Malaysian immigrant women in Australia: Culture, education and work

This paper is about the transnational identity practices of a group of Malaysian immigrant women working in the Australian education sector.  These immigrant women negotiate cultural and occupational discourses vis-a-vis cultural politics, and work ethics within highly stratified, ethnicized and politicized Malaysian context.  They also negotiate discourses in relation to migration, and  work within the Australian ‘western’, capitalist, secular society.  Contemporary immigrants from the Asian regions (eg Malaysia) are not only highly skilled and educated, they also possess cultural resources to live and work in diverse cultural spaces given the multi-ethnic and religious contexts of their home countries.  The majority of these Asian immigrants come through the skill stream to Australia. However, this mobility of ‘intellectual labour’ is not fully tapped into given the work, social restrictions and discrimination in Australia. There are questions around aspects of social integration and the ways in which their culture, knowledge and skills from their pre-migration experiences shape their new lives post-migration.    In-depth interviews focus on the ways in which these immigrant women draw on multiple cultural and educational resources in the (re)making of their identities as transnational educational workers. These women deploy essentialist definitions of  binaries that are located within multiple discourses (such as Asian/Malaysian, Australian/Western, Chinese, Muslim, Indian) in coming to understand their transnational material realities as migrant educational workers.   Yet at the same time,  their transnational identities are located at the interplay of structure and agency.

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