Migration and the Spaces of Laboring and Learning for Children and Young People in Asian Contexts

Abstract

Drawing on published works from the disciplines of anthropology, education, geography, and sociology, this chapter focuses on the learning that takes place over the course of children and young people’s migration for work or schooling from and within Asian contexts. As active contributors to social reproduction, children and young people are directly affected by ongoing changes to rural livelihoods and the modernizing process of formal education. Social reproduction takes place over geographical space and time, and for some “poor” and disadvantaged children and young people, migration serves as a means to achieve individual as well as collective (i.e., household) aspirations for upward mobility. For others, particularly males, it provides a spatial and temporal means by which to remain unemployed or underemployed so as to preserve one’s self-respect rather than perform low status work locally. Learning occurs through multiple channels, revealing many ways by which children and young people create and negotiate their identities through structures imposed by status and through their engagement with social networks that facilitate processes of migration and through which employment is secured. The ways in which migrants engage with gender show both opportunities as well as limits created by migration. Mindful of not generalizing across a region as diverse as Asia, it is found that whereas girls and young women may gain status at home through their income and the purchase of consumption goods, the work they undertake is considered “low” status. While outside their home villages, they experience greater freedom and achieve a certain level of independence that is unlikely to be realized should they return home. In contrast, and mindful of the caveat above, migrant males who succeed, including in “low” status work, have increased status at home. With findings patchy from across the region as a whole, the findings also draw attention to the need for further research on this topic.