QuaMaFA (Qualification and Skill in the Migration Process of Foreign Workers in Asia) is a four-year collaborative project looking into different aspects of qualifications and skills in the process of migration. It is the brainchild of five women scholars who use their regional expertise, academic experiences, and mixed-methods approach to investigate the role of skills in labour migration in major migrant-receiving market economies in (South)East Asia. 

Based in Frankfurt, Ruth Achenbach (project leader) has a strong interest in East Asian entanglements. She has been working on migration and Japan’s international relations with East Asia and Africa for over a decade now. Joohyun Justine Park, based in Frankfurt, is originally from Korea and had lived in New Zealand for seven years. Based on positive psychology, her current research is focused on the success and well-being of skilled migrants in Korea and she has a passion for building up supportive networks for the migrants. Aimi Muranaka is originally from Japan and currently based in Duisburg/Düsseldorf. For five years – during her PhD program and as a research associate, her research focus has been on Vietnamese IT workers in Japan and she will also look into the roles of Japanese intermediary actors and language schools. Helena Hof from Germany, currently based in Zürich and in Göttingen, has conducted extensive qualitative fieldwork on highly-educated migrants’ socioeconomic mobilities and migration motivations in Tokyo, Singapore and Sao Paulo. After seven years of graduate school, including a post doctoral fellowship, in Tokyo, she now combines her research and teaching in Japanese Studies and sociologically grounded migration studies. Megha Wadhwa, originally from India, lived in Japan for fifteen years and is currently in Berlin. She conducted ethnographic research on the Indian Diaspora in the Tokyo region and is interested in migration trends of Indians around the globe, with her primary focus being Japan and Germany.

In 2020,  Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany (BMBF) approved the grant for QuaMaFA, and in March 2021, we all joined together from different parts of the world to work on growing this idea. We hope our research and this space would be of use to you. Keep in touch 🙂

Learn more