Managing Migration: risks and Remittances among Migrant Thai Women

Sammanfattning: Female migration has increasingly caught attention from states, NGOs and the media. In particular there has been an attention to on the one hand, the risks women face when venturing into new lands, in particular risks in forms of human trafficking, and on the other hand the remittances female migrants send to their countries of origin. Central to most of these studies and debates about female migrants is the idea that they are passive victims of criminal networks, poverty and their families' demands for conspicuous consumption. Such an approach tends to ignore the possibility of these women to make decisions and act in their own interests under various constraints. Taking the case of Thai women's migration to Europe this study attempts to show how Thai women exercise "agency", using two key areas of migration research: "risks" and "remittances". Having agency as the point of departure is in line with much contemporary scholarly work on female migration that emphasizes agency. However, there seems to be unexplored challenges, limitations and pitfalls to this new celebration of agency. Hence my purpose with this thesis is twofold; To demonstrate the usefulness of approaching female migration from the perspective of agency and secondly to push and challenge the celebration of agency. I argue that we have to be careful about using the concept of agency uncritically in the field of female migration, since it essentially celebrates individualism and furthermore is an elusive and empirically vague concept. Rather, this study proposes ways to operationalize agency in the realm of female migration by using a control/victimhood model in which migratory experiences are understood as formed by successive steps which can be studied.