Feminist Negotiation with Fieldwork Challenges

Feminist researchers argue that researchers and research participants are always

embedded in unequal power relations in fieldwork sites and beyond. As a feminist researcher, I was aware of my control and power in all stages of the research process. I had the power to randomly select research informants, decide the location and timing of interviews, and to disseminate the research outcome. To balance the unequal power relations, I tried to develop rapport at the outset of every interview. I greeted them with “salam”10 _{and asked about their}

health and their family members. I told them about myself and explained the intent of my research. I tried to minimize my status as an “outsider” by relating my own experience as an immigrant woman in Canada. When they offered me to a chair to sit on while they preferred to sit on the ground, I politely refused and said I would like to sit on the ground with them. The height of our sitting arrangement mattered to me, as a height difference could create a “vertical hierarchy” (Sultana, 2007a, p. 379). I tried to avoid the possibility of any hierarchical

interactions. By letting them speak freely in an open and non-intimidating dialogue, I sought their personal stories of migration. Finally, by adopting a self-reflexive approach, I hoped to deal with the issue of unequal power relations in the interview scenario.

52 Feminist methodology requires a critical examination of power relations between

researchers and their informants beyond the interview scenario (Acker et al., 1996). As I

proceeded with my research, it was important for me to explore my relationships with my female informants in terms of the larger modus of power beyond the interview scenario. I knew that I held considerable power over the informants because of my privileges and opportunities accruing to my upper middle-class status in Bangladesh and because I am a feminist researcher in Western academia; unfortunately, I could not alter these privileges and opportunities.

As a feminist researcher, then, how did I deal with uneven power relations which could influence my analysis and presentation of their stories, even when not intentionally? My

response: in my analysis of the interview data, I tried to present women’s stories while remaining aware that my representation of their voices would entail certain mediation. After all, my

understanding of the stories is influenced by my higher class, education, other privileges and opportunities. Given this, the best I could do was to remain as faithful as possible to the information I gathered.

5-Conclusion

This chapter discusses the feminist methodology of constructivist Grounded Theory guiding my research. Because I am seeking to tell my informants’ stories using their own voices, Grounded Theory seems appropriate.

In the chapter, I have emphasized issues of reflexivity, positionality, voice and

representation as integral to understanding the crucial power dynamic in any feminist research process. Feminist researchers regard self-reflexivity as a key towards producing non-hierarchical

53 and collaborative knowledge. In the process of collaborative knowledge construction, they argue that vis-à-vis each other, both researcher and participants need to be considered to see how they both exercise power, albeit in different ways. Their respective positionalities impact on the data generation in collaborative and non-hierarchical research process. Accordingly, I paid attention to reflexivity, positionality, voice and representation as I enacted a non-hierarchical praxis. However, I had to accept the actuality that despite their attempts, feminist researchers have not been able to offer concrete methodological and epistemological rules to address the

accompanying dilemmas (Hesse-Biber & Piatelli, 2007). Feminists emphasize sustaining a non- hierarchical collaboration with their informants during the research process; but in a “real– world” research scenario, I found such collaboration difficult to sustain given my differential social location in relation to my informants. Added to this, my informants and I seem to have valued the research outcome differently. Whereas my female informants expected that after hearing their stories, somebody in the position of power and authority would step in with a secured job for them, I hoped that sooner or later I could use my research to push policy makers in Bangladesh to address the institutional problems associated with Bangladeshi women`s migration.

Feminist methodology has contradictions and paradoxes, but feminists need to continue to work within such contradictions and negotiate with them as they strive to achieve the

objectives that they ultimately target through their work. This was the most important message gleaned from my fieldwork; it enabled my critical engagement with Bangladeshi women`s migration experience.

54

Chapter Three Literature Review 1-Introduction

In this chapter I review important academic work in the social sciences that sheds light on the broker-mediated migration scenarios of temporary workers in Asia. I also interrogate key feminist scholarly writing on migrant domestic workers and their employers in the destination countries.

My dissertation seeks a critical feminist understanding of the experiences of some Bangladeshi female temporary workers who have returned from the Middle East. To this end, I problematize their engagement with migration brokers during their migration arrangement process. In addition, I analyze their responses to and negotiations with their employers in their Middle Eastern destination countries. As a component of this interrogation and analysis, I consider how power relations are revealed in these interactions. The story I tell in this

dissertation complements contemporary literature on broker-mediated migration arrangements of temporary workers in Asia, as well as literature on migrant women in the context of domestic work. Therefore, in this chapter, I shed light on how power relations are informed in these two categories of the literature.

In section two, I address some scholarly work in the social sciences setting migration brokering in the context of temporary transnational labour migration within Asia − primarily from Asia to other Asian countries and to the Middle East. In this regard it is important to note that United Nations (UN) considers Middle East to be a part of Asia, along with South Asia, East Asia, and South-East Asia (as cited in Castles, de Hass, & Miler, 2014, p. 148). Bangladeshi

55 women temporary workers, the topic of this dissertation, move from one Asian country to

another: from Bangladesh to the Middle East. In section three, I address some important feminist literature that brings together migrant domestic workers and their employers. Given the

overwhelming amount of scholarly work on migration and domestic work, this literature review selectively addresses some contemporary work more relevant to my research concerns,

regardless of region.

2-Migration Brokers and Temporary Workers’ Recruitment in Asia

A broker is commonly understood to be an intermediary who works as a third party in facilitating a transaction between a buyer and seller for a commission. Sociologists (for example, Burt, 2000; Marsden, 1982; Obstfeld & Borgatti, 2008, Small, 2009) have highlighted brokers as important traders in the social system. By bringing together otherwise detached actors in the social system, a broker makes sure that the actors have access to their intended resources (Strovel & Shaw, 2012). Johan Lindquist, Biao Xiang and Brenda S. A. Yeoh (2012) provide the

following definition of brokers and brokers’ practices in the context of migration: “We use the terms ‘broker’ and ‘middlemen’ synonymously to denote a party who mediates between other parties, in this case the migrant and the employer or client” (2012, p. 8). Following this

definition, a migration broker could be an individual or an organization working at one or more stages of the migration process to bring together the two parties (employer/client and prospective migrant). Migration brokers operate in different forms, for example, an individual who works within his/her social network as a migration mediator, a migrant recruiting agency and its complementary organizations or sub-agents who work with the recruiting agency, or any other

56 actor or agent who works at one or more stages to facilitate migration (Agunias, 2009).11 As Agunias (2009) has rightly pointed out, migration brokers are significant players “in the movement of people in an immensely inter-connected world divided by porous and often arbitrary borders” (2009, p. 2).

In recent years, scholars have noted an increasingly formalized transnational labour migration system in many Asian labour-sending countries (for example, see Guevarra, 2010; Lindquist, 2012; Lindquist, Xiang, & Yeoh, 2012; Rodriquez, 2010; Xiang, 2012, 2008). Both state and private agents play a crucial role within such a system. Whereas the state serves as the main bureaucratic and regulatory body, private agents take part in the migrant recruitment

process. A number of scholars have noted the crucial role of private agents in the temporary (and often circular) transnational migration facilitation process of some important labour exporters in Asia, including, Indonesia, China, the Philippines (Lindquist, Xiang & Yeoh, 2012), Bangladesh (Rahman, 2012) and Sri Lanka (Gamburd, 2000).

Migration brokers’ operations in Asia are diverse: they facilitate different types of migration, for example, student migration and marriage migration, along with many other types of migration, besides facilitating the transnational migration of temporary labourers (Lindquist, Xiang, & Yeoh, 2012). Following some key scholarly literature on broker-mediated

contemporary transnational migration in Asia, in this chapter I interrogate brokering practices in migrant recruitment under three types of arrangements: first, when brokers operate as established organizations (for example, a recruiting agency); second, when brokers are individuals who operate through and within their social channels and relationships; third, when brokers operate in

57 a collaboration involving the state and prospective migrants. In the third scenario private brokers are intertwined in a complex relationship with the state and migrants.