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Brenda Yeoh

Raffles Professor and Director, Humanities and Social Science Research Office of Deputy President (Research & Technology), National University of Singapore
EducationDPhil (Geography), University of Oxford
https://ari.nus.edu.sg/people/prof-brenda-yeoh-2/
Additional Website  (external link, opens in new window) 

Visiting Toronto Metropolitan University

Fall 2022

Research focus while a CERC Scholar - Migration, employment and development: Regional perspectives

Brenda addresses temporary migration regimes in times of pandemic with a focus on Asian migration regimes in a comparative context. Globally, migration regimes underscored by multiple, serial mobility and enforced temporariness are on the increase: migrant bodies are expected to travel across borders frequently, are allowed to work, but are usually not allowed to stay. Low-waged labour migrants in particular move between home and host according to work contracts, but also face a gauntlet of restrictions surrounding their access to mobility, social benefits, housing, job security and family reunification. In this context, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in curtailing mobility on different scales – transnational, national, urban and body – chisel at the foundations of temporary migration schemes. The pandemic gives rise to opportunities to rethink the sustainability of these schemes in relation to deepening migrant precarity scaffolded on hierarchies of labour, nationalisms based on differential inclusion, stratified citizenship rights, as well as the viability of transnational family strategies to remain the lynchpin of development. 

Related to CERC research theme ‘Southern’ Perspectives on Migration and Migrant Integration.

Career Achievements

Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Raffles Professor of Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and post-colonial cities, and she also has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia. Key themes include cosmopolitanism and talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalizing universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants. She has published widely on these topics.

Relevant Publications

Baas, M. and Yeoh, B.S.A. (2019): Introduction: Migration Studies and Critical Temporalities. Current Sociology, 67(2), 161-168. DOI: 10.1177/0011392118792924

Baey, G., & Yeoh, B.S.A. (2018). “The lottery of my life’’: Migration trajectories and the production of precarity among Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore’s construction industry. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 27(3), 249-272. DOI: 10.1177/0117196818780087

Liu-Farrer, G., & Yeoh, B.S.A. (Eds.). (2018). Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations. Routledge.

Wee, K., Goh, C. & Yeoh, B.S.A. (2019). Chutes-and-ladders: The migration industry, conditionality, and the production of precarity among migrant domestic workers in Singapore. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(14), 2672-2688. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2018.1528099

Yeoh, B.S.A., Baey G., Platt, M., & Wee, K. (2017). Bangladeshi construction workers and the politics of (im)mobility in Singapore. City, 21(5), 641-649.

Yeoh, B.S.A., Somaiah, B.C., Lam, T. & Acedera, K.F. (2020). Doing Family in “Times of Migration”: Care Temporalities and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1723397