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The next event from the "Inimkond" seminar series will be hosted by Johan Lindquist from Stockholm University and he will speak on the subject of "Brokers, Channels, Infrastructure: Methods for Conceptualizing Transnational Migration". The seminar takes place on November 9 at 18 o'clock in room A-325. It is followed by a reception sponsored by the Asian Studies Programme.

"In this talk, I describe my research on the migration of low-skilled Indonesian migrants to destinations across Asia and the Middle East on time-limited contracts. Rather than primarily focusing attention on the mobility of migrants, my project has been concerned with the brokers that recruit and transport migrants to employers abroad. In other words, in ethnographic terms the project focuses on what might be termed the middle-space of migration. In this context, brokers become a methodological starting point for conceptualizing migration more broadly. In this talk, I will describe my ongoing struggle to connect ethnographic engagement with conceptual development. In doing so I hope to generate comparative discussion and debate."

Johan Lindquist is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Forum for Asian Studies at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is a member of the editorial committee of Public Culture, has published articles in journals such as Ethnos, JRAI, Public Culture, Pacific Affairs, and International Migration Review, is the co-editor of Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), the author of The Anxieties of Mobility: Development and Migration in the Indonesian Borderlands (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), and the director of the documentary film B.A.T.A.M. (Documentary Educational Resources, 2005).