Downwardly global : women, work, and citizenship in the pakistani diaspora (Englisch)

In this book Lalaie Ameeriar draws on ethnographic work with immigrant Pakistani women in Toronto to explore how state multiculturalism—in the form of workplace training programs and government-funded settlement services— serves as a way to regulate immigrant bodies. Ameeriar follows highly educated professional women who, having migrated to Canada for employment opportunities, find only minimum-wage survival jobs available for them. Ameeriar details the precarious economic and social experiences of these women as they navigate citizenship, racialization, and bureaucracy. She also shows how Canadian state multiculturalism strives to create a “sanitized sensorium,” where affective experiences of Pakistani culture and bodily comportment are confined to festivals and expunged from the workplace. DOWNWARDLY GLOBAL contributes to scholarly conversations about the political economy of underemployment by focusing on the affective experiences of de-skilling labor on immigrant women

Bodies and bureaucracies -- Pedagogies of affect -- Sanitizing citizenship -- Racializing South Asia -- The catastrophic present