The Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK) at the University of Zurich is offering two postdoc positions in the research project “Provisional Futures: Migrants as wanted workers, yet temporary residents” (TEMP MIGRATION). The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and led by Prof. Dr. Helena Hof. The project focuses on the growing proportions of temporary migrants in liberal democratic states. Its objective is to understand the experience of building life on a temporary basis and how migrants' negotiations, strategies, and practices affect the receiving societies. TEMP MIGRATION uses an ethnographically-informed approach to understand how people make sense of their temporary lives as migrant workers in three countries with distinct migration regimes: Canada, Switzerland and Japan. It provides an in-depth account of temporariness a) as experienced by people of different 'skill' levels – exemplified by case studies of temporary labor migrants in IT, health care and construction –, as well as b) across labor-importing countries of distinctively different mobility regimes.
