Affect, agency and im/mobilities: skills and secrets at the shelter

Terri-Anne Teo

Mobilities, 2025, vol. 20, issue 5, 769-787

Abstract: Migrant shelters are political spaces illuminating im/mobilities, the complexities of social networks and waiting experiences among temporary migrant workers. Situated within theories of mobilities, agency and affect, this article addresses oft-overlooked emotional labour that exceeds and exists within practices of decision-making and knowledge-production. Based on interviews at a shelter for migrant domestic workers in Singapore, I argue that affective agencies like fear and hope complicate ‘acts’ of mobility like fleeing and seeking employment, and ‘acts’ of resistance such as reporting employers and claims-making. This article describes decision-making as a learned process through shared experiences at the shelter, which homes a collective of migrant domestic workers from different countries, living and working together. Knowledge transpires about and within the terrain of control that is the migration regime, with connections built on shared financial anxieties, homesickness and the domestic life of the shelter. Simultaneously, pride around knowledge-production through tactics, skills and languages learned at the shelter fill understandings of waiting spaces as places of subject-formation and collective agency.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2449008

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