Bittiandra Chand Somaiah
Biographic Data
| ID | 208243 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bittiandra Chand Somaiah |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bittiandra Chand |
| FAMILY NAME | Somaiah |
| SIGNATURE | SOMAIAH B C |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6771-0566 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
MinorityVoices Singapore: Unequal racial capital and youth digital activism
This paper examines the role of the popular yet short-lived Instagram page @MinorityVoices in mobilising an anti-racist movement among ethnic minority youths in Singapore. Historically, discussions of racism in the multiracial city-state have been muted, with minorities often experiencing discrimination in silence due to expectations of racial harmony. The rise of Web 2.0 and social media has transformed how racial issues are reported and debated…
Reconceiving Asian parenting within intra-Asia migration
(Im)migrant emotive maternal temporalities & cultural splicing in Coorg mothering
Migration infrastructures and (Im)mobile lives: Interruptions, failures, and repairs
10.1080/23800127.2024.2343540
Migrant domestic workers and transnational foodcare chains in pandemic times
In view of heightened food security issues in COVID-19 times, we employ a transnational lens to give bifocal attention to migrant women's experiences during the pandemic, as they sought to secure access to food for themselves and for left-behind children and family members in Indonesia and the Philippines. In conjunction with the classic idea of global care chains and the notion of foodwork, we propose the idea of transnational foodcare chains. T…
Grandparenting left-behind children in Javanese Migrant-sending villages: Trigenerational care circuits and the negotiation of care
Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements within the left-behind family. Existing studies of left-behind families, however, have largely concentrated on parental rather than grandparental caregiving of grandchildren. We argue that grandparents are pivotal to care work and changing family formations within migrant-sending villages. Grandparents provide supplementary care, substitutive care and even reconstitutive care,…
The critical temporalities of serial migration and family social reproduction in Southeast Asia
The prevailing neoliberal labour migration regime in Asia is underpinned by principles of enforced transience: the overwhelming majority of migrants - particularly those seeking low-skilled, low-waged work - are admitted into host nation-states on the basis of short-term, time-bound contracts, with little or no possibility of family reunification or permanent settlement at the destination. As families go transnational, 'family times' become inext…
Growing Up with Smartphones: How Stay-behind Filipino and Indonesian Children Exercise Agency in Transnational Families
Early migration scholarship on the transnational family has tended to portray stay-behind children as passive recipients of care and helpless victims of transnational migration. Despite the increasing sophistication of the literature highlighting children's active roles, empirical studies on transnational families focusing on understanding children's changing agency through time are still limited. We aim to fill this lacuna by offering a longitud…
Rap against brownface and the politics of racism in Singapore
In July 2019, a Singapore government linked E-payment advertisement featured a Singaporean-Chinese celebrity depicting various ethnicities including wearing brownface to portray an Indian man. In response, Singaporean-Indian siblings Preeti and Subhas Nair produced a rap video containing expletives lampooning the advertisement for its racism. Singapore adopts a stringent policy towards public discussions of racial inequality and racism as they ar…
Affiliative Emplacement: Festival Foodwork Among (Im)migrant Kodavathee Mothers
Within transnational contexts, ethnic minority Coorg festivals are conducted via the prominence of festival foodwork by Kodavathee immigrant mothers. In the absence of geographical proximity to the homeland of rural Kodagu due to (im)migration, festival food becomes a means to enculturate ‘good’ Coorg diasporic children with appropriate affiliative culinary identification to this ‘vanishing’ community. (Intra)domestic efforts to create emotional …
Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages
10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
"Doing Family in "Times of Migration: Care Temporalities and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia
The prevailing labor migration regime in Asia is underpinned by rotating-door principles of enforced transience, where low-wage migrant labor gains admission into host nation-states based on short-term, time-limited contracts and where family reunification and permanent settlement at destination are explicitly prohibited. In this context, we ask how migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian "source" countries-Indonesia and the Philippines-susta…
Cukup for me to be successful in this country: Staying' among left-behind young women in Indonesia's migrant-sending villages
By examining the aspirations of young, rural Indonesian women who, unlike their parents, want to stay behind rather than migrate for work, we look at how these women's experiences of feeling left-behind affect their quests for alternative futures. Using a household relational lens, we employ the mediating concept of enough (cukup) to analyse the aspirations of young women wishing to remain at home. By focusing on their commitment to inter-generat…
Neo-Folk, Indigenous–Itinerant ‘Hinduism’: The Kodavathees of Singapore
This paper presents a women-centred study of the religious identities and practices of the diasporic Coorgs of Singapore through interviews and observances of their ‘religious’ practices, focusing on how these first-generation immigrants have created adaptive techniques of ancestor worship and the worship of Kaveriamma to perform their Coorg identity away from their ancestral homeland. Their spiritual practices in the home are contrasted with the…
"Doing Family in "Times of Migration: Care Temporalities and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia
The prevailing labor migration regime in Asia is underpinned by rotating-door principles of enforced transience, where low-wage migrant labor gains admission into host nation-states based on short-term, time-limited contracts and where family reunification and permanent settlement at destination are explicitly prohibited. In this context, we ask how migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian "source" countries-Indonesia and the Philippines-susta…
The critical temporalities of serial migration and family social reproduction in Southeast Asia
The prevailing neoliberal labour migration regime in Asia is underpinned by principles of enforced transience: the overwhelming majority of migrants - particularly those seeking low-skilled, low-waged work - are admitted into host nation-states on the basis of short-term, time-bound contracts, with little or no possibility of family reunification or permanent settlement at the destination. As families go transnational, 'family times' become inext…
Reconceiving Asian parenting within intra-Asia migration
(Im)migrant emotive maternal temporalities & cultural splicing in Coorg mothering
Cukup for me to be successful in this country: Staying' among left-behind young women in Indonesia's migrant-sending villages
By examining the aspirations of young, rural Indonesian women who, unlike their parents, want to stay behind rather than migrate for work, we look at how these women's experiences of feeling left-behind affect their quests for alternative futures. Using a household relational lens, we employ the mediating concept of enough (cukup) to analyse the aspirations of young women wishing to remain at home. By focusing on their commitment to inter-generat…
Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages
10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Grandparenting left-behind children in Javanese Migrant-sending villages: Trigenerational care circuits and the negotiation of care
Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements within the left-behind family. Existing studies of left-behind families, however, have largely concentrated on parental rather than grandparental caregiving of grandchildren. We argue that grandparents are pivotal to care work and changing family formations within migrant-sending villages. Grandparents provide supplementary care, substitutive care and even reconstitutive care,…
Affiliative Emplacement: Festival Foodwork Among (Im)migrant Kodavathee Mothers
Within transnational contexts, ethnic minority Coorg festivals are conducted via the prominence of festival foodwork by Kodavathee immigrant mothers. In the absence of geographical proximity to the homeland of rural Kodagu due to (im)migration, festival food becomes a means to enculturate ‘good’ Coorg diasporic children with appropriate affiliative culinary identification to this ‘vanishing’ community. (Intra)domestic efforts to create emotional …
Neo-Folk, Indigenous–Itinerant ‘Hinduism’: The Kodavathees of Singapore
This paper presents a women-centred study of the religious identities and practices of the diasporic Coorgs of Singapore through interviews and observances of their ‘religious’ practices, focusing on how these first-generation immigrants have created adaptive techniques of ancestor worship and the worship of Kaveriamma to perform their Coorg identity away from their ancestral homeland. Their spiritual practices in the home are contrasted with the…
Migration infrastructures and (Im)mobile lives: Interruptions, failures, and repairs
10.1080/23800127.2024.2343540
Migrant domestic workers and transnational foodcare chains in pandemic times
In view of heightened food security issues in COVID-19 times, we employ a transnational lens to give bifocal attention to migrant women's experiences during the pandemic, as they sought to secure access to food for themselves and for left-behind children and family members in Indonesia and the Philippines. In conjunction with the classic idea of global care chains and the notion of foodwork, we propose the idea of transnational foodcare chains. T…
Neo-Folk, Indigenous–Itinerant ‘Hinduism’: The Kodavathees of Singapore
This paper presents a women-centred study of the religious identities and practices of the diasporic Coorgs of Singapore through interviews and observances of their ‘religious’ practices, focusing on how these first-generation immigrants have created adaptive techniques of ancestor worship and the worship of Kaveriamma to perform their Coorg identity away from their ancestral homeland. Their spiritual practices in the home are contrasted with the…
"Doing Family in "Times of Migration: Care Temporalities and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia
The prevailing labor migration regime in Asia is underpinned by rotating-door principles of enforced transience, where low-wage migrant labor gains admission into host nation-states based on short-term, time-limited contracts and where family reunification and permanent settlement at destination are explicitly prohibited. In this context, we ask how migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian "source" countries-Indonesia and the Philippines-susta…
Cukup for me to be successful in this country: Staying' among left-behind young women in Indonesia's migrant-sending villages
By examining the aspirations of young, rural Indonesian women who, unlike their parents, want to stay behind rather than migrate for work, we look at how these women's experiences of feeling left-behind affect their quests for alternative futures. Using a household relational lens, we employ the mediating concept of enough (cukup) to analyse the aspirations of young women wishing to remain at home. By focusing on their commitment to inter-generat…
Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages
10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Growing Up with Smartphones: How Stay-behind Filipino and Indonesian Children Exercise Agency in Transnational Families
Early migration scholarship on the transnational family has tended to portray stay-behind children as passive recipients of care and helpless victims of transnational migration. Despite the increasing sophistication of the literature highlighting children's active roles, empirical studies on transnational families focusing on understanding children's changing agency through time are still limited. We aim to fill this lacuna by offering a longitud…
Rap against brownface and the politics of racism in Singapore
In July 2019, a Singapore government linked E-payment advertisement featured a Singaporean-Chinese celebrity depicting various ethnicities including wearing brownface to portray an Indian man. In response, Singaporean-Indian siblings Preeti and Subhas Nair produced a rap video containing expletives lampooning the advertisement for its racism. Singapore adopts a stringent policy towards public discussions of racial inequality and racism as they ar…
Affiliative Emplacement: Festival Foodwork Among (Im)migrant Kodavathee Mothers
Within transnational contexts, ethnic minority Coorg festivals are conducted via the prominence of festival foodwork by Kodavathee immigrant mothers. In the absence of geographical proximity to the homeland of rural Kodagu due to (im)migration, festival food becomes a means to enculturate ‘good’ Coorg diasporic children with appropriate affiliative culinary identification to this ‘vanishing’ community. (Intra)domestic efforts to create emotional …
Grandparenting left-behind children in Javanese Migrant-sending villages: Trigenerational care circuits and the negotiation of care
Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements within the left-behind family. Existing studies of left-behind families, however, have largely concentrated on parental rather than grandparental caregiving of grandchildren. We argue that grandparents are pivotal to care work and changing family formations within migrant-sending villages. Grandparents provide supplementary care, substitutive care and even reconstitutive care,…
The critical temporalities of serial migration and family social reproduction in Southeast Asia
The prevailing neoliberal labour migration regime in Asia is underpinned by principles of enforced transience: the overwhelming majority of migrants - particularly those seeking low-skilled, low-waged work - are admitted into host nation-states on the basis of short-term, time-bound contracts, with little or no possibility of family reunification or permanent settlement at the destination. As families go transnational, 'family times' become inext…
Migration infrastructures and (Im)mobile lives: Interruptions, failures, and repairs
10.1080/23800127.2024.2343540
Migrant domestic workers and transnational foodcare chains in pandemic times
In view of heightened food security issues in COVID-19 times, we employ a transnational lens to give bifocal attention to migrant women's experiences during the pandemic, as they sought to secure access to food for themselves and for left-behind children and family members in Indonesia and the Philippines. In conjunction with the classic idea of global care chains and the notion of foodwork, we propose the idea of transnational foodcare chains. T…
MinorityVoices Singapore: Unequal racial capital and youth digital activism
This paper examines the role of the popular yet short-lived Instagram page @MinorityVoices in mobilising an anti-racist movement among ethnic minority youths in Singapore. Historically, discussions of racism in the multiracial city-state have been muted, with minorities often experiencing discrimination in silence due to expectations of racial harmony. The rise of Web 2.0 and social media has transformed how racial issues are reported and debated…
Reconceiving Asian parenting within intra-Asia migration
(Im)migrant emotive maternal temporalities & cultural splicing in Coorg mothering
Sociology (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (8 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Social science (5 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Geography (4 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (4 works)