+ Families of Migrant Laborers

Since January 2017, I have been collecting data for a new pilot project studying these intersections between women, work and family from an entirely different perspective than my early and current work on gender in the legal profession. Focusing on migrants’ spouses in Malappuram, a prominent sending district in Kerala, this project pays attention to the lived experience of social mobility that this labor process offers for those not migrating. Indians constitute the majority of the population in the UAE and Kerala sends the largest group among them. Yet, despite several documented effects on life in Kerala, we know little about whether and how migration is implicated in gender development. Families of labor migrants, especially migrants’ spouses who remain in the sending country, are generally conceptualized as “left behind” – often in situations that might not be conducive to their well-being. Yet, little is know about them, as much of the literature focuses on the migrant workers themselves. Deviating from the general conceptualization of migrant wives as “left behind” spouses, this project instead introduces a more directed focus on them as important motivators in the decision-making process, paying attention to both their agency in and mobility through a transnational imagined migration that they are not directly involved with themselves. This strain of questioning deals with the same broad themes of my general scholarship – i.e., law, globalization and inequality. But in approaching it from this distinctly different perspective, it offers fresh leverage on their collective interplay.