Seminar on

'The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in Singapore's Borderlands'

Date: 31 July 2009
Time: 4pm- 5.30pm
Location: Meeting Room A, Research Clusters, Block AS7 Level 6, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NUS
Speaker: A/P Johan Lindquist, Stockholm University
Chairperson: A/P Ho Kong Chong, NUS

• Jointly organized by the FASS and ARI Migration Research Clusters, NUS.

In this talk I will screen a half hour long documentary film, B.A.T.A.M, which deals with the lives of two Indonesian female migrants, who work in a factory and as a prostitute, respectively, who live on the Indonesian island of Batam. I will begin with a short introduction in which I will primarily address two issues. 1) Outline my conceptualization of Indonesian unskilled migration as driven by the emotion 'malu', meaning approximately shame, emabarrassment, or propriety. 2) Discuss the various possibilities and opportunities that filmmaking offers compared to written work.


About the speaker:

Johan Lindquist is an associate professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University in Sweden. His research on Batam is available from Singapore University Press and is entitled "Singapore's Borderlands: Tourism, Migration and Anxieties of Mobility." His current research deals with labor recruitment of transnational migrants on the Indonesian island of Lombok and the emergence of "human trafficking" as a humanitarian problem in Southeast Asia.


Post-event report:

The seminar attracted around twenty participants from various academic disciplines. There was also significant representation from graduate students as well as external parties.

The video, 'B.A.T.A.M.', was screened to the seminar attendees. In his discussion of the treatment of the video following the screening, A/P Lindquist problematized existing discourses of 'trafficking'. He also elaborated further on the role that religion played in the film's two subjects in rationalising their decision to come to Batam, as well as in dealing with the decisions they made in their choice of job.

During the discussion and also in the Q&A, he also answered questions on his role and positionality as film-maker, and the implications thereof.

Event photos can be accessed by clicking on the thumbnails below: