Accepted Panels

It is imperative to explore the specific marginalities, uncertainties and unpredictability that arise from migration and mobilities, a movement singular in its temporal dimensions for connecting the past and the future and that has come into relief in the context of the circumstances given shape by contemporary crises. Migrants, especially in the sector of unorganised labour, for the longest time, have constituted a significant section of the marginalized within populations. The study of migration has been populated with traditional paradigms such as rural to urban migration. Today, conditions such as climate change, habitat loss, changing labour demands, lockdowns due to pandemic or securitization of borders are emerging paradigms. Political consciousness is the lens through which migrant populations are categorised as diaspora in one context and refugees, even as encroachers, in another. The Panel hopes to bring out the impact of these macro causal factors on forced as well as voluntary human migration—what kinds of vulnerabilities migrants experience here and how gender queers the pitch is also significant underlining the phenomenon of feminization of labour. Questions of immigrant experiences of legality, institutional practices and, particularly, how medical and health care operate are, further, important to raise the issue of indigenous and traditional knowledge systems within immigrant communities. The broad aim of the panel remains to cull out the contours of marginalities that anthropology would have to encounter in this regard, in the hope to learn from each paradim, visualise the continuity between them and to consider policy level reflections that might inform better practices (if not best) with reference to unorganised labour.