” market opportunities in other developing countries. As the conference organizers have observed, however, such scholarship often flattens the complexity of migrant histories, treating mobility and displacement separately from each other. Furthermore, such scholarship also often assumes a body’s abledness in the study of movement. In my archival and ethnographic work, I aim to connect histories of migration, disability, mobility, indigeneity, and settler colonialism through an examination of the silhyangmin communities that have settled near the Korean DMZ after Korea’s formal division in 1953 through the Korean Armistice Agreement. Specifically, I think through the impossibility of inter-Korean mobility, the restriction of movement in the Korean DMZ region, the making of (im)mobile bodies, and the creation of new forms of mobility through an emphasis on what I call “displaced indigeneity.” From the indelible influence of Israeli kibbutzim and state development on new settlements in the Korean DMZ to the economic enterprises conducted by displaced / indigenous residents to the residents disabled by military violence in the region, I show historically and ethnographically how various regimes of displacement, disability, and indigeneity, specifically “displaced indigeneity,” are enacted in a state of inter-Korean immobility.

The escalating climate crisis has transformed literature into an important platform for environmental advocacy, social resistance, and ecological consciousness. Indian ecological writing extends beyond conventional literary texts by incorporating the voices of activists, environmental thinkers, scientists, and community leaders whose writings and lived experiences challenge the exploitative relationship between humans and nature. This paper examines how ecological discourse in India transcends disciplinary and geographical borders through the works and environmental philosophies of Vandana Shiva, Janaki Ammal, J. Mayilamma, Sugathakumari, and Mahasweta Devi. Their contributions collectively foreground environmental justice, biodiversity conservation, indigenous knowledge, ecofeminism, and grassroots resistance against ecological destruction. Vandana Shiva's writings advocate seed sovereignty, sustainable agriculture, and ecological democracy, while exposing the environmental consequences of globalization and industrial farming. The scientific legacy of Janaki Ammal underscores the importance of preserving native biodiversity and ecological balance through indigenous plant conservation. J. Mayilamma's struggle against groundwater depletion and corporate exploitation at Plachimada represents a powerful example of environmental activism that transformed local resistance into a global symbol of climate justice. Sugathakumari's poetry and leadership during the Silent Valley Movement reveal how literature can inspire ecological awareness and mobilize public participation in environmental conservation. Similarly, Mahasweta Devi's narratives illuminate the inseparable relationship between Indigenous communities, forests, and environmental rights, exposing how ecological degradation often accompanies social and economic marginalization. By bringing together literary expression, scientific knowledge, and grassroots activism, these ecological voices demonstrate that environmental protection is both a cultural and ethical responsibility. Their works challenge dominant models of development and advocate sustainable alternatives rooted in community participation and environmental stewardship. Situated within the broader framework of Asian Studies, this paper argues that Indian ecological discourse transcends national and disciplinary boundaries by promoting climate justice, ecological resilience, and collective responsibility in an age marked by multiple environmental and humanitarian crises.

From Village Narratives to Public Heritage: The Making of Zhao'an Hakka Culture in Taiwan Migration does not end when people settle in a new place. Its meanings continue to be remembered, interpreted, and transmitted through local narratives, rituals, and cultural practices. This paper examines how diverse village narratives have been transformed into a shared public narrative of Zhao'an Hakka culture in Lunbei Township, Yunlin County, Taiwan. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008–2011 and 2025–2026, this study focuses on several Zhao'an Hakka villages, each of which emphasizes different aspects of its historical memory. One village highlights ancestral worship and torchlight rituals commemorating the defense of the settlement, while another maintains annual inter-village religious processions. Elsewhere, a distinctive lion dance tradition and local martial arts are presented as defining features of Zhao'an Hakka culture. Rather than preserving a single historical account, these village-based narratives represent multiple interpretations of a shared migratory past. The paper further explores how these local narratives have been reconfigured through heritage-making initiatives since the establishment of the Zhao'an Hakka Cultural Hall in 2016. Village stories have become museum exhibitions, Hakka-language teaching materials, children's storybooks written by local authors, and educational resources used in schools and language certification programs. At the same time, Zhao'an Hakka narratives have entered commercial spaces through cultural tourism and locally developed products inspired by regional traditions. Even everyday agricultural tools collected by community members acquire new meanings as "Hakka heritage" when incorporated into museum exhibitions and heritage projects. Rather than asking what Zhao'an Hakka culture is, this paper investigates how it is produced through the selection, circulation, and reinterpretation of local narratives. By tracing the transformation of village memories into public heritage, it argues that migration persists not only through the movement of people but also through the continuous circulation of stories, identities, and cultural forms across generations.

Uganda, the pearl of Africa, is also the theatre of migrants and refugees. It’s peopling, migrations and settlements have left the country to yield to the East African Union prospects with bruised identity. As migration-refugee identities continue to be framed to make urban identity (re)construction and reconciliatory dirges void; pluralism posits to regenerate lost identity edges of citizenry glee. Even when being plural suggests abundance, its cost continues to bear on the urban common identity of humans. Thus, the choice of being a refugee and migrant always remains a limited scarce good amidst the growing urban identity (re)construction and reconciliatory identity-dirge. While examining the nexus between migration, pluralism, refugee, urban-identity, reconciliation, and (re)construction) in host community spaces; a strain emerges within host communities of West Nile Region. This ordeal of Uganda’s progressive open-door refugee policy, and increasing pressure on resources, and political interests gasps with policy implementation. This paper uses cases and qualitative inter-disciplinary perspectives to examine narratives of migrant–refugee identity’s, re-emerging to brace (re)construction and reconciliatory dirges through camp settlements. It teases, how host community culture, shapes the praxis of migrant plurality; and how migrant-plurality contributes to urban-identity (re)construction and reconciliatory dirges. Notably, the paper asserts (re)construction and reconciliatory dirges as humanities choice to dealing with prejudice. Importantly, why some gestures and practices in handling migrants and refugees evade identity recognition are discussed. It concludes that migrant plurality gives identity to all seeking cross boarder (re)construction and reconciliation with neighbours emerging from conflict.

Floods, cyclones, heatwaves, droughts, and the slower erosion of livelihoods are pushing growing numbers of people into displacement across Asia and other climate-vulnerable regions. Displacement in these cases rarely ends with a brief evacuation; temporary camps and collective settlements often persist for years, gradually taking on the character of semi-permanent towns, while most policy responses continue to treat them as short-term emergencies rather than places that need to be governed for the long run. This study treats climate-displacement settlements as complex socio-ecological systems and asks what their governance would need to look like to move past emergency humanitarianism and toward integrated, sustainable planning. Building on reports from international organizations and existing research, it combines complexity theory, the water-energy-food nexus, and socio-ecological systems thinking into a single framework. Four dimensions structure this framework: physical infrastructure, socio-economic systems, governance mechanisms, and environmental management. Across these dimensions, climate-displacement settlements often face high climate-risk exposure, fragmented policy responses, limited infrastructure, and weak coordination among humanitarian, development, and climate-adaptation actors. Water, sanitation, energy, health, education, and livelihood systems are frequently planned in isolation from one another, so gaps in one area can widen problems in others. This dynamic is visible in settlements such as Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where exposure to both slow-onset and sudden climate hazards has been documented. Rather than proposing a single fix, the study sets out a phased approach. Protection and minimum services come first in the emergency stage; integration of infrastructure and services follows during the transition; and long-term planning is guided by adaptability, scalability, and cultural fit. Environmental refugees and climate-displaced populations should therefore be understood not simply as recipients of aid, but as residents of settlements that are still taking shape. This reframing contributes to debates on climate migration, environmental refugees, and sustainable governance in Asia and beyond.

The ongoing construction of the Koshtepa Canal by Afghanistan, which aims to divert a significant portion of the Amu Darya River’s flow to expand irrigation areas within the country, is raising concerns about water security along the southern borders of Central Asia. While the canal’s impact on Uzbekistan’s water security is increasingly being discussed, its impact on mobility and migration processes in the country’s southern regions has not yet been sufficiently explored. This article analyzes how reduced river flows, increasing pressure on agriculture, and geographical proximity to Afghanistan may create new mobility pressures in southern Uzbekistan. Drawing on hydro-hegemony and migration-environment nexus approaches, the article argues that the southern regions of Uzbekistan are particularly vulnerable at the intersection of transboundary water security and transboundary processes. The diversion of the Amu Darya River could increase pressure on agricultural livelihoods and the likelihood of internal and external migration. At the same time, proximity to Afghanistan, coupled with seasonal labor movements, informal trade, and potential migration pressures related to the agricultural and security conditions in Afghanistan, creates a unique border environment. The article argues that treating water scarcity and border mobility as separate policy issues underestimates these mutually reinforcing risks. Methodologically, the study draws on hydrological forecasts, documents from the Ministry of Water Resources of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and existing research on climate-migration. The article contributes to the academic debate on transboundary water infrastructure and the water-mobility nexus, and makes recommendations for strengthening coordination between water resources management, migration, and border management institutions.

As South Korea confronts an unprecedented demographic crisis and rapid population aging, its reliance on foreign labor has intensified across industrial, service, and domestic sectors. However, host-country immigration policy remains locked in temporary guestworker rotation, creating acute friction between state administrative time and migrant biographical aspirations. Addressing the SNUAC 2026 conference theme of Transcending Borders: Asia and Beyond in an Age of Multi-Crisis, this research examines how host-state visa categories structure the long-term legal, economic, and social integration trajectories of foreign workers navigating Asian borders. Drawing on a 5-year longitudinal qualitative study conducted from 2021 to 2026 in South Korea, the paper tracks 5 Filipino migrant trajectories across 5 distinct visa classifications: industrial guestworkers under the Employment Permit System (E-9), marriage migrants (F-6), professional specialists (E-7), religious workers (D-6), and creative entertainers (E-6). Through narrative inquiry and visual ethnography, the research traces how rigid legal temporalities force skill attrition and career disruption. The findings reveal that host-country visa architecture, rather than worker language adaptability, dictates long-term mobility outcomes. The study formulates a three-category outcome typology comprising reclaimed residents, silent stakeholders, and evaporated presences. This typology demonstrates how mandatory rotation caps generate structural integration waste by absorbing recruitment and adaptation costs only to compel worker exit at peak productivity. By contrasting state-sanctioned marital integration against guestworker rotation, the presentation illustrates how grassroots transnational migrant networks persist as resilient modes of human connection across borders amidst global demographic uncertainty, offering structural visa recommendations for Asian migration governance.

Age of Multi-Crisis Akter.Yeasmean@office.skhu.ac.kr or Department of Inter-Asia NGO Studies, Sungkonghoe University, Republic of Korea Internal Colonies of Aid and Mobility: Human Trafficking in the Rohingya Refugee–Host Community of Cox's Bazar has already passed. At this stage, only Poster Presentation applications are accepted, and the deadline is August 15.) Societies Southeast Asia, South Asia, Northeast Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, North Asia, Asia- Africa, Comparative Research, Mobility, Migration, Borders) Human trafficking has become an increasingly complex challenge within contexts of protracted displacement, yet it is often examined primarily through criminal justice or economic vulnerability perspectives. Existing research has made important contributions to understanding trafficking in refugee settings; however, comparatively less attention has been given to how trafficking becomes embedded within the everyday realities of protracted displacement and the interconnected experiences of Rohingya refugees and host communities. This study examines how trafficking is shaped by humanitarian governance, restricted mobility, livelihood insecurity, and structural exclusion in the Rohingya refugee–host community context of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Rather than conceptualising trafficking solely as organised crime, the research explores how structural conditions influence vulnerability, mobility decisions, and survival strategies in one of the world's largest refugee-hosting settings. Adopting a qualitative constructivist case study approach, the research draws on semi- structured interviews, focus group discussions, and document analysis involving Rohingya refugees, host community members, NGO practitioners, journalists, and local authorities. The findings demonstrate that trafficking is closely associated with prolonged displacement, legal uncertainty, economic marginalisation, and limited opportunities for safe mobility. Participants frequently described irregular migration not only as a source of risk but also as a strategy for securing livelihoods and future opportunities where formal pathways remain inaccessible. The study further reveals that trafficking networks commonly operate through trusted social relationships, including relatives, neighbours, and former migrants, thereby challenging conventional distinctions between victims, facilitators, and brokers. While both refugees and economically marginalised host communities experience overlapping forms of insecurity, legal status, gender, age, and access to resources shape these understood as a dynamic social process embedded in conditions of protracted displacement, constrained mobility, and structural exclusion rather than as an isolated criminal phenomenon. By foregrounding the lived experiences of displaced populations, this research contributes to contemporary debates on migration, mobility, and humanitarian governance in South Asia. It argues that effective anti-trafficking responses require integrated approaches that combine legal protection, sustainable livelihood opportunities, inclusive governance, and safe mobility pathways.

As some regional cities in South Korea facing population decline explore migrant recruitment, less attention has been paid to how migrant settlement is spatially organized and made visible beyond questions of inflows and institutional support. Jecheon is distinctive because the local government directly recruited the Koryoin—ethnic Koreans from the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia and Central Asia—and established a formal support system for their post-arrival settlement. This study compares formal and informal arrival infrastructures in Jecheon and examines how they organize the settlement and urban visibility of Koryoin migrants differently. It focuses on the Jecheon Overseas Koreans Support Center and three Koryoin-owned shops, drawing on policy documents, previous studies, and field observations of the shops’ locations, linguistic landscapes, merchandise, and posted information. The findings show that the support center functions as formal arrival infrastructure by concentrating temporary accommodation, administrative procedures, and access to employment and housing within a university dormitory. While the center facilitates initial settlement, it also channels migrants through institutionally structured pathways and keeps their initial arrival relatively separate from everyday urban space. By contrast, Koryoin-owned shops have emerged within the city as informal everyday infrastructures. Through Cyrillic signs, familiar foods, and practical information, these shops make the presence of Koryoin and other Russian-speaking migrants partially visible in the urban landscape. The Jecheon case demonstrates that migrant settlement can become visible in different ways depending on the forms of arrival infrastructure through which it is organized. Formal infrastructure supports and manages arrival while limiting its public visibility, whereas informal infrastructure creates partial visibility within everyday urban space. Arrival infrastructure research should therefore examine how institutional and informal spaces interact in shaping both migrant settlement and its spatial expression.

Netflix’s Teach You a Lesson portrays school violence, teacher victimization, parental pressure, educational competition, and institutional distrust as interconnected crises demanding decisive intervention. This article examines how the series transforms institutional breakdown into failures of socially defined roles and legitimates coercive correction through the contested concept of chamgyoyuk (“true education”). Drawing on Confucian role ethics—particularly rectification of names, self-cultivation and moral shame, and rectitude in responding to injury—the study conducts an interpretive thematic discourse analysis of all ten episodes, with close readings of Episodes 1, 4, and 8 and supporting analysis of Episodes 2, 3, and 5. The analysis shows that the series repeatedly transfers educational authority from continuing relationships and differentiated institutions to the fictional Educational Rights Protection Bureau (ERPB), which concentrates investigation, judgment, and enforcement within a single exceptional body. Through public witnessing, bodily punishment, exposure, restraint, and rapid case closure, coercive intervention becomes narratively legible as the restoration of educational order. Although the ERPB protects victims and reconnects wrongdoing with responsibility, its interventions also reduce structural problems—including political influence, unequal educational resources, weak procedures, and competitive pressure—to the misconduct of identifiable role-holders. The article argues that Teach You a Lesson externalizes educational authority while using chamgyoyuk to moralize concentrated coercive intervention as education itself. The series thereby illuminates a broader tension in contemporary Korean society between demands for effective institutional protection and the appeal of visible, concentrated authority as a substitute for slower relational and institutional repair.

Migration is a complex process in which individuals repeatedly move between countries throughout their lives. This process constantly reshapes their identities and lifestyles. This process involves not only displacement but also self-improvement (Lo, Li & Tan, 2024). Self-improvement is a particularly important goal for higher education students from developing countries such as Türkiye. Every year, thousands of Turkish students migrate to other countries to study. Against this backdrop, the present study explores the experiences of Turkish postgraduate researchers who have returned to Türkiye after completing their education in East Asian countries. It examines the roles of gender, academic and social belonging. The study aims to address the following question: How do Turkish postgraduate researchers who migrate to East Asia for education and research experience this in terms of gender, identity transformation and scientific knowledge production? How does this multifaceted migration affect their lives, sense of belonging, and academic and daily experiences in Türkiye? It is argued that the migration of Turkish postgraduate researchers to East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and China is not solely driven by economic factors. Instead, these migrations challenge the widespread perception in Türkiye that education should be pursued in the West, as well as the Western-centric structure of knowledge acquisition. Furthermore, these migrations can be viewed as a transnational life strategy intended to generate intellectual capital, transform identity, and reconnect with the home country. This qualitative study will collect data through in-depth interviews with Turkish intellectual migrants who completed their education and research in East Asian countries before returning to Türkiye. The data will be analysed using thematic analysis methods, and the results will be interpreted.

Age of Multi-Crisis Center for Eurasian and Central Asian Studies of Seoul National Uni. Kazan Federal University Between Hicret and Emigratsiia: in the Russo-Ottoman Borderlands, 1883–1905 Societies Southeast Asia, South Asia, Northeast Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, North Asia, Asia- Africa, Comparative Research, Mobility, Migration, Borders) In the late nineteenth century, Muslim migration from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire was more than a demographic movement; it was a transimperial process shaped by competing ideas of subjecthood, religion, homeland, and belonging. Russian administrative sources described mobility through categories such as эмиграция, переселение, and выход из подданства, while Muslim communities also framed it through concepts such as hicret, muhaceret, muhacir, and terk-i vatan. This study examines these different languages of migration through Tercüman/Perevodchik, the bilingual newspaper founded by Ismail Gaspıralı in Bahçesaray in 1883. Published in Russian and a common Turkic language, the newspaper connected Muslim readers across Crimea, the Volga region, and Turkestan. The study focuses on 1883–1905, the main period of its bilingual publication. Previous scholarship, especially Tsibenko (2021), has shown that the Russian and Turkic versions were not always literal translations and has interpreted their differences as cultural bilingualism. This study tests that interpretation in the politically sensitive context of Muslim migration to the Ottoman Empire. It asks whether differences between the two versions reflected cultural adaptation alone or also censorship, political self- protection, and audience-specific persuasion, particularly given Gaspıralı’s cautious attitude toward large-scale emigration. The analysis compares parallel Russian and Turkic reports, editorials, serialized prose, and travel narratives, focusing on lexical choice, omission, addition, emphasis, and forms of political or religious legitimation. Selected newspaper texts will also be compared with Russian imperial and Ottoman migration records. Here, translation means not only linguistic transfer but also the reinterpretation of migration across imperial and cultural frameworks. The poster will present parallel-text comparisons, key migration terms, and a timeline of major migration episodes and related reporting. The study argues that Tercüman/Perevodchik can be examined as a transimperial mediating space between state records and Muslim cultural narratives of migration.

As one of the most climate-vulnerable regions, Southeast Asia predominantly experiences high levels of climate change, disasters, and environmental degradation which disrupt local livelihoods and reshape patterns of human and spatial mobility. These impacts are particularly significant for communities dependent on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture and fisheries, where declining livelihood security can encourage households to shifting employment opportunities in other areas. Therefore, Labor mobility not only functions as an important livelihood strategy but also generating new vulnerabilities and inequalities. This study examines the transformation of labor mobility on climate change through a comparative analysis of selected cases in Southeast Asia, focusing on the Greater Mekong Subregion: Vietnam, Lao PDR, and Cambodia and major urban contexts including Indonesia and Philippines. The analysis focuses has four dimensions: first, climate impacts on local livelihoods, second, about changing the patterns of labor mobility, third migration as an adaptation strategy, and fourth the institutional responses to climate mobility. These findings indicate that climate impacts generate differentiated mobility responses across rural and urban contexts. In the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), changing rainfall patterns have contributed to increased migration among farming households, while labor migration can diversify household incomes but also create labor shortages in communities of origin. The comparative analysis shows that the capacity to use labor mobility as climate adaptation depends on access to financial resources, skills, social networks, decent employment, and institutional support. In this study, the key challenges include fragmented climate and migration policies and limited integration of human mobility into climate adaptation and disaster-risk reduction planning. Finally, this study highlights the greater integration of climate adaptation, labor mobility, decent work, and skills development to strengthen resilience and promote safer and more sustainable mobility pathways across Southeast Asia.

Age of Multi-Crisis Bears, Tigers, Gods and Immigrants? A Discourse-Historical Commemorative Culture Poster Presentation already passed. At this stage, only Poster Presentation applications are accepted, and the deadline is August 15.) Societies Southeast Asia, South Asia, Northeast Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, North Asia, Asia- Africa, Comparative Research, Mobility, Migration, Borders) The mythology of Dangun has glued the South Korean identity together over decades and strengthened the idea of a pure Korean race. Whilst serving as a useful tool to promote political cohesion, nationalism, and ethnic pride, the mythology of Korea’s foundation now poses pivotal obstacles to the integration processes of migrants. Despite the spike in foreign residents on the Korean peninsula and the rising number of naturalized Koreans, the question of who is born Korean remains answered by jus sanguinis. Nonetheless, with South Korea’s current low fertility trend, migration offers a possible pathway to address South Korea’s demographic shift. South Korea’s migrant population continues to grow in a space between mythical ideologies and new policy reform. This paper accesses this space through Ruth Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach. By reading and contextualizing Foundation Day official commemorative addresses and local online news media coverage from major Korean news outlets on migrants during Foundation Day commemorative celebrations, it traces the development of migrant integration from 2000 to 2025, asking: How are foreigners represented as part of Korean identity? How are migrant identities narrated in National Foundation Day coverage, and which linguistic markers highlight inclusion or exclusion? The analysis suggests that whilst the acceptance of migrants as citizens of the peninsula is slowly rising, Korean identity remains closed to bloodline rhetoric, fueling reluctance toward the social acceptance of naturalized South Korean identities and posing identity issues particularly for the next generations born and raised within Korean society. On the other hand, the paper proposes that the idea of a certain bloodline Korean identity does not have to be diminished to open the possibility of new identities but may rather open identification processes that allow the existence of multi-ethnic Korean identities.

Age of Multi-Crisis At the Edge of Official Paths: Informal Infrastructures of Family Tracing across the Borderlands of Division Poster Presentation already passed. At this stage, only Poster Presentation applications are accepted, and the deadline is August 15.) Societies Southeast Asia, South Asia, Northeast Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, North Asia, Asia- Africa, Comparative Research, Mobility, Migration, Borders) State-led programs for inter-Korean family reunions have long approached separated families as a humanitarian legacy of the Korean War. In practice, however, official procedures for registration, life-status confirmation, and reunion have developed around particular histories of separation and the political conditions of inter-Korean exchange. This study asks how families are sought and connections sustained when these procedures are unavailable, suspended, or unable to accommodate forms of separation that have emerged through North Korean migration. Based on ethnographic research conducted between March and June 2026, the study follows family-tracing practices that extend across North Korea, China, South Korea, and third countries. The research draws on interviews, informal and advisory conversations, participant observation, and digital observation with North Korean migrants, civil society organizations, institutional actors, researchers, online family-tracing networks, and people involved in informal brokerage and remittance networks. Family tracing in this context rarely ends with locating a missing relative. It may begin with learning whether someone is still alive and continue through phone calls, photographs and video, remittances, identity verification, and attempts to arrange contact or reunion. These practices rely on an uneven set of intermediaries and technologies, including hometown networks, mobile messaging platforms, brokerage and remittance networks, religious organizations, and NGOs. Together, they form an informal infrastructure through which family relations are traced, verified, and maintained alongside official institutions. Such infrastructures make connection possible, but they also place the work of Information can expose relatives and intermediaries; trust must be repeatedly established; and contact may entail financial, legal, and surveillance risks. Following these practices across the borderlands of Korean division shows how contemporary separated- family issues exceed the conventional geography of inter-Korean reunion. They are also produced and negotiated through migration, cross-border mobility, and the everyday labor of maintaining kinship across multiple jurisdictions.