Book/Author Event: Migrants for Export by Robyn Rodriguez

Professor/Author Robyn Rodriguez comes to Los Angeles to discuss her newly published book, Migrants for Export. Migrant workers from the Philippines are ubiquitous to global capitalism, with nearly 10 percent of the population employed in almost two hundred countries. Rodriguez investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what she calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad. Drawing from ethnographic research of the Philippine government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, Rodriguez presents a new analysis of neoliberal globalization and its consequences for nation-state formation.

Thursday, October 7, 2010, 6:30 PM
F Square Printing (also known as Fernando’s Hideaway)
519 S. Spring Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Local community organizations are hosting a discussion on the Philippines’s Labor Export Policy and the Global Forum on Migration and Development. Professor Robyn Rodriguez, author of Migrants for Export, will be participating in this event.

Coordinating groups and individuals include Sisters of GABRIELA, Awaken! (SiGAw!), Habi Arts, UCLA Asian American Studies professor Lucy Burns, AnakBayan Los Angeles, and Bayan-USA.

Friday, October 8, 2010, 12:00 PM
Robyn Rodriguez, Sociology, Rutgers University
279 Haines Hall
University of California Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA

“Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Workers to the World.”

(Sponsored by the UCLA Migration Study Group*, Dept. of Asian American Studies, the Center for South East Asian Studies, and the Asian American Studies Center).

Speaker Bio

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. She researches and teaches in the following areas: globalization and development; political sociology; international migration; race, ethnicity and nationalism; gender; ethnographic methods. She is a faculty affiliate of the Department of Women and Gender Studies and has been part of faculty-student initiatives to increase the visibility Asian American scholarship at Rutgers. She is currently working on a second book project tentatively titled, “In Lady Liberty’s Shadow: Race, Immigration and Belonging in New Jersey after 9/11.”

*Thanks to support from: the International Institute; the Division of Social Sciences; the Latin American Institute; and the Irene Flecknoe Ross Lecture Series in the Department of Sociology. The Irene Flecknoe Ross Lecture Series is made possible by a gift from Ray Ross in memory of his wife.

Questions about these events should be directed to:

Professor Lucy Burns
Assistant Professor
Department of Asian American Studies
University of California Los Angeles
Rolfe Hall 1334
lmburns@ucla.edu