Dr Ayushman Bhagat
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8878-4668 Profile
Biography
I am deeply interested in multi-disciplinary approaches to research questions around the politics of ‘Human Trafficking’, ‘Modern Slavery’, and Forced Labour. Driven by my commitment to/frustration of implementing anti-slavery projects in South Asia, my research aims to highlight the voices and experiences of migrant workers in policy and scholarly discussions. Founded in participatory praxis, I focus on how and why migrant workers encounter, experience, embody and escape conditions of exploitation, oppression, and rightlessness over time and across space.
My current research area concerns the politics of anti-trafficking and emigration control in the South Asia-Middle East migration corridor. In my research, I problematize state practices of control by focusing on the autonomy of migrants and the spatialization of state power. This focus on spatial practices draws from wide bodies of literature like (anti-) trafficking studies, critical border studies, feminist political geography, and the autonomy of migration. I draw upon these critical frameworks to theorize the encounters and conflicts of mobility and mobility of conflicts and encounters. Methodologically, I value participatory action research and long-term ethnographic engagement with research participants.
In addition to my academic experience, I have a substantial policy and grassroots experience in the development sector of India. I lived and worked in and around a wildlife sanctuary to assist forest-dwelling communities in establishing self-governing institutions for participatory natural resource management. Later, I offered this participatory development expertise to the United Nations – International Labour Organisation (UN-ILO) for the implementation of large-scale development programmes on human trafficking, bonded labour, and inter-state migration at the policy level. Participatory praxis runs as a political thread across all my policy, grassroots, activism, and intellectual endeavours.
Research Interests
- Modern Slavery/Human Trafficking/Forced Labour/Unfreedom in Labour relations.
- Sex work/Domestic work/Construction work/Informal work
- Exploitation/Oppression/Rightlessness of migrant workers
- Migration
- Borders
- Mobilities
- Illegality
- Development
- Subversions and Escape
- Trafficking borders
- The Impact of Migration Bans on Female Nepalese Citizens
- Labour migrants’ struggle to subvert anti-trafficking interventions in Nepal
- “Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti‐Trafficking in Nepal
- Entrapment Processes in the Emigration Regime: The Presence of Migration Bans and the Absence of Bilateral Labor Agreements in Domestic Work in Nepal