Carers Cruising Cumbria and Meals on the Mile: The Drive of Migrants in Fieldwork and Fiction

Abstract

This article focuses on first-generation migrant workers in the service sector of England’s North West and their mobile subjectivities. It combines the research on cars and driving with the mobilities agenda on transnational migrants. In this essay, we draw from both fiction and fieldwork to explore the mobile experiences of migrants who work within the region’s ‘service diaspora’. Two inter-related stories unfold about cars, care and curry. Both groups, one in a city-region, and the other rurally based, are defined heavily by their mobile labour. By placing literary and oral accounts together, disparate locations and situations suddenly appear connected as never before and driving becomes embedded in migrant worlds in both real and imaginary ways.     

海外新移民与当代农村文化变迁——基于福建沿海J村的调查分析

作为当代农村人口流动的一种新现象,海外新移民潮的兴起对迁出地社会文化变迁的影响日益显著。本文以福建沿海J村为个案,通过对农民生活方式转变、个人价值观念更新以及农村传统伦理道德规范变化的依次分析,从微观角度对当代出国移民潮所引发的农村文化变迁进行解读,指出该现象是一个“传统”与“现代”发生搏弈、变异与融合的复杂过程,并呈现出“双刃剑”效应。     

Between the village and the global city: the production and decay of translocal spaces of Thai migrant workers in Singapore

This paper explores the mobilities and structural moorings of Thai labour migrants in Singapore from a translocal perspective. We argue that combining the mobilities paradigm with the concept of translocality offers a fruitful avenue of investigation not only of the production of translocal spaces, but also of their temporality and mutability. Through a multi-sited research approach we shed light on the genesis as well as the decay of translocal connections. This paper shows that translocal structures are important moorings of migration, and raises the question of what happens to translocal spaces when migration flows dissolve.