Beyond Informality: How Chinese Migrants Transformed a Border Economy
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Room: MAL B18 (Malet Street building, room B18)
Chinese migrants are playing increasingly large, stratified roles in the informal economies of South America. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is in the region's largest informal economy of counterfeit and smuggled goods, spanning from Ciudad del Este, the Paraguayan border city, to São Paulo, Brazil's largest metropolis. Here, Chinese vendors, on the one hand, are some of the most marginalized workers facing a doubly difficult landscape due to their precarious immigration status and their illegal economic activities. They bear the brunt of working on the margins of the law, and as a result do not always reap the benefits of their own labor. A transnational elite of Chinese businesspeople, on the other hand, profits and profiteers from the booming market. They leverage their economic, social, and political power to bend the law to their favor and get away with irregularities, violations, and criminal behavior.
In Beyond Informality Dr Douglas de Toledo Piza reveals the complex ways these actors interact with each other, and how the law shapes those interactions. He argues that structural inequalities in the global economy push Chinese migrants to South America, while placing them, surprisingly, in positions to overhaul markets and tip the scales of deep-seated power structures in the Global South.
In this talk, Dr Douglas de Toledo Piza (Lafayette College) will introduce this fascinating topic, drawing on his new book Beyond Informality: How Chinese Migrants Transformed a Border Economy (Stanford University Press). He will be joined by a panel of experts: Professor Hyun Bang Shin (LSE), Dr Matthew Richmond (Newcastle University), and Dr Mara Nogueira (Birkbeck).
This event is associated with Dr Nogueira's research project, Globalisation from below: livelihoods, trade and transnationalism in Brazil’s informal economy, (British Academy), which explores the role of Chinese migrants in Belo Horizonte's (Brazil) informal economy.
Contact name: Jiawei Zhao
Speakers-
Dr Douglas de Toledo Piza
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Douglas de Toledo Piza is a scholar of migration and borders. He is currently an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Lafayette College. His topics of interest include Asian migrations in South America, the informal economy, memory activism, climate displacement, and US immigration and refugee resettlement policy. His scholarly work interrogates the intersections of (im)mobilities of people, goods, and material culture across borders. Between 2019 and 2020, Professor de Toledo Piza was a research fellow at the International Rescue Committee, where he collected and analyzed data for the Emergency Unit and developed Monitoring & Evaluation at the Resettlement Unit. Between 2014 and 2021, he was affiliated with the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.
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Dr Mara Nogueira
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Mara Nogueira is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences. She is an urban geographer with an interdisciplinary background in Geography and Economics and research expertise on urbanisation in the Global South with a focus on socio-spatial inequalities and grassroots mobilisation in Brazil. Her scholarship is committed to identifying the roots and ways of addressing socio-spatial inequalities with an aim to promote social justice. She is the Principal Investigator of the project Globalisation from below: livelihoods, trade and transnationalism in Brazil’s informal economy, funded by the British Academy.
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Dr Matthew A. Richmond
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Matthew A. Richmond is Lecturer in Political Geography at Newcastle University. He has a PhD in Geography from King’s College London. Matthew was Postdoctoral Researcher at both the Centre for Metropolitan Studies, São Paulo and the State University of São Paulo (UNESP), and subsequently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the London School of Economics. Matthew’s research explores diverse themes, including urbanisation, informality, urban governance, organised crime, political ecology, and electoral geography, with a focus on Brazil.
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Prof Hyun Bang Shin
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Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and Head of the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK, Professor Shin has contributed to reshaping the understanding of contemporary urban transformation, emphasising the socio-political dynamics of cities in rapidly developing regions, particular in East and Southeast Asia. From 2018 to 2023, he served as Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at LSE, fostering interdisciplinary research on Asia. He was the Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from 2021 to 2024 and a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation from 2016 to 2023, contributing to global urban scholarship and mentorship. Since 2009, he has co-organised The Urban Salon, a London-based forum for architecture, cities, and international urbanism.
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