Nov 1, 12:30 PM: Maria Cecilia Hwang, "Unbound and Bound Spheres of Globalization: ...

Maria Cecilia Hwang Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, McGill University"Unbound and Bound Spheres of Globalization: Borders, Markets, and Asymmetries in Global Mobility" This talk compares the regional circulation across Asian global cities of independent women sex workers from the Philippines and the global mobility of their male clients, who are mostly professional expatriates and business travelers from Global North countries. Based on a qualitative study conducted in Hong Kong and the Philippines between 2010 and 2018, this talk expands current theorizations of global circuits by empirically revealing the asymmetries in the mobility of transnational professionals and transnational low-wage workers. It demonstrates the emergence of “unbound and bound spheres of globalization” in which the formal circuits of professional expatriates and business travelers are indeed unbound and global in scope while their low-wage counterparts in Asian global cities, which includes Filipina sex workers, are more than likely to only circulate within a bound “regional pocket of free travel” in Asia. Maria Cecilia Hwang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University. Before joining McGill, she was a Henry Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies at Rice University. Hwang is a qualitative sociologist who employs ethnography to examine social and political economic processes in globalization. She is interested in identifying the inequalities that emerge in globalization, the borders and boundaries it creates and sustains, and the stratifications that arise. Her works have been published in International Migration Review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly. Part of the Gender, Sexuality and Global Capitalism Project.

Date: November 1, 2019
Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

See:https://www.facebook.com/events/2394068277499358/