Dr Bittiandra Chand Somaiah holds a joint appointment as Lecturer with Yale-NUS College, and NUS College. She is an Associate with the Asian Migration cluster, at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her research interests include embodied, emplaced, intersectional and intimate citizenship practices and subjectivities vis-à-vis migration.
Since 2017, she has been working on a collaborative mixed-methods research project which investigates the impacts of parental absence on left-behind children and families located in sending communities of international labour. Her main fieldwork site for this was Indonesia. Currently she is involved in projects which focus on well-being, food practices, and food security among migrant domestic workers in Singapore and their children. Previous research includes studying social reconstructions of (im)migrant mothering in urban India, Singapore, and Australia.
Her work has been published in a range of peer-reviewed journals including Global Networks; Ethnic and Racial Studies; Journal of Youth Studies; Emotion, Space and Society; Journal of Intercultural Studies; and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
Research Specialisations
- Sociology of Migration
- Carework
- Sociology of Food
- Multiple Modernities
- New Cosmpolitanisms
Recent Journal Articles:
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand, Immanuela Asa Rahadini, Brenda SA Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel Anne Fernandez Acedera. “Burmese migrant domestic workers’ foodwork and biopedagogies in pandemic Singapore.” Global Food Security 42 (2024): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2024.100792
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand, Brenda SA Yeoh, Kristel Anne F. Acedera, and Theodora Lam. “Migrant domestic workers and transnational foodcare chains in pandemic times.” Geographical Research (2024). https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12660
Cheng, Yi’en, Exequiel Cabanda, Bittiandra Chand Somaiah, and Brenda Yeoh. “Migration infrastructures and (Im) mobile lives: interruptions, failures, and repairs.” Applied Mobilities (2024): 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/23800127.2024.2343540
Acedera, Kristel, Bittiandra Chand Somaiah, and Brenda SA Yeoh. “Growing Up with Smartphones: How Stay-behind Filipino and Indonesian Children Exercise Agency in Transnational Families.” Transfers 12, no. 3 (2022): 8-27.
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand, and Brenda SA Yeoh. “Grandparenting left-behind children in Javanese Migrant-sending villages: Trigenerational care circuits and the negotiation of care.” Geoforum 143 (2023): 103767. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718523000933
Yeoh, Brenda SA, Theodora Lam, Bittiandra Chand Somaiah, and Kristel Anne Fernandez Acedera. “The critical temporalities of serial migration and family social reproduction in Southeast Asia.” Time & Society (2023): 0961463X231164473. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0961463X231164473
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand. “Affiliative Emplacement: Festival Foodwork Among (Im) migrant Kodavathee Mothers.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 43, no. 1 (2022): 54-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2021.1997952
Velayutham, Selvaraj, and Bittiandra Chand Somaiah. “Rap against brownface and the politics of racism in Singapore.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45, no. 7 (2022): 1239-1260. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2021.1928253
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. “Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages.” Journal of Youth Studies (2021): 1-18. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Bittiandra Chand Somaiah, Theodora Lam, and Kristel F. Acedera. “Doing family in “times of migration”: care temporalities and gender politics in Southeast Asia.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110, no. 6 (2020): 1709-1725. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/24694452.2020.1723397
McDuie-Ra, Duncan, Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, Tanya Jakimow, and Bittiandra Chand Somaiah. “Collaborative ethnographies: Reading space to build an affective inventory.” Emotion, Space and Society 35 (2020): 100683. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S175545862030030X
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Silvia Mila Arlini. “‘Cukup for me to be successful in this country’: ‘staying’ among left‐behind young women in Indonesia’s migrant‐sending villages.” Global Networks 20, no. 2 (2020): 237-255. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Recent Book Chapters:
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand. “Cosmopolitan Maternalisms”, In Maternal Theory: Essential Readings (2nd Edition) Andrea O’Reilly (Ed), Demeter Press, 2021.
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand. “Gender and transnational parenting: Extended moral communities of co-responsibility among (im) migrant Kodavathees.” In Handbook on Gender in Asia. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020.
