Climate Refugees or Labour Migrants? Affective relations, gendered kinship and women’s migration from coastal Bangladesh

Keywords: Bangladesh, climate change, migration, labour, kinship, gender
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

Bangladeshi migrants are increasingly portrayed as ‘fleeing rising sea levels’, their movement being ‘climate-induced’. Using ethnography from coastal Bangladesh, I highlight the importance of labour migration in complex socio-environmental contexts and suggest that multicausal drivers of migration are overlooked in ‘geopolitics of fear’ narratives of migrants as ‘climate refugees’. Anchored in historiographies of working-class women’s labour migration in Bengal, the paper further shows that such migration, both in the past and present, constitutes a key livelihood strategy. I argue that migration decisions are shaped by both gendered kinship support and affective relations that are reconfigured in a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape. The paper adds to anthropological debates on migration and kinship by pointing to changing filial duties and a tendency towards matrifocal, uxorilocal homes in parallel with the ideal of virilocal patrilineal systems in South Asia. It concludes that shifting assemblages of kinship either enable or constrain migration, thereby complicating interdisciplinary climate and development discussions on coastal migration and the ‘vulnerability’ of ‘female-headed households’.