The politics of leisure and labor mobilities: discourses of tourism and transnational migration in Central Java,Indonesia

This article presents narratives and tropes of transnational tourism from a less considered perspective: rural migrant-origin villagers of Central Java. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cilacap and Yogyakarta, I analyze how and why some former temporary labor migrants depict their typically harsh experiences in terms of tourism and leisure. Addressing the tendency in current research to approach labor migration and tourism as mutually exclusive or unrelated class categories and experiences, I consider the ways in which former migrants and non-migrant villagers evaluate or identify labor migration in terms of gender, class, religious, and ethno-national subjectivities associated with ‘tourist’ and/or ‘migrant’ categories. Popular and commercial imaginations of leisure travel and tourism importantly shape the subjectivities and positionalities of precarious labor migrants. Foregrounding the relations between tourism and labor migration reveals the multi-scalar ways in which associated discourses and infrastructures of both mutually shape and constitute global socio-economic inequalities.     

The middling mobile: finding place in the liquid city

The middling mobile, differentiated by their modest and unsure mobility, are a vast of bulk of people who intend or expect to move on. As they travel, they tread differing intensities of rhythm and social embeddedness felt to be chaotic, constraining, liberating, or comforting. Owing to their aspirations to ‘get out’ of a rhythmic life, or to move somewhere familiar, the middling mobile use movement and rootedness to navigate and manage everyday life in the liquid city. My analysis offers a holistic exposition of a life that flows between mobility/immobility and rhythmic/arrhythmic forms, and the transitions between them.     

Schematising hospitality: Ai WeiWei’s activist artwork as a form of dark travel

The article provides a holistic appraisal of activist-artist Ai WeiWei’s work. It argues that, despite its topical innovations and evolution, it continues to be informed by narratives of ‘hospitality’ as an experiential form of engagement with variations of otherness (father, migrant, tourist and refugee). Dividing Ai’s artwork into two overlapping phases of development (national and international/global), it considers the artist’s construction of a cosmopolitan identity with uses of ‘technology’ as embodied and communal property. As Ai’s work on the refugee crisis on Lesbos attests, his (dark) artistic cosmopolitan symbolisations use geo-political imaginaries of justice and hospitality in subsequent projects.     

Gendering international student migration: an Indian case-study

ABSTRACT

Despite the mainstreaming of gender perspectives into migration research, very few attempts have been made to gender international student migration. This paper poses three questions about Indian students who study abroad. Are there gender differences in their motivations? How do they negotiate their gendered everyday lives when abroad? Is the return to India shaped by gender relations? An online survey of Indian study-abroad students (n?=?157), and in-depth interviews with Indian students in Toronto (n?=?22), returned students in New Delhi (n?=?21), and with parents of students abroad (n?=?22) help to provide answers. Conceptually, the paper draws on a ‘gendered geographies of power’ framework and on student migration as an embodied process subject to ‘matrices of (un)intelligibility’. We find minimal gender-related differences in motivations to study abroad, except that male students are drawn from a wider social background. However, whilst abroad, both male and female Indian students face challenges in performing their gendered identities. The Indian patrifocal family puts greater pressure on males to return; females face greater challenges upon return.     

Implementing a diversity policy through public incentives: Diversity Plans in companies of the Brussels-Capital Region

ABSTRACT

The development of diversity policies in the private sector is mostly a result of a voluntary engagement of companies. When interested, they decide about the ways and goals of such policies, implications for human resource management and the inclusion of staff with a migration background. This article explores a specific situation in which public authorities offered support and resources to companies in order to develop diversity policies. I present a first analysis of the implementation dynamics of the Brussels Diversity Plan, a policy instrument launched in 2007 by the Government of the city-region of Brussels. Building on the theoretical tools of the political sociology of public policies, I use qualitative material (interviews and administrative documents) to explore implementation processes in three private companies. I show that public authorities can play a decisive role in developing diversity policies in the private sector through incentives rather than constraint. Yet, the room for manoeuver offered to companies leads to important variations regarding how processes unfold and the results achieved.     

Struggle as opportunity: making sense of U.S. migration experiences through Buddhist practice

Recent scholarship demonstrates how immigrants rely on religion for resources and psychological and social support at various stages of migration. Many studies of religion focus on the institutional role of faith-based organisations, with little regard for the social importance of religious experiences in daily life. Using interviews with U.S. immigrants who identify as Buddhists, I examine how migrants use Buddhist philosophies as a lens for finding meaning in the struggles associated with migration, including language acquisition, employment, and legal status. Through their practice, migrants gain a sense of agency amid vulnerable circumstances. I also explore the potentially negative consequences of the practice’s individual focus, including the propensity to mask structural causes of inequality and impede possibilities for collective action.     

EU post-accession Polish migrants trajectories and their settlement practices in Scotland

The presence and the apparent permanence of post-accession EU migrants in the UK is of significant interest to both academics and politicians. Studies have debated whether migration from new accession countries to the UK mark a new type of migration often described as ‘liquid’ and ‘open ended’, or whether these migrants will settle in the new destination countries. Based on a qualitative study of Poles who have lived in Scotland for at least six years, we observed four typologies of what we call migrants’ settling practices: (1) stayers, (2) over-stayers, (3) circular and transnational migrants and (4) economic migrants. The findings from this study demonstrate that Polish migrants do not have fixed ideas about the duration of their migration (in terms of a sense of permanence) but instead focus on diverse links, anchors or attachments in Scotland and Poland in describing their settling practices. Thus, the main contribution the article makes is to present an in-depth understanding of what settlement means from the perspective of migrants themselves. This paper concludes by providing a short comment on implications of the outcome of the Referendum on EU membership ‘Brexit’ in June 2016 on Polish migrants settling practices.     

Comparing the effectiveness of respondent-driven sampling and quota sampling in migration research

We evaluate the effectiveness in empirical migration research of the respondent-driven sampling (RDS) and the quota sampling with regard to four criteria: quality of the data; sociometric diversity of the sample; geographic coverage of the sample; and cost-effectiveness. We review two surveys of ex-USSR migrants, conducted simultaneously in the Warsaw metropolitan area, each undertaken with the use of one of the two sampling methods. We find that although the RDS was considerably costlier, it enabled faster data collection and posed a lower risk of underestimating the cost of the survey. We also find that the RDS generated higher-quality data, and that it was more successful in surveying short-term circular migrants. This comparative evaluation contributes to the literature on social research methods in that it links the sampling methods with the quality and character of the data, and helps assess the usefulness and applicability of RDS in empirical migration studies.     

Migration aspirations of European youth in times of crisis

In recent years, the European Union (EU) passed through a significant economic crisis. All across Europe, European young people are among the groups which are hit hardest, with youth unemployment rates rising to over 50% in member states such as Greece and Spain. In the classical migration literature, it is suggested that such unfavourable economic climate would make people more likely to move abroad. Whereas in press releases we are regularly confronted with stories about South European young adults with tertiary education working in bars in Northern European cities, limited empirical evidence exists as such on the relationship between the recent Euro-crisis and migration aspirations. This paper addresses this gap in the academic literature. Using data from Flash Eurobarometer 395, I investigate which micro- and macro-level characteristics influence migration aspirations of young people across the member states of the EU. The results reveal the importance of individual characteristics and feelings of discontent with the current climate in explaining migration aspirations. Furthermore, I detect a negative relationship of relative welfare levels with migration aspirations, and a positive relationship of the youth unemployment ratio. Together, the results suggest that potential young intra-EU movers are positively selected from the population.     

Investigating the link between migration and civicness in Italy. Which individual and school factors matter?

This paper investigates the link between migration and civicness using data on cognitive skills and civic competences collected from a sample of 2747 eighth-graders in Italy. Contrary to the abundant evidence of migrant/native gaps in educational and occupational attainments in the country, this study finds no migrant-specific gap on civicness development. Children of immigrants achieve lower levels of civic knowledge than natives, but differences disappear once social background and, particularly, cognitive test scores are equalized across groups. Moreover, no differences are found, on average, between natives and children of immigrants with respect to institutional trust. However, at the top tail of the civic knowledge distribution, children of immigrants display less trust than natives. This result, coupled with their greater openness towards immigrants’ rights, suggests that immigrants’ children attach great importance to the inequality in rights concerning the immigrant population in the country and, as a reaction, participate more actively in the community. Insignificant or positive associations between the proportion of immigrants’ children in the classroom and natives’ civicness are found. Finally, fairness in student–teacher interactions is found to improve students’ civicness development, suggesting that, besides citizenship education, also the school climate plays a vital role in enhancing children's civic competences.