Asian Women, Identity and Migration (Routledge Studies in Asian Diasporas, Migrations and Mobilities)

This book explores the influence which education and migration experiences have on women of Indian origin in Australia and the United Kingdom when (re)negotiating their identities.

The intersections of migration and transnationalism are critically examined through multiple theoretical lenses across three thematic domains encompassing socio-historical discourses, postcolonial theory, theories on intersectionality and interceptionality, emotional reflexivity and affects. In doing so, the book highlights the ambiguities around gendered access and equity to education, migration experiences, the acculturation process, dilemmas surrounding transnationality and negotiation of identities, belonging and struggles inherent in simultaneously maintaining ties with home and new social fields. Chapters highlight the practical, methodological, and substantive aspects of affective dimensions and voice with a critical understanding of different tensions, challenges, complexities and conflicts underlining the stories. The book raises the question of voice and agency in advocating emotion-based writing in recalibrating conditions representing gendered subjective multivocality of women in breaking silences.

Presenting non-Western perspectives through fragmented and often marginalised accounts within transnational and global spaces, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Sociology, Gender Studies, Migration, Transnational and Diaspora studies, Sociology of Education, Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Cultural Geographies.

Nish Belford is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. Her current research interests include migration and transnational studies with a particular focus on women migrants’ challenges with education, homing, family, cultural beliefs, diasporic identities and their gendered subjectivities.

Reshmi Lahiri-Roy is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Australia. Her current research interests include issues of identity and belonging in relation to diasporas with special focus on women migrants within the spaces of education, sociology and cultural studies.