Nicole Constable is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the director of the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her latest book, Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Migration was co-published by the University of California Press and Hong Kong University Press, and had its first official launch in Hong Kong in June. At this University of Pittsburgh book launch, Constable will speak on her work, and Shalini Puri (Department of English) and Lara Putnam (Department of History) will respond.

Based on research and interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012, the book tells the stories of Indonesian and Filipino migrant women, their South Asian, African, Chinese, and Western expatriate partners, and their Hong Kong–born babies. The main focus is on the often painful and poignant struggles of women as they consider abortion, adoption, keeping a child, remaining in Hong Kong as “illegal” overstayers, or returning home as single mothers. This ethnography provides insight into global problems of mobility, family, gender, and citizenship, and points to the consequences, creative responses, melodramas, inequalities, and tragedies of labor and migration policies.