Low-skilled migration and precarious work. Where do the borders of forced migration begin and end?

We are delighted to announce that our Research Director, Priya Deshingkar, will be speaking in New Delhi next week.You can catch her on Monday 17 April at 10.30 in the Conference Hall of the Centre for Policy Research. Alternatively she is speaking later that day (15.00 - 17.30) at the Conference Room, UNESCO New Delhi Cluster Office.

Click on either link for more details of how to RSVP.

In this talk, Priya Deshingkar will draw on research conducted in different locations in Africa and Asia, including India, to draw out the conditions in which low-skilled migrants are recruited and employed and the contrasting discourses on their experience. In doing so, she will highlight the often complex and contradictory outcomes of migration and the difficulties this creates for dichotomies of forced and free labour. She will also discuss the policy implications of these findings.

Priya Deshingkar is Research Director of the six-year DFID-funded Migrating out of Poverty Research Consortium; Principal Investigator for the Capitalising Human Mobility for Poverty Alleviation and Inclusive Development in Myanmar (CHIME) project, and Senior Research Fellow at the School of Global Studies. Her research focuses on migration and poverty with a focus on precarious occupations, debt-migration, labour rights and agency.

As Research Director of MOOP, Priya Deshingkar has played a key role in designing and overseeing mixed methods research in five global regions: South and Southeast Asia as well as East, West and Southern Africa where she has worked closely with the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, The Centre for Migration Studies in Ghana and The African Centre for Migration and Society in South Africa. She has also developed a strand of work within the consortium on the migration industry which has resulted in path breaking research on brokerage in the migration of domestic workers in Ghana and brokerage in the migration of low-skilled construction workers from Bangladesh to Qatar.

As the Principal Investigator of the CHIME project, Priya Deshingkar has designed and led mixed methods research in four regions of Myanmar which will yield unique evidence on migration drivers and process in the country.

Priya Deshingkar holds a PhD from the Institute of Development Studies and is an internationally recognised authority on internal migration. She has played a key role in influencing the global policy discourse on internal migration and development. Her most recent book is Circular Migration and Multilocational Livelihood Strategies in India (co-edited with John Farrington, 2009).