Migration and the senses

Recent scholarship in the sociological subfields of culture and immigration offers several promising directions for studying how people experience the world in embodied ways and move through and across boundaries. Yet, the lack of overlap between fields has left numerous theoretical angles unexplored. In this review, I consider the limited existing scholarship at the intersection of migration and the senses. I discuss literature on the role of sensation during three critical moments of migration: movement, encounter, and return. These moments highlight the sensorially dislocating nature of travel, the felt politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the transporting power of embodied memories. These works dive deep into the everyday realities of bodies on the move that public and academic discourse has previously ignored. I conclude by briefly outlining exciting new directions to expand work connecting migration and the senses and suggest that we begin to explore globalized migrant sensibilities.     

Is there a global super-bourgeoisie?

In recent decades, accelerating processes of globalization and an increase in economic inequality in most of the world's countries have raised the question of the emergence of a new bourgeoisie integrated at the global level, sometimes described as a global super-bourgeoisie. This group would be distinguished by its unequaled level of wealth and global interconnectedness, its transnational ubiquity and concentration in the planet's major global cities, its specific culture, consumption habits, sites of sociability and shared references, and even by class consciousness and capacity to act collectively. This article successively discusses how the social sciences have examined these various dimensions of the question and begun to provide systematic empirical answers.     

Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.     

Hometown associations and the micropolitics of transnational community development

This article argues that a closer inspection of the historical trajectories and the evolving micropolitics of hometown associations (HTAs) expands our understanding of how community development is practised across borders. Drawing from six years of ethnographic, multi-sited fieldwork carried out in the Dominican Republic and the United States, focusing on the experience of three Dominican HTAs, the evidence presented demonstrates how working dynamics and decision-making responsibilities between internal, international, and non-migrant HTA members shift over time, and identifies the organisational strategies employed to achieve transnational cooperation for community development. The ethnographic data also highlight and explain how communal legacies based on home country agrarian traditions laid the groundwork for future transnational development practices.     

The intersection of class origin and immigration background in structuring social capital: the role of transnational ties

The study investigates inequalities in access to social capital based on social class origin and immigration background and examines the role of transnational ties in explaining these differences. Social capital is measured with a position generator methodology that separates between national and transnational contacts in a sample of young adults in Sweden with three parental backgrounds: at least one parent born in Iran or Yugoslavia, or two Sweden‐born parents. The results show that having socioeconomically advantaged parents is associated with higher levels of social capital. Children of immigrants are found to have a greater access to social capital compared to individuals with native background, and the study shows that this is related to transnational contacts, parents’ education and social class in their country of origin. Children of immigrants tend to have more contacts abroad, while there is little difference in the amount of contacts living in Sweden across the three groups. It is concluded that knowledge about immigration group resources help us predict its member's social capital, but that the analysis also needs to consider how social class trajectories and migration jointly structure national and transnational contacts.     

Competing for the diaspora's influence at home: party structure and transnational campaign activity in El Salvador

ABSTRACT

How do parties in migrant-sending countries engage with the diaspora? Migrants exercise an increasingly important voice in electoral politics in their home countries, though they often either cannot legally vote or vote in very low numbers, yet parties attempt to leverage the influence they believe migrants have over voters at home. However the degree and manner by which parties reach out to diaspora citizens varies widely. A case study of El Salvador points to party organisation as a determinant of variation among parties in diaspora campaigning, based on interviews with Salvadoran party elites in the U.S. and El Salvador, party documents, and historical comparison of campaign activities of El Salvador's two major parties, ARENA and FMLN, over three presidential elections and one mayoral election. FMLN, with a hierarchical model and base committee structure, more effectively mobilizes diaspora support while ARENA, with a horizontal model and sectoral structure, exhibits difficulties in party-diaspora coordination and largely makes indirect and symbolic references to diaspora issues.     

The disinterested state: negative diasporic policy as an expression of state inclusion and national exclusion

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the understudied phenomenon of the ‘disinterested, denouncing’ diaspora state (Levitt, P., and N. G. Schiller. 2004. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.” International Migration Review 38 (3): 1002–1039. doi:10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x) or ‘indifferent’ diaspora state (Ragazzi, F. 2009. “Governing Diasporas.” International Political Sociology 3 (4): 378–397. doi:10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00082.x). Focusing on U.S. citizens abroad, the article argues that there is negative diasporic outreach on the part of the state – ‘disinterested’ from the state's perspective, but ‘denouncing’ from that of the diaspora. Negative diasporic outreach is exemplified by the 2010 FATCA legislation, which sought to root out tax evaders resident in the U.S., but has, instead, affected millions of American emigrants through increased financial control and the repercussions of those policies, and has resulted in sharply higher citizenship renunciation figures. Impact on an American diaspora was not considered in the law's proposal, debate and passage into law. Second, the article argues that this negative diasporic outreach, in combination with the continued facilitation of the right to vote, is a reflection of the inclusion of these American emigrants in the American state, but their simultaneous exclusion from the American nation.     

Introduction: Aspiring migrants,local crises and the imagination of futures ‘away from home’

This special issue addresses the imagination of futures ‘away from home’ in a globalising world. While a growing number of migration scholars have taken into account that migration considerations are always socially embedded and culturally informed, the processes at work among a mounting number of (young) men and women throughout the world, who are convinced that a better life can only be found ‘away from home’, have been notably understudied. This special issue goes beyond the study of migration aspirations as a question of migration only. It focuses on the specific contexts (in five different countries) within which migration dreams are born, and sometimes even cultivated. It explores the sociocultural embedding of these aspirations by investigating the interpretation of local realities versus global possibilities, and examines how the aspirations of so many worldwide link up to the wider interconnections between globalisation and the sociocultural, political and economic transformations ‘back home’.     

Moroccan women in Madrid: between change and continuity

This article focuses on individual migration and acculturation processes experienced by Moroccan women in the area of Madrid, based on qualitative research conducted in the Spanish capital in 2008. The results show that Moroccan women restructure their daily practices through complex acculturation processes, orienting them towards both the society of origin and that of arrival. They experience a constant struggle in getting to know the traditions of Spanish society, reorienting their former traditions and inventing new solutions. Moroccan women develop new ways of adapting themselves to their situation in Madrid. This acculturation process bridges the continuity with their culture of origin and reflects changes related to the new context. The studied women move in a transnational space with rigid borders, which is intersected by several social categories such as their education, ethnicity and gender, influencing their relative position within this space.     

Beyond “filling in the gap”: the state and status of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies

Against the socio-economic and cultural backdrop of the ongoing Latina/o media “boom,” this critical literature review delineates the location and status of contemporary Latina/o Feminist Media Studies. Departing from a critique of current mainstream Feminist Media Studies research and citational practices, it traces the influence of rapidly expanding transnational Latina/o media markets, the gendering of Latinidad, and transnational feminisms on recent Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholarship. As it not only breaks with exclusively domestic analyses of intersectionality and accurately reflects twenty-first century media’s transnational orientation, this essay argues that the theoretical paradigms and thematic concerns of Latina/o Feminist Media Studies must ultimately be reframed as central, not marginal, to Feminist Media Studies research.