CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Eggart, Claudia |
|---|---|
| Title | Gendered Mobility: Small-Scale Cross-Border Traders and Labor Migrants in Globalizing Kyrgyzstan |
| Summary | Mobility is a critical condition of economic survival in Kyrgyzstan. The two prevalent forms of mobility as a livelihood strategy are small-scale cross-border trade and labor migration. Bazaar traders travel far distances to purchase merchandise in supplier countries such as China, Turkey, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. Labor migrants mostly commute between Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Traders, just like workers depend on trans-border price differentials in goods and labor. For both groups the changing legal regulations of movement between countries are essential. Fieldwork in the space in and in-between Russia and Kyrgyzstan, following and interviewing mobile traders and laborers in a train and on the market, allowed me to uncover a multiplicity of pull and push factors for engaging in mobility as a livelihood strategy. Taking mobility regimes as an analytical lens reveals the salience of history, spatiality, gender, generation, and ethnicity as factors that are “placing” the actors in a particular opportunity grid. Scrutinizing the different regulatory levels of mobility regimes (international, local, personal) shows that ‘objective” constraints and individual strategies are mutually constitutive for the making, unmaking and remaking of these regimes. From this transtemporal and multi-level approach, I show how actors on the ground are struggling, challenging, and shaping the constantly transforming regulations on mobility, but also their intransigent limits. |
| Supervisor | Ju Li (supervisor), Prem Kumar Rajaram (second reader) |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/eggart_claudia.pdf |
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