Scholars of ethnicity should care about tourism

Ｔｏｕｒｉｓｔｉｃｅｔｈｎｉｃｉｔｙｉｓｉｎｃｒｅａｓｉｎｇｌｙｉｍｐｏｒｔａｎｔｆｏｒｕｎｄｅｒｓｔａｎｄｉｎｇｅｔｈｎｉｃｒｅｌａｔｉｏｎｓ,ｃｕｌｔｕｒｅａｎｄｉｄｅｎ ｔｉｔｙｉｎｔｈｅｗｏｒｌｄｔｏｄａｙ .Ｅｍｐｉｒｉｃａｌｌｙ ,ｔｈｉｓｒｅｆｌｅｃｔｓｔｈｅｓｐｒｅａｄａｎｄｉｍｐｏｒｔａｎｃｅｏｆｔｈｅｔｏｕｒｉｓｍｉｎｄｕｓｔｒｙａｎｄｉｔｓｍａｎｙｒａｍｉｆｉｃａｔｉｏｎｓｆｏｒｅｔｈｎｉｃｉｔｙ .Ｔｈｅｏｒｅｔｉｃａｌｌｙ ,ｔｈｅｓｔｕｄｙｏｆｔｏｕｒｉｓｔｉｃｅｔｈｎｉｃｉｔ…     

An invisible minority? Return migration and ethnicity in Okinawa*

This paper examines ethnic return migration in Japan by looking at a particular case – that of people of half-Okinawan parentage returning to Okinawa, referred to in this paper as the Nisei. By going beyond conventional theories that entice people to return migrate to their ethnic homelands, I also look at issues regarding nationality and how the category of ‘Japanese’ tends to conflate race and ethnicity, thus creating boundaries as well as ‘invisible minorities’. I also explore how ethnicity and nationality intersect using this particular case and how these intersections are actually created and enabled through processes of migration. In line with this, I also discuss how ‘Japanese’ and ‘half’ are both ascribed and self-ascribed identities, and how each of these two categories delineate ‘boundaries’ and hence engage in ‘boundary-making process/es’.     

Cross-border mobility,transnationality and ethnicity as resources: european Somalis’ post-migration mobility practices

Based on a qualitative study, this article explores post-migration mobility practices developed by Somali women and men who have settled in Europe. It focuses on the ‘politics of mobility’, considering cross-border mobility an unequally distributed resource through which people access different forms of capital, and thus an element of social differentiation. The article reveals that respondents invest resources in places other than those where they acquired them, benefiting from a favourable symbolic exchange rate between the different places. Furthermore, while a significant part of the economic, social and cultural capital of these migrants is acquired within ethnically diversified contexts, it is mostly reinvested in networks and places where their Somali ethnicity becomes an asset—either in ethnically homogeneous networks or in activities that address Somali people's needs. Cross-border mobility, transnationality and ethnicity become core resources that enable these migrants to mobilise their capital where it can be valued most highly and to access advantageous social positions, thus fostering upward social mobility. The article argues that these strategies are less the result of an identity-based ethnic preference than a compensatory mechanism implemented by people who have few prospects of having their assets valued within the wider networks in their country of residence.     

Unpacking racial identities: the salience of ethnicity in Southeast Asian-American youth’s schooling experience

This article reconceptualizes white teachers’ notion of their Asian-American students’ racial identity. Forty urban Southeast Asian-American (SEAA) students and seven of their white European-American teachers were examined to determine how the students responded to the white teachers’ assumptions about their identity. This study provides an overview of the U.S. historical and political contexts that shape the positionality of Southeast Asian-American youth in the black–white racial discourse. It found that despite the fact that the teachers lumped the SEAA students into one category, the students highlighted the salience of ethnicity in their lives. One implication of this study is for teacher education programs to train new teacher candidates to move beyond simple racial categorization or race-blind approaches. Instead, teachers should be taught to acknowledge the importance of ethnicity to their students; to examine their own positionalities; and to incorporate more culturally relevant pedagogies into their instructional practices.     

Organisational legitimacy beyond ethnicity? Shifting organisational logics in the struggle for immigrant rights in Los Angeles

Immigrant political organisations in the United States have traditionally built political power by claiming to legitimately represent an ethnically defined group. However, the emergence of a number of multi-ethnic, class-based organisations over the last two decades has challenged this assumption, while raising questions about the ability of the institutional context to accommodate organisational change. Building on a neo-institutional theory of legitimacy, I examine the diverging legitimating strategies employed by two long-standing immigrant organisations based in Los Angeles (LA): the Korean Resource Center (KRC) and the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA). Through grant applications, organisational archival data and qualitative interviews, I show how KRC and KIWA, two groups embedded in the same sociopolitical context, have built unique yet equally successful legitimating accounts by adopting different organisational logics, one broadly based on ethnicity and one on class and multi-ethnicity. I suggest that KIWA and KRC's ideological differences, and their reliance on a different core of supporters – ethnic-oriented for KRC, labour-oriented for KIWA – drove the organisations towards distinct, yet partially overlapping subfields. By discursively mobilising those connections, and by actively shaping the surrounding organisational environment, both KRC and KIWA were able to incorporate in the broader non-profit advocacy sector in LA.     

‘I'm not like all these Ecuadorians’. Promises and dilemmas of immigrants’ selective ethnicity appropriation

This article revisits my translocal ethnography of Ecuadorian immigration to Italy, building on the notions of ethnicization and selective ethnicity appropriation. The salience of an ethnic dimension, in the daily lives of the migrants I met, is explored with regard to collective identification, alignment with co-nationals and interactions with natives. By de-constructing migrants’ ethnicity from within, a range of expectations and strategies towards the receiving society emerges. While processes of ethnicization affect them in cognitive, discursive and practical terms, immigrants selectively draw from their ethnicity patterns, as their previous identities and lifestyles interact with the mainstream overseas. Their ethnicity – as a shared repertoire of habits, ways of life and common sense ideas, supported by a communal identity and background – can be purposefully negotiated in several respects, as they strive to negotiate better life conditions overseas. Why this occurs, under what conditions, and producing what effects, are the questions to be approached in this article. As I shall argue, ethnicity-related attitudes and behaviours raise opportunities and dilemmas both for migrants’ incorporation overseas and for their transnational connections.