Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations - Paperback

by Nicole Constable (Author)

Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable considers how these instruments determine legal status and dictate rights. Constable finds that new biometric technologies and surveillance do not lead to greater protection, security, or accuracy, but rather reinforce violent structures on already vulnerable women by producing new vulnerabilities and reproducing old ones.

Back Jacket

There are few discussions specifically about passports among migrant workers, so this is a very welcome contribution and important investigation.--Gordon Mathews, author of Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

"Passport Entanglements is a necessary and concrete intervention in critical studies of mobility and migration. Through rich ethnographic work and sharp analysis, Nicole Constable manages to bring together the urgent question of identification and its relation to hegemonic mobility regimes through the specific artifact of the passport and its extensive, complex, and entangled role within the everyday lives of Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong."--Mahmoud Keshavarz, author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent

Author Biography

Nicole Constable is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and author of several books, including Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail Order" Marriages and Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor.