Social Mobility via academic mobility: reconfigurations in class and gender identities among Asian scholars in the global north

ABSTRACT

Geographic mobility is increasingly perceived worldwide as a key to academic excellence, career advancement and upward social mobility. Drawing on long-term qualitative fieldwork data, this paper interrogates the impact of academic mobility in reconfiguring class and gender identities among students, early professionals and their families from Hong Kong and Indonesia who have studied or received further training in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. This analysis problematises the crude ‘academic mobility?→?upward social mobility’ formula and considers international academic mobility as a contextual, dynamic and multi-directional process. Through this process social positions and identities of the moving individuals and families are negotiated in an on-going manner as migrants insert into, depart from and re-insert into the various social milieus where their mobility trajectories touch ground. Narratives of interviewees illustrate the complexity and contradictions in class and gender configurations as students move across borders. They show how these individuals are inserted in contrasting social positionings, and experience how a particular social class or gender position carries different connotations. The paper concludes with a few conceptual and methodological reflections.     

On becoming Mexican in Napa: Mexican immigrant girls negotiating challenges to transnational identities

This article examines the ethnic identity formation of high school aged Mexican immigrant adolescent girls. The ethnic identity is new to them and acts as a coping mechanism that allows them to confront the racial order and gender monitoring they experience at home and at their high school. Being Mexican allows them to make meaning of their immigrant experience. The author contends that these girls rather than disconnecting from their national ethnic identity are developing a stronger sense of being Mexican than if they had never left Mexico. However, developing a strong sense of being Mexican comes with challenges. This article is based on 20 unstructured interviews conducted at a local high school in Napa, California. The interviews trace the identity transitions and challenges each girl experienced both before migration and after they arrived in the US. The author finds that they develop an ethnic identity based on their memories of Mexico that they share amongst each other where they long to continue to be part of their old community. The stories of girls point to the identity transitions Mexican immigrant youth experience. Their stories also point to how identities are not clean sequential transitions, but are rather messy, conflicting, and contradictory.     

Transnational mobility among early-career academics: gendered aspects of negotiations and arrangements within heterosexual couples

ABSTRACT

Today, transnational mobility is often presented as indispensable for a successful academic career. This institutionalisation of transnational mobility for young academics has important effects in (re)producing or transforming gender inequalities. Building on the results of a qualitative study conducted at three universities – Zurich (Switzerland), UCLA (U.S.A), and Cambridge (UK) – this paper examines the mobility experiences of early-career academics and their partners and seeks to understand the gendered mechanisms underlying mobility patterns. Drawing on three case studies, this paper focuses on the negotiations and arrangements of mobile couples. Each case study represents a different ideal-typical pattern of how gender is entangled with mobility. We show how gender is ‘done’ and ‘undone’ by the academics and their partners throughout these mobility trajectories, and how these couples’ negotiations and practices are closely entangled with gender representations that are structurally anchored in labour markets and discursively expressed within the wider social environment. As such, this paper questions the dichotomy between economic men and social and cultural women sometimes reproduced in studies on highly skilled migration. Furthermore, the findings challenge earlier studies that suggest a causal link between mobility and the leaky pipeline by showing that important transformations with regard to gender relations are occurring.     

Liquid migration,grounded lives: considerations about future mobility and settlement among Polish and Spanish migrants in Norway

The 2004 EU extension and the 2008 financial crisis triggered new migration flows within Europe, and subsequent debates about what the novelty of these migration flows consists of. We draw on adult Polish and Spanish migrants’ in Norway’s considerations about future mobility and settlement, and explore how these situate themselves in relation to conceptualisations of intra-European migration as ‘liquid’. Family concerns, economic factors and working life conditions in countries of origin appear as significant in migrants’ reflections about the future. This seems to contrast with conceptualisations of intra-European migration as ‘liquid’ in the sense of increasing individualisation, lifestyles of mobility and a migrant habitus. Rather a ‘normal life’ is emphasised by migrants’ underscoring desires to lead more grounded lives, under less ‘liquid’ conditions. Migrants’ already established lives in Norway, together with deregulated labour markets in Poland and Spain, are experienced as reasons not to return. Migrants’ considerations about the future suggest that key characteristics of South–North and East–West intra-European migration flows to Norway, appear to be converging: with a trend of transition to longer-term settlement and a wish for more grounded lives, where dignity is central and ongoing mobility is less prominent.     

Ethnic,gender and class identities of Polish migrant mothers: intersecting maternal narratives with transnationalism and integration

ABSTRACT

Based on a doctoral study of Polish migrant mothers living in Germany and the United Kingdom, this paper examines women's narratives pertinent to ethnicity, gender and social class, as well as the mutual entanglements of these dimensions. While the ethnic identity matrix often evokes dimensions of transnationalism and integration, the addition of the femininity component illustrates the diversity among contemporary Polish migrant women in Western Europe with regard to their identity practices. The analyses of transnational, translocal and cosmopolitan orientations highlight their binding to a contextualized understanding of femininity – its various markers and corollary epitome of motherhood, particularly in the Polish context. The main findings comprise an ideal-type based typology of migrant mothering, which sheds light on how mobility and gender intersect. The discussions adopt the social class lens in an attempt to focus on the implications of certain maternal and migrant identities among Polish women. By underscoring the value of both integration and transnationalism perspectives, the paper calls for additional aspects of translocality and hybridization, seeing them as noticeable social markers of the Polish female migrants’ biographies.     

Moving citizens: citizenship practices among Polish migrants in Norway and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Following post-EU-accession migration, Poles currently form the largest group of foreign nationals in Norway and the second largest group of foreign born residents in the United Kingdom. Given the considerable volume of new arrivals, there is a growing literature on Polish migration to both countries; however, there is little comparative research on Polish migration across different European settings. By exploring how Polish migrants reflect on the possibilities of settlement or return, this paper comparatively examines the effects that permanent and ‘normalised’ mobility has on Polish migrants’ self-perception as citizens in four different cities. In addition to classic citizenship studies, which highlight the influence of a nation-state based institutionalised citizenship regime, we find that transnational exchanges, local provisions and inter-personal relationships shape Polish migrants’ practices of citizenship. The resulting understanding of integration is processual and sees integration as constituted by negotiated transnational balancing acts that respond to (and sometimes contradict) cultural, economic and political demands and commitments. The research is based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with a total of 80 respondents, conducted in two British and two Norwegian cities that experienced significant Polish immigration, Oslo, Bergen, Bristol and Sheffield.     

Providing social protection to mobile populations: symbiotic relationships between migrants and welfare institutions

Studies on migration and social protection have shown that a lack of access to formal welfare in receiving countries leads migrants to rely on their informal social networks for support. This paper argues that such clear-cut dichotomies between formal and informal social protection systems ignore the manners in which both welfare-state institutions and migrants work together at the interstices of the formal and informal to cater to national and transnational social protection needs. Based on empirical data collected during 14 months of multi-sited and partially matched-sample ethnography with Sudanese families across the Netherlands and Sudan, this paper investigates how migrants sometimes enter into symbiotic relationships with different welfare-state institutions, such as municipal offices, non-governmental organisations and other immigration institutions, which in turn rely on the support of these migrants to provide social protection to people who would otherwise escape their purview. While these interplays allow migrants, who are sometimes undocumented, to informally participate in the formal social protection system, such practices are embedded within power relationships that are at times risky, especially for migrants.     

Recycling the idea of race: socio-political agenda,transnational business culture,and diversity management in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article intends to contribute to the line of studies that critically addresses diversity management, bringing the Brazilian experience into the discussion. It aims to demonstrate how large Brazilian companies and transnational corporations operating in the country have been recycling the idea of race in order to cope with the greatest politicisation of debates on the racial issue within the Brazilian public sphere since the late twentieth century. This phenomenon is related to changes in the political actions of the black movement in Brazil, which since the same period has been absorbing the new socio-political agenda existing within the global network of anti-racism advocacy. This is an agenda in which two purposes have a central importance: the battle against racial inequality and the demand for affirmative action policies. The data presented in this paper are part of broader research in which, by means of the biographical method and the ethnographic fieldwork, the social trajectories and career paths of two generations of Brazilian black executives were analysed.     

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

ABSTRACT

This special issue showcases work that theorises and critiques the political, economic, legal, and socio-historical (‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’) subordination of the European Roma (so-called ‘Gypsies’), from the specific critical vantage point of Roma migrants living and working within and across the space of the European Union (EU). Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of ‘Europe’, the contributions to this collection are likewise concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the sociopolitical formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma living and working outside of their nation-states of ‘origin’ or ostensible citizenship, we seek to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialisation of Roma migrants, in particular, and imposed upon migrants, generally. Thus, this special issue situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe. Furthermore, this volume shifts the focus conventionally directed at the academic objectification of ‘the Roma’ as such, and instead seeks to foreground and underscore questions about ‘Europe’, ‘European’-ness, and EU-ropean citizenship that come into sharper focus through the critical lens of Roma racialisation, marginalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of ‘Europe’. In this way, this collection contributes new research and expands critical interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of Romani studies, ethnic and racial studies, migration studies, political and urban geography, social anthropology, development studies, postcolonial studies, and European studies.     

Motivations for mobility and settlement of Polish female migrants in Barcelona and Berlin

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on individual perceptions that shape migration decisions and investigates how the process of migration or settlement itself is framed by a variety of personal considerations. It is a comparative study of Polish female migrants in Barcelona and Berlin who moved for the sake of economic and educational opportunities, because of family reunification and formation considerations (‘move for love') – as well as other reasons. It is argued that the factors influencing women's decisions about continuous mobility or settlement are negotiated within social, cultural and economic transnational spheres and exchanges. In most cases, Polish women formed families with foreigners or Polish migrants in the host countries which contributed to their settlement decisions. Complex perceptions of life abroad juxtaposed with previous experiences and present ideas about life in Poland also influence decisions to move or settle. It is argued that the specific cultural, intellectual, economic and professional capital as well as the potential of these privileged EU migrant women accounts for their opportunity to choose and their specific freedom to make migration related decisions. A balancing of premises related to life-projects in both localities is an important aspect of the gendered experience of migration within Europe. It also brings attention to individual agency in a globalized world. The study is based on ethnographic research in Barcelona and Berlin that has been conducted since 2010.     

Being a desirable migrant: perception and racialisation of Icelandic migrants in Norway

In the aftermath of the financial crisis that hit Iceland in October 2008, increased numbers of Icelanders migrated to Norway to seek employment due to difficult economic circumstances in Iceland. Using critical perspectives from postcolonial studies and critical whiteness studies, the paper explores how these Icelandic migrants in Norway make sense of their new position as economic migrants within a global economy characterised by a growing sense of precariousness, while past inequalities and racism continue to matter. We also examine how these migrants are perceived in Norwegian media, and how social discourses of Icelandic migrants reflect larger Norwegian debates on racism, desirability and cultural belonging. Media discourses in Norway and interviews with Icelandic migrants reveal a hierarchy of acceptability of migrants. Icelanders are positioned as highly desirable compared to other migrant groups due to the intersection of perceived racial belonging, nationality and class. Our discussion contributes, furthermore, towards a critical analysis of the category migrant, by exploring how the term immigrant (innvandrer/innflytjandi) is used in narratives of Icelandic migrants in Norway and in Norwegian media discussions, showing the negative and racialised connotations of the term immigrant and how its understanding is linked with vulnerable positions and discrimination.     

Making the transnational move: deliberation,negotiation, and disjunctures among overseas Chinese returnees in China

As Chinese cities compete aggressively for foreign-educated Chinese labour from afar and offer enticing recruitment packages, little is known about how targeted foreign-educated Chinese navigate these programmes across transnational space. This article explores the relationship between the talent recruitment programmes the Chinese state fiercely promote and the experiences of U.S.-educated Chinese returnees. Drawing upon the literature on neoliberal globalisation, skilled return migration, and Chinese diaspora engagement, I argue that transnationally connected and mobile migrants do not subscribe to the nationalistic development agenda of a particular state but move across transnational spaces by strategically utilising different forms of capital at their disposal. Based on qualitative data collected in China between 2014 and 2016, this article demonstrates that despite strong push from the Chinese state towards patriotism, foreign-educated Chinese returnees do not subscribe to the inherently place-based, nationalistic development agenda. Rather, they utilise different forms of capital that these initiatives provide in ways the Chinese state has not intended: to enhance mobility across national borders and flexibility to organise their careers and detach themselves from particular places. More work is called for to further theorise the experiences of these transnational elites and the new subjectivities emerging from these processes.     

The precarious path of student migrants: education,debt, and transnational migration among Indian youth

The drive to internationalise campuses is an important dimension of the globalised neoliberal university, and it is leading to large numbers of students crossing national borders to pursue their education. As key global consumers of higher education, middle-class students from India migrating overseas to study are at the centre of this trend. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted at a public university in New York, this article considers how notions of obligation become critical to these students’ movements, their practices of place-making, and their futures. I use the term educational debts to capture the different forms of indebtedness that not only structure these young people’s educational migration, but also inform the sensibility shaping their negotiations of everyday life as overseas students. Attending specifically to their experiences with work, both the part-time labour they provide on campus and their search for work after they receive their degrees, I argue that educational debts position them precariously in the linkages between global education and labour markets. Elucidating how particular experiences of precarity are produced through the process of educational migration, this article offers insights into the differences that exist among the transnational class formations of Indian high-skilled migrant populations in the neoliberal era.     

Shehri (city) brides between Indian Punjab and the UK: transnational hypergamy,Sikh women's agency and gendered geographies of power

This paper explores Sikh transnational marriages contracted between the UK and Indian Punjab. Ethnographic and statistical studies have found that transnational marriage is less popular among UK-born Indian Sikhs than Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. Those who marry transnationally tend to be less educated than those who marry in the UK, and there is an apparent pattern in transnational marriages wherein UK-born men are likely to marry women from India who are more educated than themselves, or shehri (city) women as they are called in Punjabi. The paper explores two shehri brides’ lived experience of marriage and explores the constraints on their agency and the forms that it takes at a number of ‘geographies’ or scales: in their relationships with their natal families, with their in-laws, husbands, the labour market and the state. The paper argues that state discourses problematising marriage migration in socio-economic and integration terms must be critiqued, not only because the shehri brides go against classed policy framings of the migrant wife but also because such framings deny the agency of all migrant women as they struggle to move on with their lives over time.     

Changing places: children of return migrants in Albania and their quest to belong

This study examines the experiences of children of return migrants to Albania following the economic crisis in Europe. Adopting a longitudinal approach in which participants were followed-up after a year and employing participative qualitative research methods, the study investigates how perceptions of local and translocal spaces and social relations interact to shape children’s (aged 7–12 years) sense of belonging to their parents’ homeland. Findings suggest that the children’s initial positioning is influenced by a perceived lack of everyday places of play and unsettled local interactions with peers. The research indicates further that, over time, children actively seek to inhabit and identify with their new surroundings and that meaning-making is shaped by experiences that transcend multiple localities. It documents how children of return migrants attain a sense of belonging via interacting with different physical and social contexts in a complex process which appears simultaneously facilitated and impeded by adults. Overall, the findings of this research suggest that children’s sense of belonging is negotiated in relation to multiple temporal and spatial frames of reference to which children attribute meaning.     

Ethnic entrepreneurship and the question of agency: the role of different forms of capital,and the relevance of social class

The literature on ethnic entrepreneurship has focused on structural factors, group characteristics or a combination of both when explaining the entry and/or success of different ethnic groups in/to self-employment. While the active involvement of individuals has often been noted, agency has been under-theorised, and frequently conflated with what are considered as ‘cultural’ factors. This article explores the question of agency in ethnic entrepreneurship by looking at how entrepreneurs access and mobilise different kinds of resources. Using a forms-of-capital approach, the article draws on qualitative data from the U.K. and Spain, and looks at how entrepreneurs mobilise cultural, social and economic resources in structural contexts that include constraining as well as enabling features. Our findings show that the entrepreneurs are active agents who play an important role in shaping ethnic businesses. However, their agency varies significantly depending on the extent to which entrepreneurs have access to different kinds of resources, which is closely linked to their socioeconomic position. The article contributes to the literature through its direct engagement with the question of agency in ethnic entrepreneurship, and by highlighting the relevance of social class in entrepreneurial processes.     

1.5 generation Asian migrants and intergenerational transnationalism: Thoughts and challenges from New Zealand

This article analyses New Zealand's post-1987 immigration patterns, specifically the arrival of East Asian professionals and their families, and their impact on the demographic and cultural composition of New Zealand society. The discussion addresses a specific and under-theorised category of migrants: school-aged children who migrate with their parents, identified as the ‘1.5 generation’. Focusing on the unique position and attributes of the 1.5 generation, it is posited that New Zealand's new intergenerational transmigrant communities seriously challenge conventional attempts to explain – and manage – migrant settlement and incorporation into host societies.     

Introduction: international academic mobility and inequalities

ABSTRACT

Higher education is one of the social fields where inequalities are produced and reproduced. Nevertheless, we still know very little about the ways in which heterogeneities and inequalities have been experienced and interpreted by those involved in international academic mobility. In this introductory editorial, we consider some of the crucial conceptual issues involved in the study of the nexus between inequalities and international academic mobility. First, we argue that it is important to take manifold inequalities into account when examining this nexus. After all, inequalities can be detected at different levels, and the mobility process is structured around multiple heterogeneities rather than by a single one. Second, we discuss how international academic mobility and inequalities attached to it go beyond nation-state borders. Third, we argue it is beneficial to extend the scope of to the mobility process as a whole, as inequalities in opportunities and outcomes are intrinsically connected.     

Breaking the silences,breaking the frames: a gendered diasporic analysis of sexual violence in the DRC

ABSTRACT

The role of diasporas in fuelling conflict has been extensively studied, with much less attention being paid to their role in peace-building. It is increasingly recognised that diasporas from conflict regions are contributing to the reconstruction of their countries of origin, acting as ‘peace-makers’ rather than ‘peace-wreckers’. Women and men migrants have also been found to engage differently towards their country of origin, but attention to women’s activism is still scarce. This article addresses the issue of political activism by Congolese women in the diaspora in both the UK and Belgium. Their activities are assessed analytically through the prism of ‘mechanisms of framing’, which shape the ways in which messages are conveyed during the mobilisation process. The paper discusses diagnostic, motivational and prognostic frames to address sexual and gender-based violence against Congolese women in the protracted conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Framing strategies vary among Congolese diaspora women’s groups depending on the national context in which they are embedded (Belgium and the UK) but a variety of narratives is also discerned which transcends and is shared among Congolese women beyond national borders.