The winner of the 2025 Maria Ioannis Baganha Dissertation Award is Dr Kurt W. Kuehne with the work “Lives in Limbo: Precarity, Control and Temporary Migrant Workers in the Global City”, defended at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2023. Based on 18 months of field research, complemented by the author’s longer experience as both a teacher and an NGO caseworker in Singapore, Dr Kuehne’s thesis analyses the semi-hidden migrant labour force of male construction workers and female domestic workers in Singapore. Although there has been abundant research on migrants to Singapore, nothing approaches the scale and originality of this study. It manages to combine into a single, powerful analysis the circumstances and experiences of both gendered labour migrations – of men from Bangladesh and India into the construction sector and of women from Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines into domestic work. The analysis of the spatial and temporal settings and strategies by which these two sizable migrant populations are managed, exploited, kept vulnerable, and effectively ‘hidden’ is ground-breaking. The thesis is theoretically robust and in the terms used by one of the evaluators — who borrows the concept from the past history of Dutch total football —, this thesis is ‘total sociology’ which operates across a wide range of conceptual realms within sociology and cognate social sciences (notably political economy and human geography) and involves analysis at a variety of scales from the global to the individual embodied experience. It is methodologically extensive and plural, providing a wealth of empirical material to support the theoretical framework. In sum, “Lives in Limbo: Precarity, Control and Temporary Migrant Workers in the Global City” is an extraordinary thesis: wide-ranging, hard-hitting, theoretically and empirically rich, and well-written.
