GSSC Seminar Series
24 June 2025
Precarious while skilled: examining highly-trained migrant creative workers in Singapore
Ye Junjia (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
12:00-13:00
The language of skill has been very attractive to policy makers when it comes to admitting – or, indeed, denying – immigrants. The borders of migration are therefore being reinforced through policy, using the language of skill. What constitutes as skill is also not static. Rather, it changes along with recalibrations of labour and migration regimes. The change of what skill means is a part of the changing nature of work, through conditions produced by neoliberal changes to labour markets and migration regimes. This paper addresses the institutionalized uncertainty (Anderson, 2013) – precarity – that is produced through changes in the definition of skill among highly trained migrant creative workers in Singapore.
Through qualitative interviews with migrant animators, illustrators, local studios and senior educators at art institutions in Singapore, I highlight how the skill is part of the changing labour regime that forms the precarity that highly trained migrants have to navigate. Skill is not a neutral sorting mechanism. The language of skilled work, instead, neutralizes the politics of skill even as it rationalizes precarity. Furthermore, there is a political productivity to this shifting nature of skill. Rather than skill being in a linear relationship with job certainty, the redefinition of skill produces the precarious migrant worker subjectivity.
Chair: Tilmann Heil
Junjia Ye is Associate Professor in Geography at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of migration studies, cultural diversity, and the political-economic development of urban Southeast Asia. One of her current projects investigates the intersection of precarious creative labour and migration. Her work has been published in Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. She is currently Associate Editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
Organised by Thematic Area South-South Relations