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Brokerage roles and practices of state and non-state actors in international labour migration: Mediating labour mobility from the Philippines to Central and Eastern Europe

V stredu 11. 12 2024 o 10:00 prednesie Rizza Kaye C. Cases (Sociologický ústav SAV, v.v.i.) prednášku Brokerage roles and practices of state and non-state actors in international labour migration: Mediating labour mobility from the Philippines to Central and Eastern Europe.

Seminár v anglickom jazyku sa uskutoční v miestnosti 94 na Klemensovej 19 v Bratislave.

we warmly invite you for the Seminar of the Institute for Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences on Wednesday 11th December 2024 at 10:00. Rizza Kaye C. Cases (Institute for Sociology, Slovak Academy of Sciences) will present the lecture Brokerage roles and practices of state and non-state actors in international labour migration: Mediating labour mobility from the Philippines to Central and Eastern Europe.

The language of the lecture will be English. Seminar will take a place in the room 94.

Abstract of the lecture: While brokerage has increasingly been employed as an important heuristic lens in various disciplines and fields of study, this has led to what Kwoon et al. (2020: 1093) described as “a rather splintered, fragmented understanding of the concept.” Thus, there has been a pressing call for conceptual clarity not only to advance studies on brokerage but also to ensure its heuristic value.
Migration studies is one of those fields that increasingly employed brokerage to examine and make sense of geographical mobility, particularly the mechanisms that facilitate international migration. However, it can be observed that either the concept has been employed metaphorically or there is no sustained engagement with the developments in the brokerage literature within the field of social network analysis. In particular, what has been considered as brokers (such as smugglers, labour recruiters, and traffickers), and what has been examined as brokering practices, has usually been understood as separate from and outside of the structure and dynamics of ‘social networks’ (or migrant and migration networks).
Utilising the recruitment and deployment of overseas migrant workers from the Philippines to ‘new destination countries’ in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as case studies, this researcch aims to understand how immigration policies and labour market demands intersect with intermediary practices of various actors involved in international labour migration. In particular, it explores how state and non-state actors mediate the movement of workers from sending to receiving countries through the concept of brokerage. Following the conceptual distinction between the structural and behavioural/ processual dimensions of brokerage (Obstfeld et al. 2014; Kwoon et al. 2020), the study identifies the relevant actors involved in overseas labour migration from both the sending and receiving countries and examines how these actors are positioned, how their positions relate to their brokerage practices, and how such practices contribute to the specific contours of international labor mobility in this region.
Based on fieldwork in sending and receiving countries and interviews of a broad set of key informants (such as representatives and officers of embassies in CEE countries and Manila, Filipino migrants and representatives of Filipino organisations in ‘new destination countries,’ as well as the officials of the newly established Department of Migrant Workers in Manila), the study attempts to explain how the brokerage roles and micro-practices of state and non-state actors contribute to a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the complexities of international labor migration and its governance.