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- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2017
Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2017
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Student migration and domestic improvisation: Transient migration through the experience of everyday laundry
Authors: Sarah Pink and John PostillAbstractIn this article, we develop a novel approach to transient student migration: by studying it through the mundane everyday. We focus on the private worlds where migrants encounter and improvise with new domestic technologies – through their laundry – by drawing on our video ethnography of Indonesian students in Australia. Such an analysis creates insights into some of the most fundamental, but usually invisible, aspects of migrant experience: their relationships with the routines, materiality, infrastructures and weather environments of everyday life. As such, it offers an alternative route through which to understand international student wellbeing, which we argue needs to be accounted for alongside more conventional and institutionally-oriented foci in this field of research.
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Understanding ‘integration’: Chinese ‘foreign talent’ students in Singapore talking about rongru
By Peidong YangAbstractStudying abroad is an increasingly prevalent form of transient migration. How do international students understand their relationship with the host society and host nationals? Based on in-depth interview data, this article investigates the ways in which international students from China at a Singaporean university understand the idea of ‘integration’ (or rongru in Chinese). It is found that these Chinese students tend to define ‘integration’ in terms of friendly and everyday social interactions, but their understanding has a more or less assimilationist underlying assumption. This explains their generally modest self-evaluations of their success at ‘integration’. This article argues that this social and somewhat assimilationist understanding of integration might be explained in terms of the Chinese students’ cultural-linguistic ideologies about rongru, and the characteristics of their social space, position and circumstances in Singapore as academically capable ‘foreign talent’ students on Singaporean government scholarships.
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The mobile middle: Indian skilled migrants in Singapore and the ‘middling’ space between migration categories
By Michiel BaasAbstractStudies of skilled migration tend to be strongly bifurcated in terms of their focus on either low- or highly-skilled migrants, and public debate generally also reflects this. However, since skills, education and income levels are frequently conflated, there are usually considerable differences in terms of how low or highly skilled migrants actually are. In addition, there has been little attention paid to strategies of mobility between various visa categories. This article focuses on what it conceptualizes as the ‘mobile middle’: skilled migrants who actively negotiate and test the flexibilities of a migration programme in order to be able to work and potentially stay on ‘permanently’ in a particular country. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Indian (mid-level) skilled migrants in Singapore, the present study explores how we can (further) conceptualize migration categories, and the ways migrants engage with them with respect to inherent constraints on the one hand and ambitions for the future on the other. With its focus on Singapore, the article also highlights how the mobile middle, as a rapidly growing group of migrants, takes up an increasingly prominent place in discussions about new immigrants and population growth.
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‘Now I can never go back’: The thwarted returns of temporary labour migrants from China in Perth, Western Australia
More LessAbstractFrom the early 2000s onwards, labour migrants from China with technical work skills but low educational attainment arrived in Australia with fixed-term, temporary plans. Yet, to their surprise, many have been thwarted in their plans to return, and have instead experienced an unexpected transition to permanent residency (PR). Reasons include rapid economic growth in China and the rising cost of housing; the challenges of re-entering the competitive Chinese education system for children accustomed to Australian schools; and the realization that time spent overseas has limited work opportunities upon return. They describe their experiences in terms that closely resemble classical labour migrations of colonial and postcolonial eras. Return and discourses of return must be understood within contemporary migration models that emphasize circular, transient and open-ended mobility. Yet individual migrants still articulate migration trajectories and return plans that are grounded in simpler conceptions of ‘here’ and ‘there’. While recognizing the contemporary shift towards mobile and transnational lives among elites and non-elites alike, it is important not to overlook the very real and material barriers to return that some temporary migrants claim to experience.
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Entangled belonging: Barcelona-to-Melbourne professional transient migrants
Authors: Glenda Mejía and Sarah PinkAbstractThe economic crisis in Europe has generated a context of increasing uncertainty along with new forms of globalization through a wave of migration from Europe to more thriving OECD economies, including Australia. This article examines how particular transnational senses of belonging are generated in this context through the example of how Catalan migrants generate what we refer to as an ‘entangled sense of belonging’ between Melbourne and Barcelona. In doing so, we draw on semi-structured interviews and photographic research methods undertaken with such migrants living in Melbourne. We argue that the transient nature of migration becomes contingent in this context. As such, it is not a measurable state or status, but something more qualitative and experiential, and therefore needs to be attended to through an approach that accounts for this.
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Expatriate 2.0: New media for new expatriates
By Fan MaiAbstractIn the aftermath of global financial crisis, a new generation of western expatriates from developed countries have chosen mainland China as their destination for temporary migration. Using case studies and in-depth interviews, this article explores how this group of transient migrants comes to define their identities as ‘new expatriates’ in China by creating their own media. From lifestyle magazines to podcasts, western expatriates are cultivating their own niche to support expatriate communities despite institutional barriers and marginalized status. This study provides insights into the motivations of creating expatriate media that connect media practices with the everyday life experiences of western expatriates in China.
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When tears become a language: Frictions in a xenophobic national ‘imaginary’
More LessAbstractIn the past few years, South Africa has experienced three widely publicized xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals. The victims of each of these incidents of antiimmigrant violence were Mozambican nationals and each received prominent media attention: the ‘burning man’ of 2008; the ‘police-dragged’ national of 2013; and the savagely-knifed Emmanuel Sithole of Alexandra in 2015. This article is framed by these incidents, in which the ‘alien’ found their negotiation of identity and history subverted by experiences in the diaspora. It discusses these incidents in order to broadly interrogate xenophobia, and in order to locate the genesis and implications of violent multicultural nuances reported in several hundred televisual broadcasts and newspaper articles across South Africa. A critical discourse analysis of these reports provides a platform for an examination of the nationalist and ethnicitycentred dynamics at play, and attempts to generate an understanding of the historical genesis of xenophobia in South Africa. Diasporic refugee and migrant movements within Southern Africa in recent times have brought about the ‘right to narrate’, hence the article’s enquiry into narratives, sites, sights, media reports and witness accounts that cut across the narrower interests of polities and nation states.
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Reviews
Authors: Peidong Yang and Cora Lingling XuAbstractTRANSNATIONAL STUDENTS AND MOBILITY: LIVED EXPERIENCES OF MIGRATION, HANNAH SOONG (2016) New York and London: Routledge, 204 pp., ISBN: 9781138022836, h/bk, £90
CHINESE STUDENT MIGRATION, GENDER AND FAMILY, ANNI KAJANUS (2015) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 194 pp., ISBN: 9781137509093, h/bk, $99.00 USD
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