Nicole Constable Books

Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable considers how these instruments determine legal status and dictate rights. Constable finds that new biometric technologies and surveillance do not lead to greater protection, security, or accuracy, but rather reinforce violent structures on already vulnerable women by producing new vulnerabilities and reproducing old ones. 

Middle-class Chinese women in the global city of Hong Kong have entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers over the past three decades, and the demand for foreign domestic workers has soared. A decade ago some foretold the decline in foreign workers and the influx of mainland workers. But today over 120,000 women from the Philippines, over...

Analyses and compares what it means to be Hakka.

By the year 2000 more than 350 Internet agencies were plying the email-order marriage trade. Attentive to the structural, cultural, and personal factors that prompt women and men to seek marriage partners abroad, this book questions the dichotomies so frequently drawn between structure and agency, and between global and local levels of analysis. schovat popis

Hong Kong is a meeting place for migrant domestic workers, traders, refugees, asylum seekers, tourists, businessmen, and local residents. This book looks at the experiences of Indonesian and Filipina women in this Asian world city.