Working and Living under Taiwan’s Migration Regime: An Ethnography Among Indonesian Fishers and Factory Workers

My current project studies the situation of Indonesian migrant workers in Taiwan’s manufacturing and fishing industries. It addresses migrant workers’ various forms of behavior in the face of everyday exploitation, precarity, and discrimination.

I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in ports and factory zones in different parts of Taiwan. I explore how migrant workers cope with their conditions, how they protect themselves from various risks and uncertainties, and how they strive to regain control over important aspects of their lives and labor. Hence, the project sheds light on a multitude of workers’ individual and collective practices inside and outside their workplaces.

To extend this research, I compare the current situation of Indonesian migrant workers with that of so-called “guest workers” in post-WWII West Germany. I inquire into the conditions that shape both contexts and explore the particular forms of agency exercised by “guest workers” in post-WWII West Germany and, respectively, by Indonesian migrant workers in contemporary Taiwan.

Previous Research Projects

Supporting Female* Refugees in Germany
(2019–2021)

As a research associate at the Institute of Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at the University of Osnabrück, I studied how women*’s shelters, women*’s counseling centers, and refugee self-organizations can be sites of protection and empowerment in the context of gendered violence and asylum regimes. The research project under Helen Schwenken’s supervision was a subproject of the research project “Welcome Culture and Democracy in Germany” that was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and a collaboration between the University of Kassel, the University of Osnabrück, and the University of Tübingen.

Negotiationg Respect(ability). A Transnational Ethnograpghy of Indonesian Labor Brokerage (2013–2019)

My Phd-project studied how the Indonesian state facilitates the migration of its female citizens for employment as domestic workers in Hong Kong. I scrutinized a multiplicity of practices of state and non-state actors in one of Asia’s major labor sending countries. My dissertation traces attempts of making Indonesia’s migrant workers more respectable. The notion of respectability allows me to situate notions of desired migrant subjectivity in aspirations to modernize Indonesian brokerage and in discourses circling around national dignity. Based on ethnographic insight, the dissertation carves out the tensions that emanate from the workers’ lived subjectivities and modes of realizing their migratory projects on their own terms.

The Researchers’ Affects (2013–2017)

As a research fellow and scholarship holder of the Volkswagen Foundation, I was part of a team at the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Freie Universität Berlin, to study the role of affects in ethnographic research processes and knowledge production. Together with Thomas Stodulka and Ferdiansyah Thajib, I developed reflexive methodical tools to document affective experiences during fieldwork and make them productive for writing ethnographies. The research project was part of a collaboration between the University of Bern and Freie Universität Berlin.