'Stres' and self-protection: Migrant workers facing everyday violence in Taiwan's fisheries.

This article examines the sensory, affective, and emotional dimensions of "dirty" and socially devalued manual labor performed by Indonesian migrant fishers in Taiwan's coastal, offshore, and distant-water fisheries, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork. Using the Indonesian term "stres" (stress) as an entry point, it explores how these fishers experience everyday violence through hazardous working conditions, social degradation, isolation, and precarious legal status, and how they actively engage in practices of self-protection and everyday resistance to maintain their physical safety, emotional well-being, and dignity. The study highlights the limitations of dominant discourses on modern slavery by focusing on the embodied, everyday exploitation and agency of migrant workers, including collective self-organization such as mediation task forces and ritual gatherings. It underscores the ambivalence of self-protection strategies, which both empower workers and contribute to sustaining exploitative labor regimes within racialized divisions of labor.