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Migration for work is often an unending journey. Many Indonesian women spend years as domestic workers overseas before they return home, and there is often no definitive answer as to when they should return, and whether such a return is ‘final’. Migration scholars have long critiqued neoliberal capitalism and the global job market for subjecting workers to uncertainty and precarity. Yet, few have explored the precarity faced by return migrant women at home. Drawing on the results of our field interviews conducted on return workers in East Java and workers in Hong Kong, we develop the concept of ‘home-bound precarity’ to examine the financial and moral violence imposed on migrant women. We argue that ‘home-bound precarity’ is one of the root causes of migrant workers’ protracted precarity. The research opens a rich vein of inquiry into return migration and sheds new light on the understanding of labor precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a nascent phenomenon in which a cluster of digital platforms mimicking popular Chinese apps has popped up in various cities in the United Kingdom (UK). They have been eagerly adopted by a strong clientele composed mainly of Chinese international students and young working migrants from China. Drawing on data we gathered from the British city of Manchester, one of the most popular destinations for Chinese international students, we propose the concept of home virtuality to illustrate how Chinese student migrants' frequent surfing of these Chinese‐style digital platforms has created a 'virtual home' that is quite reminiscent of the platformized lifestyle in China, and that thus offers them a sense of connection to home. We argue that this 'home virtuality' does not only imply a virtual connection but is also a home environment materialized through the familiar app services of the new Chinese platform businesses in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong was not only a place where rice had been widely grown to support its own population, but had also once produced rice for overseas markets. However, rice production had declined rapidly since the 1960s and disappeared in the 1990s. Since the 2010s, there has been a reemergence of rice planting in Hong Kong carried out by conservationists, NGOs and individual farmers. In 2021, an heirloom rice cultivation campaign was launched by the Hong Kong government which further boosted local rice planting. Food growing is contingent on locations, yet, its symbolic meanings and signification often cross scales. This paper puts forward a multiscalar perspective of the recent ricescape, which involves overlapping socio spatial spheres, networking multiple actors, and creating multifarious interpretations of local rice. While this ricescape seems to entail converged efforts that revive the local rice identity and agricultural heritage, it has also contested the meanings of food localism in Hong Kong. We tap into the cross-scales of food movement at a time when there have been huge social rifts and interrogate the relations between rice heritage, rural conservation, and social identity and cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 upended both the existing world order and the research agenda of academics. In both cases, one crucial feature was a net shift from an expansive 'hyper mobile' world to a strong emphasis on the immobilization of people. With growing anxieties about the risks and dangers involved in human mobility, there was a turn in mobility studies: an 'immobility turn' agonized by a rapidly evolving diseasescape shaped at the intersection of a rapidly evolving virus and rapidly evolving human responses to it. This paper seeks to examine the dynamic dialectical relationship between this diseasescape and human (im)mobility that has resulted in the formation of a new mobility hierarchy that stresses 'sanitized mobility'. This in turn heightens human inequality. The pandemic has also forced a competition in 'immobility governance'—testing different models of governing health security within and beyond borders. The paper sheds new light on the emerging scholarship on 'immobility and pandemic' by examining the multifariousness in 'immobility governance' and interrogating the uneven state capacity in ensuring 'sanitized mobility' and practicing 'immobility governance' that will bring different outcomes in national and international health security in the post-COVID era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patients with acute ischemic stroke appear to benefit from the treatment with low-molecular-weight heparin given as nadroparin within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms. Researchers studied 306 Chinese patients who were randomly given a high-dose regimen of 4100 anti-factor Xa IU of nadroparin twice a day, a low-dose regimen of 4100 anti-factor Xa IU of nadroparin once a day, or placebo, under the skin for 10 days. At six months, a total of 45 patients in the high-dose group, 53 in the low-dose group, and 68 in the placebo group became dependent on others for daily living or died. At a six-month follow up, the patients given the high dosage of nadroparin fared significantly better than patients given placebo. One death or case of dependency on others could be averted by the use of the high-dose nadroparin regimen in five patients.

Making and sharing food plays an essential role in foreign domestic helpers' work and leisure life. However, this has seldom been addressed in the voluminous migrant domestic helper literature. In Hong Kong, overseas helpers are employed in over three hundred thousand households. This article explores their food experiences in both their leisure and work spaces. It first examines the "contact zones" in which these workers share food with co-ethnics. It then considers the kitchen space in which foreign domestic workers serve their employers. It shows how these domestic helpers make use of their culinary skills to secure better human relationships and gain extra bargaining power through the provision of tasty ethnic dishes. Despite the immense power imbalance between the employer and the domestic helper, such food contact has shed light on the everyday resilience embedded in kitchen politics in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction outlines the conceptual framework of the special issue. Culinary politics involves a contest over the social organization and cultural meanings of food by a variety of actors: both civil and state, the powerful and the grassroots. In particular, we consider food governance as a form of culinary politics entailing a two-way traffic, in which policies and regulations are set by state actors, while the responses of civil actors often reshape the foodscape and complicate the outcome of food policies. Food governance also points to the reshaping and contestation of collective and individual food identities, and how different power hierarchies can be challenged through acts of food-making. While food is an enduring cultural concern in human life, food governance and culinary politics should be two important concepts for researchers to engage with when examining individuals' soft skills of food-making and the exercise of soft power through food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]