Time, (im)mobility and social reproduction: self-development of Chinese migrant women workers in Singapore

This article uses time as an analytical frame to examine low-wage migrants' aspirations and strategies in negotiating social mobility and reproduction under temporary migration regimes. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Chinese migrant women factory workers who actively pursue self-development during their sojourns in Singapore, this article demonstrates that time is central to understanding migrant women's mobility aspirations and social reproduction strategies as well as the structural conditions that propel them to embark on self-development. It underscores the diversity of migrants' experiences of time and the rhythms of their personal and family lives and how they are inextricably linked to temporal processes of migration and production. Through the temporal lens, the article also sheds light on the workings of temporary migration regimes under neoliberalism. It points out the contradiction between state attempts to constitute low-wage migrants as immobile labouring subjects and the temporal nature of migrant subject-making and skills development. It also shows how migrants' pursuit of self-development and enactment of agency paradoxically play into the dominant ideology and become a site for surplus value extraction. The article contributes to the temporal approach to the intersection of migration, mobility and social reproduction.