Lecture Series

Ulrike Muller-Boker
on
The Multi-local Livehihoods of Bajhangis

In Nepal, international labour migration to India and overseas as well as internal migration to the Nepali lowlands are of high socio-economic significance. However, little evidence has been generated about the potential linkages between international and internal migration. This lecture sheds light on the migration practices of people moving from a village of Bajhang district to Delhi and to the Tarai. The lecture shows the crucial role that social relations play in channelling internal migration to specific destinations. Finally, it examines how migration strategies adopted over generations create multi-local social networks rooted in the family’s place of origin.

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Ulrike Müller-Böker is Professor of Human Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich in Switzerland and head of the National Centre of Competence North-South programme component ‘institutions, livelihoods, conflicts’. Within the broad field of human geography, her research concentrates on social geography and development studies. Fields of competence include the analysis of institutional dimensions of livelihood strategies, the impact of globalisation processes, local resource-use conflicts, labour migration patterns, nature conservation, and development and participation processes focusing on South Asia, Central Asia, and Switzerland.

Prof Müller-Böker’s publications include Social networks and migration: Women’s livelihoods between Far West Nepal and Delhi (2010), Objectives of public participation: Which actors should be involved in the decision-making for river restorations? (2007), ‘But now men also listen to the women’: Women’s-Development Approach in the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area Project, East Nepal (2007), Reflections on the Himalayan Landscape: An interview with Harka Gurung, a leading authority on the Himalaya (2005), and Addressing Nepalese Migrant Workers’ Needs (2005). Her latest publication is Intergenerational linkages between internal and international migration of rural-to-urban migrants in Far West Nepal (2011).