The Undocumented Maps of Mongolians and Their Detours in Korea
Topics:
Keywords: migration, women migrants, Korea, Mongolia, hand-drawn maps, undocumented migrants
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Sondra Cuban, Western Washington University
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Abstract
This paper is part of the session, "Detour" Mobilities and Alternate Perspectives on Time-Spaces. It focuses on a study about the everyday im/mobilities of 30 Mongolian women migrants in South Korea and their movements across borders and within their homes, communities, and at work. Several cases of undocumented Mongolian women participants reveal stories of disrupted im/mobilities, social, spatial, and temporal. The participants’ im/mobilities were affected by the Mongolian economy, Korea’s COVID-19 border politics and pandemic policies, as well as the work they did to survive. The maps the participants drew of their lives reflected their squeezed timelines, distance travelled, and the body work involved in taking up mobile cleaning jobs, against the backdrop of Korea’s sociopolitical, geographical, and historical landscape. These self-drawn maps make clear that detours occurred within their migratory trajectories, and which involved innovative routes and strategies. These detours included moving fast as well as “stopping at different points, and/or creating deviations, along the pathway” (Ratnam & Drozdzewski, 2020, p. 757). Narratives of the participants’ migrations supplement these maps and reveal timescales of critical incidences that framed their detours, inflected by gender and nationality.
The Undocumented Maps of Mongolians and Their Detours in Korea
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Paper Abstract