Social Reproduction of Sending Migration Communities: The Thailand-Israel Migration Regime in the Orbit of Isaan

Social Reproduction of Sending Migration Communities: The Thailand-Israel Migration Regime in the Orbit of Isaan

This lecture examines songs written by Thai migrants about their experiences working on Israeli farms, analysed in the context of the Thailand-Israel labour migration regime. The recruitment of Thais in the last four decades has been part of Israel's aim to replace, weaken and control the Palestinian workforce from the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the West Bank and Gaza and based on long-term bilateral relations between Thailand and Israel. Aiming to maintain the Jewish majority, the Israeli migration regime developed policies controlling migrant workers' lives, contributing to exploitative employment structures, continuous rights violations and social and physical isolation of migrant workers.

In capitalist, racialised, and discriminatory migration regimes, migrants' homes, as the songs articulate, are more than a physical place of origin. They encompass a multiplicity of relations, affective worlds, political gravity and power dynamics. They are spaces where responsibilities, a sense of belonging, and hopes materialize and are negotiated. Writing, performing, and listening to such songs is theorised in this lecture as a form of unwaged social reproduction labour of Thailand's rural sending migration communities in the northeast region (Isaan).

With this analysis, I expand the scope of social reproduction theory (SRT) by arguing that unwaged creative labour is a further type of social reproduction labour of sending migration communities. This labour is embedded within capitalist labour relations and is part of the latter's reproduction. Nevertheless, the creative labour and the gravity of sending migration communities into the lives of migrants offer imaginaries of future-oriented visions, potential paths of political struggles and of knowledge production. The lecture is based on more than a decade of research with sending migration communities in Isaan.
 

The event will take place in a hybrid format at ZMO.

Further information: www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/ethnologie/forschung/bas/bas_sommer2026.html

Program PDF