Raising cosmopolitans: localized educational strategies of international families in Shanghai

This qualitative research documents the educational strategies of international migrants to Shanghai who are attempting to raise their children as cosmopolitans through immersion in local Chinese schools. We distinguish this localizing educational strategy from the established network of international schools designed to serve the families of corporate expatriates. Instead, our research subjects consist of self‐initiated expatriates, or ‘middling transnationals’, who have chosen to prioritize immersion in the language and culture of China by sending their children to local schools. This localized, or Sinocentric, model exposes non‐Chinese children to a challenging and nationalistic Chinese curriculum. Our analysis of these practices as a form of cosmopolitan education challenges both the goal of teaching a universal and placeless ethical cosmopolitanism and the assumption that a meaningful cosmopolitan education must take place in the idealized setting of a liberal cosmopolitan school system. We also highlight the difficulties families face in this approach, describing this as an ‘entangled cosmopolitanism’, an enriching but uncomfortable engagement with both local and home‐country educational cultures.     

Strong or weak ties? British and Indian expatriate scientists finding jobs in Boston

In this article I analyse the different social networks that British and Indian scientists use to obtain job information in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector around Boston, Massachusetts. I argue that individuals' social networks are critical in helping highly skilled migrants find jobs. The research finds that British and Indian scientists use both strong and weak ties to obtain jobs and there is no significant difference between senior and junior workers in terms of whether they relied on strong or weak ties. I argue, nonetheless, that the terms strong ties and weak ties are problematic because they are not clearly understood or mutually exclusive.