New Regional Labour Circuits in the South Pacific: Migration, Gender, Affect

This project examines migration and gendered affect by mapping circuits of labour mobility within and across the Pacific region, focussing on Australia, Cook Islands, Samoa and Fiji. It takes the macro forces that generate opportunities to migrate, including economic, political and environmental push and pull factors, and conjoins these with gendered and culturally embedded and embodied practices of people who choose, or are forced, to move or indeed, to stay put. As such, personal aspirations, ambitions and desires and their everyday enactment are at the heart of this project. Feminist and decolonial perspectives provide a lens to apprehend and animate understandings of ontological mobility, migration and globalisation more broadly.

In Pacific contexts, as elsewhere, reasons for migrating (or not) are many and varied. Many people migrate in search of higher wages and educational opportunities, some leave to support family goals, while others leave to escape their demands. Some dream of something different; expressed as a desire to escape the boredom of small island, rural life. Most see themselves returning home eventually, even as they fall in love, have children and become more routinely enmeshed in the prospects of new communities abroad. Others get stuck in circuits of debt and the shame of economic and social immobility. These ‘economies of affect’ encompass both people and the things they care about–including food, clothing and the songs and dance they travel with and create along the way.

Working with local NGOs, artists and academics across the region, this project aims to generate collaborative creative and applied outcomes that document the impacts and of inter-regional and transnational migration in scholarly and policy fields.