L Kathiravelu
Biographic Data
| ID | 53777 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Kathiravelu |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Kathiravelu |
| SIGNATURE | KATHIRAVELU L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Nanyang Technological University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4420-8263 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Blurring the Boundary Between Regular and Irregular: Tamil Low-Wage Migrants in the Gulf and the Co-Construction of Khalluli
The mobility between South Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states constitutes the largest migration corridor in the world. Irregular practices are widely tolerated in this region, but have been relatively underexplored in the literature. In exploring that lack, this paper troubles the distinction between regularity and irregularity, demonstrating how different actors constituting the migration industry are complicit in the maintenance…
Immigration without diversity: The invisible second generation in Singapore
It's purely mutual respect”: Cross‐cultural taboos and the everyday reproduction of Singaporean nationalism
While differences often threaten ethnonationalist projects, the Singaporean state has rendered a particular configuration of racial‐religious diversity constitutive of nationalism in the city‐state. In this paper, we approach nationalism through an often‐overlooked avenue: intangible heritage such as everyday myths, customs, and taboos. A total of 150 interviews were conducted in three neighbourhoods in Singapore, where guided conversations were …
Locating invisible privilege in Asia: Conceptual travel and contextual significance
This article that forms part of a Special Section on 'Invisible Privilege in Asia' is committed to expanding the theoretical debates in race and ethnic studies, which has been previously critiqued as a field that has focused more on the gathering of empirical observations than the development of theory. This critique is even more pronounced within the realm of studying race and ethnicity in Asia, where research is often siloed within the contexts…
Invisible privilege in Asia: Introduction to special section
This introduction to the special section 'Invisible Privilege in Asia' suggests a framework within which studies of privilege in Asia can be situated. Animated by a global politics of Blackness and social movements that have renewed the focus on racialised inequality and hierarchy, we use this moment to urge an interrogation of the conceptual productivity of the notion of privilege. This project is particularly significant within a region that is…
Conceptualizing migration beyond the “West”: A view from Asia
This critical reflection essay responds to John Mollenkopf’s review of the book “Contested Concepts in Migration Studies” (Routledge 2022). Rather than take a comprehensive overview of individual chapters within the edited collection, this essay suggests that occupying an ontological and epistemological perspective that is rooted in and starting from Asia produces alternative understandings of concepts typically used to study international migrat…
Superdiversity in Highly Regulated Global Cities
This chapter examines the analytical productivity of superdiversity as a perspective in conversation with issues of nationalism, citizenship, and immigration from an empirical perspective that draws primarily from studies of (im)migration in highly globalized city-states with intensely regulated migration regimes. In relation to concepts of “intersectionality” and immigrant integration, it asks how superdiversity helps to interrogate key empirica…
More than race: A comparative analysis of “new” Indian and Chinese migration in Singapore
Singapore is a nation-state characterized by the convergence of multiple diaspora populations. The state and citizens alike cannot ignore a sharpened sense of difference that has led to social tensions between “old” and “new” waves of migrants/immigrants, in particular amongst those considered co-ethnics from India and China. Comparative analyses of Indian and Chinese migration are few, resulting in a narrow understanding of how both impact migra…
Introduction to Special Section 'Infrastructures of Injustice: Migration and Border Mobilities
This Special Section interrogates the interrelationships between mobilities infrastructures and notions of injustice across multiple empirical settings regarding regimes of migration and border movements of peripheralized communities. Most readings of infrastructure imply fixity and permanence and suggest neutral mediations of mobility. This collection, in contrast, examines how, in fact, infrastructural forms interpret, translate and paraphrasea…
Bodies That Don’t Matter, but Labor That Does: The Low-Wage Male Migrant in Singapore and Dubai
Singapore and Dubai are hypermodern city-states that host large temporary migrant populations. The majority of this group is composed of low-wage workers, migrant men from India who labor under conditions of structural inequality and extreme precarity. While there is a growing literature that discusses the issues of debt bondage and unfair conditions of employment that these men face, there is far less interrogation of the everyday and embodied f…
Marginalized migrants and urbanization in Southeast Asia
This chapter discusses issues of marginalization in relation to low-wage migrants in Southeast Asia – examines Singapore specifically as a case study. It provides ongoing and previous fieldwork in Singapore with low-wage migrant workers in terms of the empirical material. In Asia, the link between urbanization/urban development and migration is evident both in processes of internal as well as international migration. The chapter explores how stru…
Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life
Al-Nakib's Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life records the history of Kuwait and also commemorates the social heritage of its urbanization, following its dramatic transformation, particularly in the final decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It joins a small but growing collection of book-length works that have sought to understand the rapid urban and social development of Arab Gulf states. This book is of p…
Introduction: Urban friendship networks: Affective negotiations and potentialities of care
Issues of integration, assimilation and the place of ‘strangers’ within metropolitan contexts have been overwhelmingly conceptualised within the larger structural frames of ethnicity, nationality, immigration status and socio-economic class. This raises and reflects important issues around strategies of differentiation, urban exclusion and the hierarchies inherent in everyday life within contemporary cities. However, in privileging such modes of …
A Yellow Bird [film]
A Yellow Bird can be seen as part of a recent series of introspective Singaporean films such as Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013) that have attempted to articulate and wrestle with social issues such a...
Migrant Dubai: Low Wage Workers and the Construction of a Global City
This book analyzes the everyday lives of labour migrants in a rapidly developing city-state. Using the emirate of Dubai as a case study, Migrant Dubai shows that even within highly restrictive mobilit
Extending urban liveability: Friendship and sociality in the lives of low-wage migrants
‘Liveability’ continues to attract considerable attention internationally, in the media, among urban policymakers and from academics. In this paper, we extend consideration of liveability beyond the elite, professional migrants who are the primary target of inter-urban competition to low-wage migrants in two different urban contexts in Asia. Drawing upon narratives of South Asian men in Dubai and Singapore, we highlight friendship and sociality a…
Social Networks in Dubai: Informal Solidarities in an Uncaring State
Dubai is a unique location to interrogate the dynamics of multicultural politics, interracial relations and belonging; with 90 per cent of its population made up of resident foreigners across 150 nationalities. The city-state is typical of the Islamic Gulf states in that it draws labour migrants not with the promise of eventual citizenship and access to the state's resources, but with the trappings of a tax-free lifestyle and opportunity for acce…
Social Networks in Dubai: Informal Solidarities in an Uncaring State
Dubai is a unique location to interrogate the dynamics of multicultural politics, interracial relations and belonging; with 90 per cent of its population made up of resident foreigners across 150 nationalities. The city-state is typical of the Islamic Gulf states in that it draws labour migrants not with the promise of eventual citizenship and access to the state's resources, but with the trappings of a tax-free lifestyle and opportunity for acce…
Introduction to Special Section 'Infrastructures of Injustice: Migration and Border Mobilities
This Special Section interrogates the interrelationships between mobilities infrastructures and notions of injustice across multiple empirical settings regarding regimes of migration and border movements of peripheralized communities. Most readings of infrastructure imply fixity and permanence and suggest neutral mediations of mobility. This collection, in contrast, examines how, in fact, infrastructural forms interpret, translate and paraphrasea…
Introduction: Urban friendship networks: Affective negotiations and potentialities of care
Issues of integration, assimilation and the place of ‘strangers’ within metropolitan contexts have been overwhelmingly conceptualised within the larger structural frames of ethnicity, nationality, immigration status and socio-economic class. This raises and reflects important issues around strategies of differentiation, urban exclusion and the hierarchies inherent in everyday life within contemporary cities. However, in privileging such modes of …
Extending urban liveability: Friendship and sociality in the lives of low-wage migrants
‘Liveability’ continues to attract considerable attention internationally, in the media, among urban policymakers and from academics. In this paper, we extend consideration of liveability beyond the elite, professional migrants who are the primary target of inter-urban competition to low-wage migrants in two different urban contexts in Asia. Drawing upon narratives of South Asian men in Dubai and Singapore, we highlight friendship and sociality a…
Immigration without diversity: The invisible second generation in Singapore
Locating invisible privilege in Asia: Conceptual travel and contextual significance
This article that forms part of a Special Section on 'Invisible Privilege in Asia' is committed to expanding the theoretical debates in race and ethnic studies, which has been previously critiqued as a field that has focused more on the gathering of empirical observations than the development of theory. This critique is even more pronounced within the realm of studying race and ethnicity in Asia, where research is often siloed within the contexts…
Blurring the Boundary Between Regular and Irregular: Tamil Low-Wage Migrants in the Gulf and the Co-Construction of Khalluli
The mobility between South Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states constitutes the largest migration corridor in the world. Irregular practices are widely tolerated in this region, but have been relatively underexplored in the literature. In exploring that lack, this paper troubles the distinction between regularity and irregularity, demonstrating how different actors constituting the migration industry are complicit in the maintenance…
Social Networks in Dubai: Informal Solidarities in an Uncaring State
Dubai is a unique location to interrogate the dynamics of multicultural politics, interracial relations and belonging; with 90 per cent of its population made up of resident foreigners across 150 nationalities. The city-state is typical of the Islamic Gulf states in that it draws labour migrants not with the promise of eventual citizenship and access to the state's resources, but with the trappings of a tax-free lifestyle and opportunity for acce…
Migrant Dubai: Low Wage Workers and the Construction of a Global City
This book analyzes the everyday lives of labour migrants in a rapidly developing city-state. Using the emirate of Dubai as a case study, Migrant Dubai shows that even within highly restrictive mobilit
Extending urban liveability: Friendship and sociality in the lives of low-wage migrants
‘Liveability’ continues to attract considerable attention internationally, in the media, among urban policymakers and from academics. In this paper, we extend consideration of liveability beyond the elite, professional migrants who are the primary target of inter-urban competition to low-wage migrants in two different urban contexts in Asia. Drawing upon narratives of South Asian men in Dubai and Singapore, we highlight friendship and sociality a…
Marginalized migrants and urbanization in Southeast Asia
This chapter discusses issues of marginalization in relation to low-wage migrants in Southeast Asia – examines Singapore specifically as a case study. It provides ongoing and previous fieldwork in Singapore with low-wage migrant workers in terms of the empirical material. In Asia, the link between urbanization/urban development and migration is evident both in processes of internal as well as international migration. The chapter explores how stru…
Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life
Al-Nakib's Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life records the history of Kuwait and also commemorates the social heritage of its urbanization, following its dramatic transformation, particularly in the final decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It joins a small but growing collection of book-length works that have sought to understand the rapid urban and social development of Arab Gulf states. This book is of p…
Introduction: Urban friendship networks: Affective negotiations and potentialities of care
Issues of integration, assimilation and the place of ‘strangers’ within metropolitan contexts have been overwhelmingly conceptualised within the larger structural frames of ethnicity, nationality, immigration status and socio-economic class. This raises and reflects important issues around strategies of differentiation, urban exclusion and the hierarchies inherent in everyday life within contemporary cities. However, in privileging such modes of …
A Yellow Bird [film]
A Yellow Bird can be seen as part of a recent series of introspective Singaporean films such as Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013) that have attempted to articulate and wrestle with social issues such a...
Bodies That Don’t Matter, but Labor That Does: The Low-Wage Male Migrant in Singapore and Dubai
Singapore and Dubai are hypermodern city-states that host large temporary migrant populations. The majority of this group is composed of low-wage workers, migrant men from India who labor under conditions of structural inequality and extreme precarity. While there is a growing literature that discusses the issues of debt bondage and unfair conditions of employment that these men face, there is far less interrogation of the everyday and embodied f…
Introduction to Special Section 'Infrastructures of Injustice: Migration and Border Mobilities
This Special Section interrogates the interrelationships between mobilities infrastructures and notions of injustice across multiple empirical settings regarding regimes of migration and border movements of peripheralized communities. Most readings of infrastructure imply fixity and permanence and suggest neutral mediations of mobility. This collection, in contrast, examines how, in fact, infrastructural forms interpret, translate and paraphrasea…
Superdiversity in Highly Regulated Global Cities
This chapter examines the analytical productivity of superdiversity as a perspective in conversation with issues of nationalism, citizenship, and immigration from an empirical perspective that draws primarily from studies of (im)migration in highly globalized city-states with intensely regulated migration regimes. In relation to concepts of “intersectionality” and immigrant integration, it asks how superdiversity helps to interrogate key empirica…
More than race: A comparative analysis of “new” Indian and Chinese migration in Singapore
Singapore is a nation-state characterized by the convergence of multiple diaspora populations. The state and citizens alike cannot ignore a sharpened sense of difference that has led to social tensions between “old” and “new” waves of migrants/immigrants, in particular amongst those considered co-ethnics from India and China. Comparative analyses of Indian and Chinese migration are few, resulting in a narrow understanding of how both impact migra…
Conceptualizing migration beyond the “West”: A view from Asia
This critical reflection essay responds to John Mollenkopf’s review of the book “Contested Concepts in Migration Studies” (Routledge 2022). Rather than take a comprehensive overview of individual chapters within the edited collection, this essay suggests that occupying an ontological and epistemological perspective that is rooted in and starting from Asia produces alternative understandings of concepts typically used to study international migrat…
It's purely mutual respect”: Cross‐cultural taboos and the everyday reproduction of Singaporean nationalism
While differences often threaten ethnonationalist projects, the Singaporean state has rendered a particular configuration of racial‐religious diversity constitutive of nationalism in the city‐state. In this paper, we approach nationalism through an often‐overlooked avenue: intangible heritage such as everyday myths, customs, and taboos. A total of 150 interviews were conducted in three neighbourhoods in Singapore, where guided conversations were …
Locating invisible privilege in Asia: Conceptual travel and contextual significance
This article that forms part of a Special Section on 'Invisible Privilege in Asia' is committed to expanding the theoretical debates in race and ethnic studies, which has been previously critiqued as a field that has focused more on the gathering of empirical observations than the development of theory. This critique is even more pronounced within the realm of studying race and ethnicity in Asia, where research is often siloed within the contexts…
Invisible privilege in Asia: Introduction to special section
This introduction to the special section 'Invisible Privilege in Asia' suggests a framework within which studies of privilege in Asia can be situated. Animated by a global politics of Blackness and social movements that have renewed the focus on racialised inequality and hierarchy, we use this moment to urge an interrogation of the conceptual productivity of the notion of privilege. This project is particularly significant within a region that is…
Blurring the Boundary Between Regular and Irregular: Tamil Low-Wage Migrants in the Gulf and the Co-Construction of Khalluli
The mobility between South Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states constitutes the largest migration corridor in the world. Irregular practices are widely tolerated in this region, but have been relatively underexplored in the literature. In exploring that lack, this paper troubles the distinction between regularity and irregularity, demonstrating how different actors constituting the migration industry are complicit in the maintenance…
Immigration without diversity: The invisible second generation in Singapore
Political science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (10 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (10 works) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (9 works) · Social science (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Politics (7 works)