Part 1

• The Afterlives of “Protected” Migration: Indonesian TITP Returnees from Japan in Cirebon and Ponorogo Andi Holik Ramdani Hashimoto Foundation Societas Research Institute

  Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) has been framed as a regulated and “protected” pathway of labour mobility, designed to ensure skill transfer and prevent exploitation through state supervision and intermediary oversight. Yet the experiences of returnees reveal how protection operates unevenly and often dissipates once mobility ends. This paper examines the post-return trajectories of Indonesian former TITP workers in Cirebon (West Java) and Ponorogo (East Java), two of Indonesia’s most significant labour-sending regions.

  Based on qualitative fieldwork with returnees, sending organisations, training centres, and local community actors, the study explores how migratory investments—financial, social, and aspirational—are recalibrated upon return. While pre-departure processes are highly regulated through licensing systems, language training infrastructures, and brokerage mechanisms, reintegration support remains fragmented. Many returnees face debt burdens from placement fees, limited local employment opportunities, and difficulties converting Japanese workplace experience into upward mobility. For some, early contract termination or workplace disputes in Japan result in abrupt return, undermining the narrative of successful skills transfer.
  Theoretically, the paper draws on migration infrastructure studies and the concept of protection as governance. It argues that protection under TITP functions not only as a rights-based safeguard but also as a regulatory apparatus that disciplines, monitors, and commodifies migrant labour. This infrastructure of protection—spanning terrestrial training centres in Indonesia, dormitories and workplaces in Japan, and digital remittance platforms—structures migrants’ trajectories but offers limited continuity after return. Reintegration thus emerges as an underexplored site where the limits of “safe migration” become visible.
  By foregrounding Indonesian TITP returnees in Cirebon and Ponorogo, the paper highlights how state-managed migration produces uneven temporalities of protection, revealing new forms of precarity in migrants’ home communities across Southeast Asia.

• Dwelling in extremis: hunger, starvation and dehydration Antje Missbach Bielefeld University Gerhard Hoffstaedter The University of Queensland
• The border in the clinic: medical clinics as border spaces in contemporary Indonesia Jonathan Kraemer Heidelberg University

  Contemporary labor migration in Southeast Asia revolves around the highly structured and mediated movement of workers from their countries of origin to their work destinations (Lindquist et al. 2012; Xiang 2012). One key institution in this process is the medical clinic, where health screenings are conducted and medical certificates produced. In this paper I will explore the clinic as a space where shifting borders materialize in the process of migration (Shachar 2020). Being tasked by both local and foreign authorities with biometric registration procedures, verification of documents and identities, and similar policing work, clinics become a border space located far inside and dispersed across the territory of Indonesia, where labor migrants’ cross-border mobility is regulated long before they set foot in their destination countries.

  In my paper, I will focus on administrative practices carried out in these clinics, which are often only peripherally related to biomedical screening procedures, showing how they transform both the space of the border and that of the clinic as the two are merged, and the way in which this emerging border space is navigated by migrants.

  References
  Lindquist, Johan, Biao Xiang, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 2012. “Introduction: Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers, the Organization of Transnational Mobility and the Changing Political Economy in Asia.” Pacific Affairs 85
  (1): 7–19.

  Shachar, Ayelet. 2020. “1 The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility.” In The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility: Ayelet Shachar in Dialogue. Critical Powers. Manchester University Press.

  Xiang, Biao. 2012. “Labor Transplant: ‘Point-to-Point’ Transnational Labor Migration in East Asia.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (4): 721–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1724156.

• ‘Help was the key’: Negotiating mutual aid and commercial logics in OFWs migration to Poland the Beyond the state and linearity Olga Wanicka University of Warsaw

  Poland has become a dynamic ‘migration hub’ in Central Europe for Asian migrants, including Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). OFWs’ trajectories rarely lead directly from the Philippines. Instead, ‘stepwise’ migration from third countries (e.g., the UAE or Hong Kong) initiated by informal fixers and ‘supporters’ predominates, challenging linear and state- centric understandings of migration.
  In the absence of formal bilateral agreements, these informal networks assume regulatory functions, turning ‘help’ into a key instrument for navigating precarious legal
  environments. This presentation demonstrates how an ethos of care is instrumentalized by various actors as an operational logic shaping OFWs’ trajectories to Poland. Even formal intermediaries frame their involvement as ‘helping’ migrants. I analyze the consequences of this framing for the migration infrastructure and migrants themselves. The analysis focuses on how spatial modalities, ranging from material infrastructures such as dedicated airport terminals in Manila to digital spaces like YouTube and Facebook, as well as sport (e.g., the Filipino Basketball League in Warsaw) – condition mobility and regulation. These spaces constitute crucial arenas in which migrants interact with ‘helpers’ (fixers, supporters), where mutual aid is entangled with commercial logics and profit-making strategies.
  These infrastructures produce a temporality of migration, often leading to
  ‘infrastructural involution’ (Xiang & Lindquist 2014) where the intensification of procedures results in stagnation and bureaucratic loops of red tape. The findings suggest that while contemporary migration infrastructure for OFWs enables mobility, it frequently disempowers migrants by rendering them dependent on informal logics of protection masked by an ethos of ‘help’.

Part 2

• The Dynamics of Humanitarian Adaptation of Migration Industries: Evidence from the recruitment of Lombok-based plantation workers Ahmad Mubarak Munir University of Mataram Pamungkas Ayudaning Dewanto Waseda University

  While the number of Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia is steadily decreasing, Malaysia remains among the top three destinations for Indonesian workers. The strongest pillar of sustained labour mobility between Indonesia and Malaysia is the palm oil plantation sector. Despite its significant contribution in absorbing foreign labour force, existing research on palm oil workers indicates the sector’s heavy precarious labour (Pye et al. 2012). Yet, since the early 2010s, Western palm oil consumers have been strongly campaigning against forced labour practice evident in palm oil plantation estates. This has severely disturbed the business process of the palm oil production in countries like Malaysia as the country experienced significant drop in the export of palm oil products to the US and European countries. As a result of this urgent call to protect palm oil plantation workers, palm oil estates are forced to adapt with ethical recruitment principles. We call this a humanitarian turns in migration industries where consumers forced producers to employ human rights due diligence in the production sites, including the recruitment of workers from countries of origin.

  While the precariousness of migrant workers has become a frequent object of scrutiny, how the humanitarian turns in migration industries have affected labour intermediaries in the migrant-sending countries remain underresearched. We conducted an ethnography among migration industries based in Indonesia, as well as interviews with private recruitment agencies, the Malaysian representatives of palm oil corporation, workers and the ‘taikong’ or recruiters involved. A participant observation with ethical recruitment monitoring organization was conducted over the course of 2024-2025 in Lombok, Indonesia. Our research suggests that while larger commercial actors have conformed with the need to protect migrant workers, smaller actors including recruiters and subagents resisted against the humanitarian turns of migration industries. This has showed fragmentation and contestations between the commercial actors.

• Achieving the “Migration Goal”: How Filipino Domestic Workers Navigate Reintegration during the COVID-19 Pandemic Regina Rose Domino ActionAid International

  Reintegration of returning migrant workers is often viewed in economic terms, positioning returnees as family breadwinners and agents of national development. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, disrupted this narrative. Widespread job losses compelled many migrants to return home, leaving them with even prolonged insecurity. This paper seeks to explore reintegration as a dynamic process governed by material and spatial infrastructures. By examining the narratives of returning Filipino migrant domestic workers (MDWs) during the pandemic, this study explores reintegration through intersecting regimes of protection, gendered labour relations, and transnational ties.

  This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with ten female MDWs, who returned from 2020 to 2025. It utilises thematic narrative analysis using transnational social protection, transnational identity, and intersectionality as analytical lenses. The study is guided by the question: What are the experiences of returning Filipino MDWs in reintegrating?

  Results reveal that returnees faced economic insecurity, health issues from exploitation abroad, and limited job prospects due to age and low education. They primarily relied on informal social protection, such as financial support from their children and job referrals and emotional support from friends and migrant groups, because formal state programmes are often bureaucratically constrained or time bound. Returnees also define successful reintegration as the achievement of pre-migration goals such as children’s education and house ownership. These findings suggest a need for more holistic and intersectional policies that recognise psychosocial dimensions, moving beyond purely economic approaches to reintegration.

• From Mail Order Brides to Workers or Wives: Figures of Marriage Migration as Migration Information Infrastructure Riza Franchesca Regala Polish Academy of Sciences

  Research on the so-called Philippine “bridal diaspora” (Del Rosario 2005) has played a central role in rendering the marriage-migration nexus visible across different disciplines in the social sciences. Yet this literature has repeatedly foregrounded a limited set of figures, oscillating between victimhood and constrained forms of agency.
  Building on work conceptualizing migration infrastructures as socio-technical assemblages (Xiang and Lindquist 2014, 2018) and recent scholarship foregrounding knowledge production, exchange, and datafication as infrastructural conditions of migration governance (Meissner and Taylor 2024), this paper extends the infrastructural lens to academic scholarship itself. Drawing on a systematic mapping of key academic works from the 1980s to the present, the paper reconstructs ‘social figures’ through which Filipina marriage migrants have been represented, tracing shifts in dominant analytical frames. It examines how repeated discursive construction generates hypervisibility of particular tropes.
  The paper argues that while the literature has moved away from overt victimhood, newer representations can still reproduce hypervisible representations of vulnerability and provide epistemic resources for protection regimes operating under different logics of protection. By focusing on the Philippines as a major sending country within Southeast Asia, it shows how these hypervisible representations in academia coexist with and align alongside protection regimes, such as anti-trafficking frameworks and restrictive marriage migration measures, as parallel forms of knowledge infrastructure that can shape migration governance.

• Scam Compounds: the Reassertion of Trafficking Governance in Southeast Asia? Sverre Molland Australian National University

  The emergence of trafficking-linked scam compounds across Southeast Asia signals a notable recalibration in migration governance. These compounds have become a new and understudied site within regional mobility pathways. As fortified yet digitally networked spaces, they form a distinctive migration and exploitation infrastructure that unsettles prevailing understandings of migration patterns in the Mekong region, while marking a further shift in how mobility and exploitation are governed.

  A decade ago, the region experienced a discursive reorientation from “sex trafficking” toward kin nomenclature such as “modern slavery” and “safe migration”, redirecting attention away from the sex industry to other labour sectors. These developments softened earlier emphases on borders, criminal justice, and state-driven protection, introducing both regulatory logics of pathways (under the auspices of safe migration) and neoliberal logics of supply-chain audits (exemplified by modern slavery abolition). Scam centres now reverse this trajectory. Their operational logics revive trafficking as the dominant framing and reposition enforcement as the primary mode of intervention. Yet the constellation of coercive practices, and the actors involved, differs markedly from earlier interventions targeting labour exploitation in the sex industry, domestic work, and other sectors.

  This paper situates scam compounds within a broader trajectory of anti-trafficking regimes in Southeast Asia to ask two questions: what do scam centres reveal about shifting policy registers for governing migration flows, and how does their emergence as a regional exploitation infrastructure compel a rethinking of migration governance as an assemblage that continually vacillates between market and state rationalities?

Part 3

• Shared Words, Shared Struggles: Exploring Myanmar Migrants’ Experiences in Thailand Through Workplace Words Haymarn Soe Nyunt University of Yangon

  On the factory ground, even a few sets of compact workplace words can define the distinction between safety and arrest, as well as payments and exploitation of workers’ experiences. By examining the garment workplace language used among Myanmar migrant workers in Thailand, this study explores how workers’ shared words transformed into daily essentials as a pattern of labor knowledge in terms of surviving in a border economic landscape. Followed by an ethnographic perspective and qualitative data collection, this research interprets workers’ common words, especially workplace-related terms experienced by migrant workers, to reflect their situations on legality, wage struggles, production demands, power hierarchy, and supervision. Viewing workplace language as a socially developed practice through workers’ survival rather than a medium for communication. These words, which are often adopted or borrowed from different languages in a migrant setting, are developed from everyday labor repetition, not from formal training or an officially set up. Migrant workers shaped a complex that mostly understandable arrangements and forms of labor governance and workplace control into versions that were worker-friendly and speakable. By centering workers’ own narratives and daily linguistic routines, findings from this study shift the way of seeing institutional frameworks towards workers’ lived experiences from below. Finally, workers’ words advance how their shared workplace language organizes as practically experiential knowledge that helps workers use language to manage authority, precarity, and everyday governance in transitional migrant labor conditions.

• Refugee Educational Opportunities in a Transit Country: Rationale and Underlying Objectives Arwanto Arwanto University of Leeds

  This paper investigates the rationale and process of refugee education policy construction in Indonesia, a transit and non-signatory to the refugee convention country. It focuses on the issuance of a policy that opened access for refugee children to public schools. Drawing on 22 interviews with stakeholders (international organisations, government officials at national and local levels, NGOs, teachers, academics, and refugee parents), alongside analysis of Indonesian refugee policies, the study highlights the dynamics of refugee governance shaped by multiple scales. Using the scalar framework, the chapter shows how refugee education emerged from a rescaling process. The first Indonesian refugee policy creates space for new actors, such as the Ministry of Education, to be involved. Meanwhile, international organisations like IOM advanced the agenda through advocacy and strategic framing. Four main justifications underpin the policy are i) fulfilment of human rights obligations; ii) preparation for resettlement; iii) minimising conflict with host communities, and iv) improving refugee wellbeing. I argue that these justifications mobilise particular logics of protection in which schooling becomes both a protective intervention and a mode of governing mobility, temporality, and presence in a protracted transit setting. However, beyond these humanitarian and practical reasons, the national government pursued an underlying objective of maintaining Indonesia’s “transit country” status, distancing itself from long-term integration responsibilities while projecting compliance with international norms. This analysis contributes to refugee studies by situating education policy within broader scalar politics and highlighting the tension between humanitarian commitments and state interests in a protracted transit context.

• Learning in Limbo: Protection Gaps, Informal Infrastructures, and Educational Motivation among Rohingya Refugee Students in Malaysia Noor Jannah Afi Albukhary International University Salfarina Abdul Gapor Albukhary International University

  This study examines educational motivation among Rohingya refugee students in Malaysia as a site where protection logics, informal infrastructures, and the aftereffects of forced displacement converge. Rohingya refugees constitute 65.5% of Myanmar nationals in Malaysia, yet they exist outside formal state protection — ineligible for public schooling, legal employment, and healthcare — leaving community-run institutions to fill the void left by regularised systems. Drawing on comparative fieldwork at Rohingya Community School in Sungai Petani and Madrasah Bukit Pinang in Alor Setar, this paper analyses how these informal educational infrastructures operate as a form of protection enacted by non-state actors, shaping refugee students’ trajectories in ways that both mitigate and reproduce precarity. The research integrates Self-Determination Theory, Social Cognitive Theory, and Resilience Theory to explore how autonomy, competence, social support, self-efficacy, and resilience are conditioned by the broader migration regime in which students are embedded. Particular attention is given to the afterlives of displacement: how protracted irregularity, constrained mobility, and the absence of legal recognition shape students’ motivational orientations and future horizons. The findings contribute to understandings of how informal protection infrastructures emerge in the gaps of state-centric migration governance, and what this means for the educational possibilities — and limits — of refugee communities in Southeast Asia.

• The state, migrants, and uneven spatialities of protection in Indonesia Joseph Trawicki Anderson University of Gothenburg

  Following the passage of Law 18/2017, Indonesia has been engaged in a widespread effort to improve the protection of migrant workers abroad through heavy state involvement in the process. From international agreements down to village governments, this “domestication of protection” (Dewanto 2020), has seen the Indonesian government seek to centralize both its formal role in migrant protection, but also to physically insert itself into the migration process. The creation of LTSA “One Stop” centers in which potential migrants are offered direct access to key government agencies, has been an attempt to provide both a clear focal point as well as a physical embodiment of state services and presence. This state protection of migrants is therefore both procedural and spatial, creating protection that is not only state-led, but notably spatialized in ways that rely on (or assume) proximity to state infrastructures and linear, regularized migration processes. Yet, in practice, these infrastructures can be unevenly distributed and aligned with the lived geographies of migration. Drawing on fieldwork in Lampung, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), and West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) the paper examines how LTSA centers, especially in places with poor infrastructure and complicated connections, may remain either inaccessible to migrants or disconnected from their trajectories. Focusing on these disconnects, the paper seeks to think through how geography can rupture these structures of protection and therefore disconnect migrants from the assumed structures and process of protection—potentially pushing migrants toward informal channels. In doing so, the paper contributes to broader thinking about labor migration governance and protection by highlighting how these spatio-material infrastructures do not just create “safe migration” but also influence the paths of migrants by altering who has access to what services in which places.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Chinese Indonesian identity
• Germany
• Indonesian Muslim women
• Indonesian women
• Indonesian women’s literature
• May 1998 violence
• Muslim feminist
• Muslim women influencers
• coloniality
• decolonial feminism
• diasporic women writing
• digital narratives
• domestic violence
• educational mobility
• embodied authority
• female ulama
• feminist autoethnography
• gendered norms
• gendered precarity
• gendered violence
• intersectionality
• migrant vulnerability
• migration regimes
• mobility
• piety
• transnational marriages
• transnational subjectivity