BA Geography with International Study

Today more than ever, workers in Asia produce many of the products and services we consume: from iPhones to trainers, automobiles, call centers, and crypto-currency. And yet, popular accounts of both globalization and ‘Asian values’ often depict workers as either docile subjects or passive victims of exploitation, a view that neglects the agency of these workers in shaping their own geographies. This course challenges these assumptions by examining the dynamic processes through which space has been produced for, with, and by Asian workers in the global economy. What types of institutional reforms have produced such a large number of factory workers in the Asian region? How are the labour relations of Asian workers embedded within and across place, gender, and scale? What formal and informal resources have workers utilized in order to contest uneven and oppressive labour relations? How have labour movements articulated their goals within wider struggles for democracy and global justice.

This course seeks to tackle these important and timely questions by exploring a variety of socio-spatial processes that have assigned workers a key role in the production of Asia as an emerging region: from the construction of free economic zones in North Korea, to the restructuring of China's 'Iron Rice Bowl’, and the rollout of factory-enclaves with built-in dormitories for rural migrant workers across SE Asia. This course will try to unlock some of the complex roles that ethnicity, gender, migration, and political subjectivity have played in the shaping of Asian workers’ geographies. While the geographically-situated, political economic relations that shape labour's multiple 'spaces' will be discussed, particular attention will be paid to how workers themselves actively articulate their identities and struggles as part of their wider social formations. Attention will be paid to diverse strategies of worker resistance, with attention to how demands for democracy in the workplace resonate with historical constructions of identity (including concepts of ‘the people,’ but also regional, gender and ethnic identities), locality, and citizenship. Finally, the course explores some of the everyday tactics and other unconventional strategies of protest, or ‘weapons of the weak’, that workers have developed to contest labour relations in contexts where formal collective bargaining has been repressed or restricted.

The readings draw upon contemporary labour histories from across Asia from the Chinese revolution to the emergent post-Covid-19 period, but all have a strong focus on how the politics of labour is affected by export-oriented industrialization strategies in East, South and Southeast Asia. The main textbook provides a rich ethnographic account of formation of China’s large ‘floating population’ of rural migrant workers and their struggles in the workplace. Nonetheless, students are encouraged to use the theories and concepts from the lectures and apply them to contexts of labour politics elsewhere within Asia in their coursework. Through readings and assignments, students will be encouraged to examine different contexts of production and labour struggle in a way that contests dominant narratives of Asian workers as passive or docile subjects and facilitates comparisons between different places, histories, and cultures.
 

• To develop a perspective on the role of Asian workers in the global economy;
• To examine the ways that multiple forms of spatial and social difference shape workers’ geographies;
• To develop an understanding of how workers contest unequal labour relations;
• To conceptualise the geographies of Asian labour\Asian labour geographies in light the effects of export-oriented economic development strategies;
• To explore the geographical dilemmas of justice that (Asian) workers face within the contemporary global economy.

Syllabus (two study weeks tbc)
1. Orientation: Why do we need Asian labour geographies? 
2. Starting points: Is labour a commodity? 
3. How do workers use space? 
4.  Unfinished Proletarianization? Chinese workers from Mao to market 
5.  Labour regime theory and the dormitory labour regime 
6. Informal resistance: Weapons of the weak and 'minor politics' 
7. Labour and popular politics: Producing the 'People' in South Korea and beyond 
8.  Contemporary migration and the biopolitics of labour control 
9. Exceptional spaces: From the enclave to the zone 
10.  What can be done? Exploring labour internationalisms

The course unit will be delivered via a 2+1 format, namely a two-hour lecture and a one-
hour seminar each week. The lecture sessions will be interactive and include a variety of 
media resources, including videos and photographic images. The seminars will provide 
space for student-led engagement with the supporting literature and other course 
materials. A high level of student participation will be required from all students throughout 
the course. Students will be expected to help lead tutorial discussions and to directly 
engage with course texts.
 

• To develop a perspective on the role of Asian workers in the global economy;
• To examine the ways that multiple forms of spatial and social difference shape workers' geographies;
• To develop an understanding of how workers contest unequal labour relations; 
   

• Critical thinking, reflection and self-awareness;
• An ability to develop, articulate and sustain structured and reasoned written arguments;
• Demonstrate how geographies of labour are embedded in and articulated across 
  multiple dimensions: space, scale, place, but also community, nation, region, gender, the body and so on;
   

• An ability to assess the merits of contrasting theories, explanations and their policy implications;
• Written and oral communication
• An ability to structure and present material in creative ways
   

• Information handling skills, project planning, evaluation and analysis of different kinds of evidence;
• Awareness of your responsibility as a global citizen.
• Motivation and self-directed learning;
   

Formative Assessment Task:  

Workshopping of coursework topic during seminars and advising hours
Length (word count/time):  NA 
How and when feedback is provided:  Oral feedback from instructor and TA and/or email feedback

Summative Assessment Task:

Written exam:             50%

Written assignment:   50%

Feedback will be provided in the following ways during this course unit:

• extensive verbal feedback through Q&A, discussion and interaction within lectures and seminars;
• verbal feedback on any course unit issue through consultation hours;
• on-going peer feedback through seminar participation;
• detailed written feedback on the coursework assignments.

Phil Kelly. 2002 Spaces of labour control: comparative perspectives from Southeast Asia. Transactions Inst Br Geographers 27 395-411.

Ngai, P. 2005. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Marketplace. London: Duke University Press.

Friedman, E., 2022. The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City. Columbia University Press.

Nicole Constable (2009) MIGRANT WORKERS AND THE MANY STATES OF PROTEST IN HONG KONG, Critical Asian Studies, 41:1, 143-164,

Keller Easterling 2014 Extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructural space. London: Verso. Chapter 1: Zone; 25-71.

Panimbang F 2017 Resistance on the Continent of Labour: Strategies and Initiatives of Labour Organizing in Asia. Hong Kong: Asia Monitor Resource Centre. https://www.amrc.org.hk/content/resistance-continent-labour-strategies-and-initiatives-labour-organizing-asia

Video. 2010. Last Train Home. Dir: Lixin Fan. Available in Kantorwicz Library. Websites: 

Asia Monitor Resource Center: http://www.amrc.org.hk Focus on the Global South: http://www.focusweb.org/ Labourstart news www.labourstart.org

Key Journals: 
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Antipode, Critical Asian Studies, 
Economic Geography Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Labour Studies, positions: east asia cultural critique, Transactions of the Institute of British 
Geographers;