Navigating the city: internal migration of Oaxacan indigenous women

The relationship between migration and gender roles has received increased attention in recent decades but most of the literature has focused on transnational migration while the relationships between transnational and internal migration, and gender roles and internal migration have not been widely studied. In this paper, I analyse internal migration as a ‘transborder experience’. I argue that indigenous women from Zegache who engage in internal migration to Mexico City pose greater challenges to ‘traditional’ gender roles in their community because their experience as single young women navigating Mexico’s capital and their reliance on female social networks allow them to obtain social legitimation by claiming migration experience and courageousness. I contrast migration to Mexico City with transnational migration. Although transnational migration challenges, to some extent, existing gender roles, women from Zegache who migrate transnationally often do so as part of couples and within gendered social networks.     

Review article

Social processes in the world today are characterized by the growing importance of relations between actors located in different national spaces (transnational relations). Based on case studies, this article illustrates how nowadays transnational relations between local and transnational actors affect in different ways the social production of representations that are sociopolitically significant – insofar as they articulate meanings in the constitution and practices of social organizations and movements of diverse political orientations. Through the analysis of cases related to the social production of representations of ideas of pan-ethnic indigenous identities, ‘culture and development’, ‘civil society’, and ‘free trade’, this text seeks to contribute to the theoretical debate about culture, communication, and social change in the contemporary world. The cases discussed in this article are based on field and documentary research undertaken in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela.     

Gender and citizenship in academic career progression: an intersectional,meso-scale analysis in German higher education institutions

ABSTRACT

In tune with the fundamental shift in Germany’s skill-b(i)ased immigration policy since 2005, higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly becoming ‘magnets’ for a skilled migrant workforce. While ‘internationalisation’ is often understood as something to be celebrated and (further) accomplished, some observers speak of clear signs of discriminatory experiences among racialised and migrant academics. This is a new aspect, as social inequalities have by and large been considered in migration studies to be the sole terrain of labour mobility into less-skilled sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, abundant literature on gender and higher education shows that women academics have poorer access to career progression than men, demonstrating gender-based academic career inequalities. However, the insights generated in these two strands of scholarship have seldom been in conversation with one another. This paper takes stock of the lack of an intersectional perspective, focusing on citizenship and gender within HEIs as hiring meso-level organisations that are becoming increasingly transnationalised. It explores the intersectionality of citizenship and gender in accessing academic career advancement by examining three key career stages, that is, doctoral researchers, postdoctoral researchers, and professors, in two case-study HEIs.     

Reconciling transnational mobility and national social security: what say the welfare state bureaucrats?

The welfare state was constructed to ensure the well-being of a sedentary population, consisting of citizens living within the territorial boundaries of the nation. However, mobility patterns change, and more people lead lives that criss-cross national borders while drawing on different sources of transnational social protection – the welfare state included. Now, the daily work of bureaucrats involves delivering national social security benefits to transnationally mobile recipients. Through encounters and casework processes, these welfare state bureaucrats observe how ‘transnationals’ deal with complex regulations and make use of the social security system. This article explores bureaucrats’ perceptions of individuals’ agency and behaviour as they reconcile their transnational mobility with national social security. It builds on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in the Norwegian welfare administration, including 36 interviews, participant observation and informal conversations. The analysis identifies an institutional perspective of transnationals’ agency as shaped by their level of regulatory awareness and compliance. The bureaucrats observe some types of transnational behaviour to be more prevalent than others. As the article concludes, these bureaucratic perspectives have major implications for transnational social security delivery and how the welfare state accommodates transnational mobility.     

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.     

Enabling,structuring and creating elite transnational lifestyles: intermediaries of the super-rich and the elite mobilities industry

ABSTRACT

This article considers how the migration industries lens can be usefully employed in understanding how professional intermediaries enable, structure, and create transnational migration lifestyles of the super-rich. In particular, we examine how intermediaries and their services (1) enable the continued sustenance of transnational migration lifestyles for this group of elites; and (2) structure and create elite transnational lifestyles. This article primarily draws on interviews with professional intermediaries who service the super-rich, and content analysis of their websites and brochures. Inspired by insights from the new mobilities paradigm (and in particular the politics of mobility), we argue for an expanded conceptualisation of the migration industries beyond the literature’s current focus on labour recruitment and migration management. Specifically, we suggest thinking of the migration industries as a collection of actors and services that enable, structure, and create different types of ‘migrants’, their spaces and their highly uneven transnational mobilities – including that of the super-rich and their elite transnational lifestyles. We conclude with suggestions for a research agenda that may help to better understand the role of intermediaries in the creation of differentiated mobilities.     

Multiple belongings: transnational mobility,social class,and gendered identities among Polish migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT

Using ethnographic research in Norway and in Poland, this article focuses on the dynamics of multiple belongings of Polish migrants. It explores their experiences of belonging in relation to social class, gendered identities, and their different strategies of transnational mobility between Poland and Norway. By approaching belonging ‘from below’, we posit that it is a dynamic, processual, and socially and culturally constructed attachment to places, times, and communities, which includes experiential, practical, and affective dimensions. Considering the importance of questions of belonging and home-making in migrants’ lives, always contextually produced and read through performative reiterations, we focus on migrants’ daily routines and migratory practices, and argue that belonging is a multifaceted process, which takes on diverse forms and meanings of ‘who’ belongs to ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. Following intersectional perspective, the article aims at problematizing dependencies between mobility, gender, class, and migrants’ multiple belongings, and thereby, enhancing the understanding of the notion of belonging and its embeddedness in the inter-related social, cultural, economic, and political realms.     

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.     

Breaking borders,changing structures – transnationalism of migrants from Poland as anti-state resistance

ABSTRACT

Among the many meanings of transnationalism(s), the political significance of transnational action from the perspective of individual migrants does not always gain enough attention. It is usually framed as a way transnational migration processes affect the state, how social movements formed in the diaspora compete for the stake in the home country or how a particular state manages its diaspora through various policy means. This article will call for a more actor-centred approach in which individuals’ choices and strategic decisions have an anti-state frame of reference dominating their individualised agendas and norms of behaviour. These are not overtly political, thus falling outside a typical political science lens, but follow what James Scott refers to as ‘small scale resistance’ or ‘weapons of the weak’ of structurally subordinate groups. In the case of Polish migrants I discuss, this follows a long-lasting tradition of contestation of the state normative and institutional structures, its surveillance, migration regimes and ways in which institutions aim to control human actions. With the advent of increased mobility within the European Union due to EU integration processes and the subsequent volume of these flows, these types of behaviour and cultural attitudes gain particular prominence offering a variety of means and opportunities to manoeuver between structural constraints, contesting them and at times even changing them to individual advantage. I argue that these culturally and structurally mutually reinforcing features of anti-state culture make migrants from Poland a particular type of agents in the European web of transnational social fields.     

‘The endless winter’: transnational mobilities of skilled snow sport workers

This article takes up Newman and Falcous’ (2012) challenge to move sport migration studies beyond the career-based travels of the sporting elite and to ‘cultivate new accounts of the affects of global sport mobility on the experiences’ of a wide range of people involved in sporting cultures and industries (48). Working at the intersection of sport migration and lifestyle mobilities scholarship, this paper focuses on the seasonal migration experiences of passionate skiers and snowboarders who have dedicated many years to working in ski resorts as instructors, terrain park-crew, and managers. Drawing primarily upon in-depth interviews with six long-term snow sport workers, the author examines the opportunities, constraints and negotiations of those following the winter between the hemispheres for work and leisure, as well as those who have transitioned out of this highly mobile career. She concludes by examining how snow sport participants’ transnational experiences influence their emotional connections to place and understandings of ‘home’ well after their careers in the snow sport industry have come to an end.     

Caste,kinship and the realisation of ‘American Dream’: high-skilled Telugu migrants in the U.S.A.

ABSTRACT

Literature on the Indian diaspora domiciled in the U.S.A. largely portrays the group as educated, highly skilled migrants in pursuit of their American Dream, without critically engaging with the regionally particularised migration trajectories that predispose only certain groups to become skilled migrants from the global South to the North. Migration studies bracket skilled migrants as those who make rational choices and choose formal routes to migrate whereas unskilled migrants often rely on informal channels of kinship or ethnicity to migrate. Unsettling this proposition, in this article, based on an ethnographic study of the high-skilled Telugu professionals in the U.S.A. and their families living in Coastal Andhra, India, I show how aspirational and topographical migration pathways from Coastal Andhra to the U.S.A. are created and sustained through networks of kinship, caste and endogamous transnational marriage alliances. These high-skilled migrants (doctors, engineers and scientists) from the dominant castes have successfully manoeuvred spatial mobility and social upward mobility by utilising ‘caste capital’ within a transnational social field. Moreover, decades of migration from the dominant castes have shaped a caste-inflected transnational habitus among its members who see migration of their youth to the U.S.A. as desirable, and at times, also inevitable.     

Patterns of im/mobility,conflict and the re/making of identity narratives*

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the interrelationship between patterns of im/mobility on the one hand and the reconstitution of social collective identities and the related emergence or settlement of conflicts on the other. The main arguments are (1) that the im/mobility of a social or cultural group has major impact on how identity narratives, a sense of belonging and relationships to ‘others’ are shaped, and vice versa, and (2) that these dynamics are closely interlinked with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion between groups and power structures that involve a broad variety of actors. Mainly looking at patterns of internal mobility such as ‘traditional’ or strategic mobilities and mobilities enforced by crisis, conflict or governmental programmes and regimes, the contribution provides the conceptual background for a special issue that aims to go beyond currently predominant issues of transnational migration. Established or emerging dynamics of (non-)integration and belonging, caused by im/mobility, are analysed on a cultural and political level, which involves questions of representation, indigeneity/autochthony, political rights and access to land and other resources. Conflict situations in contexts of mobility involve changes in the social understanding and renegotiation, reconstruction or reproduction of group identities and narratives with reference to certain socio-political and historical patterns. The legitimation of rights and access to various forms of citizenship and mobility need to be understood against the backdrop of emerging or established mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion between groups, which trigger or settle conflicts and make social identities to be constantly renegotiated.     

Heritage corridors: transnational flows and the built environment of migration

ABSTRACT

In settler nations such as Australia, which have high migrant intakes, a category of cultural heritage practice has emerged that focuses on the material record of immigration. Currently, a nation-bounded approach tends to be taken to the recording and interpretation of this heritage, an approach that largely ignores the transnational social fields to which the immigrants who created the heritage places and buildings belonged. I propose the concept ‘heritage corridor’ to aid in conceptualising the transnational connectivity between migrant heritage sites in Australia and overseas locales as well as the bi-directional flow of ideas and capital that is often materially evident in the built environments, both rural and urban, encompassed by such a corridor. Focusing on Chinese overseas migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I describe how transnational remittances were instrumental in the building of houses, temples, schools, shops, roads and bridges in Guangdong Province, many of which are now regarded as heritage items. As an example of how the field of heritage studies may productively dialogue with migration studies, new thinking on material agency is drawn upon to account for the way remittance-built houses become entangled in the lives and aspirations of those at opposite poles of a heritage corridor.     

The transnational career aspirations of France’s high-achieving second-generation Maghrebi migrants

This article examines the mobility aspirations of France’s high-achieving second-generation Maghrebi migrants. Drawing on in-depth, open-ended interviews with students and graduates of grandes ecoles, prestigious higher education institutions, it delves into the career trajectories they intend to embark on beyond the French borders. Three distinct mobility projects are envisioned by the respondents. While some contemplate intensifying their ties with their parents’ homeland, others envisage moving to a ‘third space’ in which they have commonly lived during their studies and established strong connections. Another group of informants seek to set up hyper-mobile careers spanning multiple global-cities. The article suggests that the threat of discrimination and the desire to defy the nation-based assimilationist rhetoric frame the desire to set up transnational pathways. It further disentangles the role of educational resources, social capital in the places envisioned, as well as gender processes in informing these distinctive ways of engaging with the transnational among second-generation migrants. Lastly, the article examines the specific trajectories of respondents who intend to remain in France.     

Beyond breadwinning: Ghanaian transnational fathering in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This article probes how gender norms and male migrants’ legal and socio-economic position shape transnational fathering amongst Ghanaian-born fathers, residing in the Netherlands, who have one or more children living in Ghana. Drawing on ethnographic research with Ghanaian transnational fathers, this article compares fathers’ attitudes and actual practices. In conformity with cultural expectations of fatherhood in Ghana, the men in this study primarily addressed their paternal role in terms of financial support for their families as ‘breadwinners’. Alongside breadwinning responsibilities, however, over three-quarters of the Ghanaian fathers espoused more ‘engaged’ parenting ideals, challenging stereotypes of the uncaring and distant migrant father who neglects his ‘stay-behind’ children’s emotional needs. Our analysis shows that fathers’ legal and socio-economic status largely determines men’s possibilities to perform their material and ‘emotionally engaged’ paternal ideals across borders. The emotional distance was particularly pronounced for undocumented and low-income migrants who were legally or financially incapable of bridging the emotional gulf arising from physical distance.     

Social remittances and intra-EU mobility: non-financial transfers between U.K. and Poland

The massive rise in intra-European Union (EU) mobility in recent decades has spawned several important social and cultural phenomena that are still not covered by academic research. Social remittances – the transfer of ideas, practices, codes of behaviours, values and norms between the place of origin and destination are an important aspect of social change and modernity and they are still to be explored and documented. However, not all migrants acquire, transfer and implement them in the same way. Ongoing acts of resistance, imitation and innovation are involved, so that some migrants become ‘ordinary agents of change’ in their local microcosms, while others may contest that change. Tracing these processes in a transnational perspective through a three-year transnational multi-sited qualitative longitudinal research, this article offers an in-depth look at the consequences of human mobility within the enlarged EU.     

Navigating the migration industry: migrants moving through an African-European web of facilitation/control

ABSTRACT

This paper approaches the African-European migration industry as a complex web of relations in which different actors liaise, objectives oppose each other, and roles overlap. Starting from this notion, the question emerges: How do migrants navigate this fuzzy web of migration facilitation/control? To answer this question, this paper uses a ‘trajectory ethnography’ that follows the im/mobility processes of migrants from West – and Central Africa to, and inside, Europe. In so doing, it particularly focuses on two practices that are related to the concept of social navigation. First, it concerns débrouillardise, a term that points to the power of improvisation, creativity and hustling. Second, it regards social negotiation, a term referring to the process of how migrants ‘massage’ their relations with important actors in the field. The findings stress the relational dimension of the migration industry in the sense that the functioning of one actor depends so much on the intentions and efforts of others. I conclude that we could enhance our knowledge on migration industries with studies that constantly shift between the perspective of the migrant, the social network, the facilitator and controller. Such a dynamic approach unpacks further the multiple efforts that produce migrant im/mobility.     

Education and national identity in a comparative context

A missing link in the voluminous chain of prior studies on Canadian versus American identity is a comparative analysis of the impact of social studies – especially civics – education on the construction of national identity in these two North American nation-states. This article analyzes curricular documents and secondary-level school textbooks to learn more about how social studies education contributes to constructing a sense of ‘being a Canadian’ versus ‘being an American’ north and south of the 49th parallel.     

The strategic uses of race to legitimize ‘social mix’ urban redevelopment

ABSTRACT

This article contends examines how racialization – the strategic employment of racial discourses to both define- and legitimize-specific social and spatial changes – serves as an adaptive and strategic means for city leaders and developers to control, define, plan and implement efforts to reshape impoverished neighborhoods. The deployment of racial tropes and narratives, such as diversity and ‘social mix’, organize and make legible redevelopment and its consequences of displacement for communities of poor minority residents. Urban development initiatives are imagined, worked out, legitimated and reconciled in an urban politics that relies on the deployment of racialized discourses of colorblindness, inclusivity and diversity. Drawing on a case study of redevelopment of Regent Park in Toronto, Canada, the paper examines how minorities are placed in the position of combatting socioeconomic and spatial inequalities, including displacement, on racial terms set by white elites.     

Parental migration and disruptions in everyday life: reactions of left-behind children in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

Increasing feminisation of transnational labour migration has raised concerns over potential ‘care crises’ at home, and consequently a ‘care deficit’ for children left in origin countries. Our paper focuses on how left-behind children from Indonesia and the Philippines understand, engage and react to changes in their everyday lives in their parents’ absence. While many children had no say over their care arrangements, some were able to assert their agency in influencing their parents’ decisions and eventually migratory behaviours. Their thoughts and actions reinforce the importance of including children’s views in development and migration studies to improve both the children’s and families’ well-being, and make migration a sustainable strategy for all.