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Postdoctoral/Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute (NurseTracs)

University-Level Unit: Asia Research Institute

Faculty/Department-Level Unit: Research

Employee Category: Research Staff

Location: Kent Ridge Campus

Posting Start Date: 23/03/2026

The Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS), invites applications for ONE Postdoctoral/Research Fellow to join the NurseTracs project team.

The successful applicant is expected to commence duties at NUS in August 2026, and no later than October 2026.

Tracing Nurse Trajectories: Multinational Migration Amid Global Competition (NurseTracs)

As global migration patterns become increasingly complex, social scientists face growing pressures to make sense of migrants’ long-term trajectories. Research has shown how people can move to multiple countries throughout their lives, challenging a long-held belief that migration involves only a single origin and destination. Yet, scholars have also been limited to framing multinational trajectories as an individual experience – a result of the resources, aspirations, and circumstances of migrants themselves. Largely missing is the question of how other actors and institutions can shape migrants’ multinational pathways. This project shifts scholarly attention to how different actors move people across multiple borders, channelling migrants toward some places and drawing them away from others. We aim to examine how global competition over migrant skills defines people’s multinational trajectories. Specifically, we seek to determine how governments, recruitment agencies, and employers compete to direct migrants to and from specific destinations, reshaping their trajectories across time. We focus on the case of migrant nurses, a healthcare profession projected to face severe labour shortages in the coming decade (WHO 2023). We also centre our study on the movement of Filipinos, the largest nationality group among migrant nurses. We ask: How have nurse migration trajectories diversified over time amid a growing competition for healthcare labour? How have state institutions, commercial agencies, and employers sought to influence nurses’ migration trajectories? How might nurses alter their migration trajectories in relation to changing state policies, workplace incentives, and recruitment strategies?

The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars from sociology, geography, nursing and implementation science. With over a decade of experience in studying healthcare workers and health systems, the research team has built strong connections in major source countries like the Philippines and established destinations like Singapore. We will implement a mixed-method research design that includes a survey of nurses’ international trajectories, in-depth interviews with different actors competing for nurses’ labour, and a digital story completion method that determines how nurses respond to changing state policies, employer incentives, and recruitment strategies. This project is original because it examines what scholars have called the “middle space” of international migration, where different actors compete to direct migrants toward specific destinations, often at the expense of other nations in need of such labour. This middle space has been relatively understudied in research on migrant trajectories, despite their key role in shaping people’s international pathways. While existing studies show how individual nations recruit migrant workers to address local needs, they do not explain how the recruitment strat