Graduate Student Researcher Seminar-

British Highly Skilled Migrants Returning From Singapore: A Household Perspective

Date: 16 May 2008
Time: 11am-12pm
Location: NUS, Singapore, Block AS2/03-16, Department of Geography Meeting Room.
Speaker: Madeleine Dobson, Royal Holloway, UK
Chairperson: A/P Tracey SKelton, Department of Geography, NUS

Jointly organised by the Social & Cultural Research Group, Department of Geography, and the Migration Research Cluster, NUS.

Abstract

Focussing on British households returning to the UK from Singapore, this paper draws on in-depth research into the experience of return migration, and hopes to redress some of the neglect of this type of migration, which has often been ignored because a return ‘home’ is thought to be an easy move to make. 

A household-level approach has been taken to interrogate this assumption and bring to the fore the negotiations made necessary by returning.  Migration rarely takes place outside of the close relationships of the household. As such, the focus is on incorporating ‘tied’ and ‘child’ migrants, highlighting the multiple subjectivities of returnees, rather than on a sole, ‘lead’ migrant.

To further ground this study of return migration in the everyday social and material contexts in which it unfolds, the research focuses on the domestic material culture of the home spaces created and inhabited by returned migrant households.  The investigation of ‘the things that are important to migrants in the home’ will open up the experience of return migration, and highlights how households and individuals negotiate it on a day-to-day basis and how return migration might present different challenges and opportunities from out-migration. 

About the speaker:

Madeleine Dobson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.  For her doctoral thesis she is currently researching the way that return migration is negotiated within domestic and everyday life, focussing on households of British migrants who return to the UK from Singapore.  Previously, she has conducted research on the homemaking practices of students in halls of residence and of British expatriates in Melbourne, Australia.  She gained an MA in Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway, having previously obtained a BA (Hons) in Geography from the University of Durham and she attended school in Singapore.