‘Filial son’, the family and identity formation among male migrant workers in urban China

This article is based on an ethnographic study of life histories of 28 rural–urban (internal) migrant men located within southern China. It explores their narratives with a particular focus on changing social relations within the family, from the perspective of migrant sons. It argues that traditional gender norms, such as those attached to being a ‘filial son’, are lived out, albeit reworked, among Chinese male migrant workers across generations. The men recount the role of traditional familial gender norms, which are central cultural resources in forging their ‘dislocated’ identities within specific temporal and spatial conditions. For example, being a ‘filial son’ has become an important reference point for these mobile male workers to actively negotiate their emerging masculine identities in the process of negotiating urban lives, while living away from their rural homes. The article also explores a more complex understanding of rural–urban migration in terms of critically engaging with the men's well-being as urban workers.     

基于腾讯迁徙数据的中国“春运”城市间人口流动空间格局

“腾讯迁徙”大数据基于位置服务，实时、动态、完整、系统地描述了用户日常出行活动的轨迹。通过采集“腾讯迁徙”数据平台中2018年春运期间中国346个地级及以上城市之间的逐日人口流动数据，分“节前、节中、节后”3个时间段，利用复杂网络分析方法，从人口流动的集散层级、集散体系分层集聚特征、人口流动空间格局、网络空间特征等角度分析各时间段城市间的人口流动特征与空间格局。结果表明，腾讯迁徙大数据直观地揭示了春运期间中国城市间人口流动空间格局，3个时段人口的净流入均呈现十字形骨架支撑的菱形分布，人流集散中心主要集中在京津冀、长三角、珠三角和成渝4大城市群，与城市等级有较强的一致性。人口流动集散体系呈明显的分层集聚，城市行政级别的高低与人口流动影响力存在一定的正相关关系，大部分城市人口流动处于“相对平衡”状态。人口流动网络呈现东密西疏的分布特征和东部并联、西部串联的网络关联特征。人口流动网络局部具有较明显的“社区”结构特征，聚为3个大区级、5个跨区域级和1个地区级社区。     

Making the emotional connection: transnational eldercare circulation within Sri Lankan-Australian transnational families

The scholarship on care for older parents within transnational families focuses mainly on the experience of unskilled migrants and is presented largely from the perspective of caregivers. Few studies consider the case of affluent, skilled migrants, and their wealthy older parents who also cross borders to visit and provide care for their migrant adult–children. Through Baldassar and Merla’s concept of ‘care circulation’ and the lens of emotional transnationalism, the article illustrates that despite affluent transnational family members’ mobility and access to resources that should facilitate successful circulation of care, care is not easily exchanged at an intimate level. Drawing upon 30 transnational family case studies of skilled migrants residing in Australia and their urban, high to middle-income older parents from Sri Lanka, I argue that older parents construct both caring across distance and in proximity as an attentiveness to their emotional care needs, and the time and effort taken to engage in emotion work; a task that is more challenging for migrant sons than daughters. The article reveals the manner in which gendered care practices both enable and inhibit care circulation between transnational migrants and their older parents.     

Planned Resettlement,Unexpected Migrations and Cultural Trauma in Laos

Though not officially considered a ‘policy’ by the Lao government, resettlement of ethnic minorities has become a central feature of the rural development strategy in Laos. Over the past ten years, a majority of highland villages have been resettled downhill, and the local administrations are planning to move the remaining villages in the coming years. This article draws on a national survey about resettlement in Laos, commissioned by UNESCO and financed by UNDP, that was undertaken by the authors. It focuses on the consequences of these huge shifts of population and on the social and cultural dynamics that underlie them. It shows that the planned resettlements, which are intended to promote the ‘settling’ of the highland populations by enforcing the ban on slash‐and‐burn agriculture and opium growing, actually cause increased and diversified rural mobility. This in turn complicates the implementation of the rural development policy and the political management of interethnic relationships. In other words, the ‘settling’ process promoted by the State, because of its broad and often tragic social consequences, can paradoxically generate unplanned or unexpected further migrations, which could be called ‘resettlement‐induced forms of mobility’     

Factory ‘nuns’: the ethnicization of migrant labor in the making of Tibetan carpets

Many debates over migrant labor politics in contemporary China rely upon essentialist notions of ethnic identity. In contrast, I identify migrant labor politics as transnational processes through which women migrants from rural Tibet become ethnic workers. Drawing on post-colonial theories of ethnicity and on feminist literature on global capitalism, this article analyzes the uses of migrant laborers in a globalizing Tibetan carpet industry. First, I investigate the making of Tibetan carpets and the essentialist construction of ‘carpet weavers’ employed by Tibetan–Nepalese carpet factory owners, carpet dealers in New York City, and various participants in Lhasa, including party cadres, international non-government organizations (NGOs), and overseas investors. I argue that the functioning of the international carpet business relies upon the ethnicization of migrant labor, in which labor subjugation involves creating ethnic subjects and ethnicized boundaries. This form of labor commodification is driven by both an economic logic and a moral imperative for preserving or regenerating ‘ethnic culture.’ Second, through the lens of gender, I look closely at the ethnicization of migrant labor in post-socialist Lhasa, analyzing its significance for the labor force in the carpet industry. The women carpet weavers, who mostly come from Tibet's rural areas, I found, strive to reconcile their desires for female autonomy with labor positions that reduce them to strangers in the city. Some women attempt to overcome their experiences of alienation while actively engaging in the reproduction of the patriarchal family as well as in labor hierarchies at work.     

The Game: Or, ‘the making of migration’ along the Balkan Route

‘The Game’ is how many refugees describe their attempts to informally travel to Western Europe via the so-called Balkan Route. This article conceptualises The Game as a spatial tactic implemented by refugees as a response to the impossibility of legally entering the EU and as a gray area in the governance of informal migrant mobilities. It does so by engaging with the recent literature on the Balkan Route to analyse how The Game has been performed and ‘managed’ in Serbia, a key ‘buffer state’ along this corridor. Drawing from Tazzioli's work on ‘The Making of Migration’, and in particular on her understanding of refugee forced mobility as a form of ‘migrant management’ on the part of the authorities, this article shows how the ambivalent connotations of The Game reveal the troubling configurations of EU border politics and of its formal and informal geopolitical arrangements. At the same time, it argues that the practices related to The Game ultimately reflect the extraordinary determination of the refugees in creating new itineraries, spatial interstices, invisible networks and ‘holes in the border walls’ that allow them, despite all the difficulties, to challenge such border politics. We conclude by proposing to understand The Game as part of the biopolitics of migration and by suggesting that it represents a powerful manifestation of the condition (and the field of possibility) of thousands of refugees along the Balkan Route today.     

Parents of global youth: contesting debt and belonging

In the United States, recently arrived migrant youth encounter competing media and institutional discourses that cast them as dependents who have been rendered ‘left behind,’ ‘on their own,’ or ‘unaccompanied’ by their parents. A corresponding narrative emerges in which young migrants’ parents are framed as abusive, neglectful, and ignorant. Combined, these portrayals may garner specialized services and contribute to success in the legal realm. At the same time, however, they fail to recognize and even imperil the intimate intergenerational networks that facilitate transnational migration. In this article, we trace the homogenizing power of public discourses on young people and their families across two diverse ethnographic contexts, that of Chinese and Guatemalan migration. Focusing in particular on narratives of debt and belonging, we argue that the pervasive pathologization of migrant youths’ parents diminishes and contorts valued relationships over time. It correspondingly demands broader efforts to historicize and to contextualize youth mobility.     

Chinese migrant women as boundary markers in Singapore: unrespectable,un-middle-class and un-Chinese

This article argues that the intersection of ethnicity, class and gender foregrounds the contestation of Chinese-ness in a context of migration in Singapore. I argue that the presence of co-ethnic mainland Chinese migrant women has heightened Chinese-Singaporean women’s anxieties. In lieu of ‘convenient markers’ of language and ethnicity, Chinese-Singaporean women have had to look elsewhere for the production of difference. This article argues that the Chinese-Singaporean woman favourably contrasts herself with the newly arrived mainland Chinese migrant woman in regards to the notion of respectable femininity – the latter being a key marker of middle-classness. Specifically, Chinese migrant women are perceived as unrespectable through charges of excessive materialism and of transgressing the Asian/Chinese family. By emphasising Chinese migrant women’s perceived lack of respectability, Chinese-Singaporean women can (re)establish their own respectable femininity, middle-classness and Chinese-ness.     

Rushing for Gold: Mobility and Small‐Scale Mining in East Africa

African rural dwellers have faced depressed economic prospects for several decades. Now, in a number of mineral‐rich countries, multiple discoveries of gold and precious stones have attracted large numbers of prospective small‐scale miners. While their ‘rush’ to, and activities within, mining sites are increasingly being noted, there is little analysis of miners' mobility patterns and material outcomes. In this article, on the basis of a sample survey and interviews at two gold‐mining sites in Tanzania, we probe when and why miners leave one site in favour of another. Our findings indicate that movement is often ‘rushed’ but rarely rash. Whereas movement to the first site may be an adventure, movement to subsequent sites is calculated with knowledge of the many risks entailed. Miners spend considerable time at each site before migrating onwards. Those with the highest site mobility tend to be more affluent than the others, suggesting that movement can be rewarding for those willing to ‘try their luck’ with the hard work and social networking demands of mining another site.     

Family education support to rural migrant children in China: evidence from Shenzhen

Rural migrant children have become a fast-growing population in China as a consequence of the large-scale population flow from rural to urban areas. Besides the dual-structure hukou system, which restrains rural migrants from upward mobility, family capital also plays an important role in providing family educational support to rural migrant children. Using the data from P District and N District of Shenzhen in 2013, this paper explores the present status of three dimensions of family capital and five aspects of family educational support to Chinese rural migrant children, as well as the correlation between family capital and family educational support from perspectives of migration status (hukou), life course (children’s age), and school type. Constrained by inadequate family capital in multiple dimensions manifested by less education, lower income, and limited social networks, etc., parents of rural migrant children provide less family educational support in nearly every aspect compared with parents of urban local children. Among rural migrant children, those in private migrant schools receive the least support from their parents.     

Translocal Householding: Care and Migrant Livelihoods in a Waste‐trading Community of Vietnam's Red River Delta

This article examines the shifting household organization of care and livelihoods in a community of Vietnam's Red River Delta that has a history of migrating to work in the urban waste trade, and has been doing so increasingly since the socialist country embraced a market economy in the mid‐1980s. In Spring District, household care and livelihood activities have been taking place across the city and the countryside for decades, indicating the degree to which the rural household reflexively opens up its spatial and social boundaries in response to broader processes of change. Their trajectories reveal fluidity in terms not only of spatial mobility but also of the gendered configuration of paid work and care, and complex dynamics between household care practices and the development of waste trading as a particular migrant livelihood activity. The analysis draws on and advances the concept of ‘householding’ emerging from recent discussion of the globalization of social reproduction.     

Gendered and generational experiences of place and power in the rural Irish landscape

The out-migration of young people from rural regions is a selective and highly gendered process suggesting considerable differentiation in the way young men and women identify with and experience rural life. Gender imbalance in rural youth out-migration has prompted feminist researchers to consider more carefully linkages between the gendered nature of rural space and place and the social and spatial mobility of rural young men and women. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Irish fishing community, this article explores the gendered dimensions of rural youth experience. Theoretically grounded in the conceptual triad of gender, power and place, this article considers how young men and women experience ‘the rural’ as masculine and feminine subjects. Special attention is given to the ways in which relations of power in ‘the rural’ are articulated, contested and accommodated in the everyday lives of local young men and women. As well as highlighting the ways in which rural space and place is male-dominated, this article foregrounds other power relations at play in the rural. As part of this effort, I problematize male power and point to the ‘effectivity of girls as conduits of power’. I argue that subjectivities of intra-gender relations are a critical dimension of rural youth experience and cannot be overlooked in research on rural youth experience and emigration.     

ON LONELINESS

Contemporary Western societies are characterized by ‘until further notice’ relationships (and precarious or very loose social bonds), historically high levels of mobility of both capital and labour and growing numbers of single person households. As artefacts of freedom and choice these social arrangements do not inevitably give cause for concern but they may come at a price and that might involve more frequent and more sustained experiences of loneliness. This article argues that we know very little about loneliness even though some observers have described it as a new plague. The article sets out to describe the dimensions of a sociology of contemporary loneliness in terms of its social distribution, its extent and impact as well as its nature as an emotional and ontological experience. While we may be heading towards a civilization which, as Michel Houellebecq darkly hints in the recent novel The Possibility of an Island (2006), may have little further need for ‘the social’, for the time being it seems as though this problem (that would ‘rather not’ speak its name) is the cause of considerable suffering and pain.     

‘If you can't beat them,be them!’ – everyday experiences and ‘performative agency’ among undocumented migrant youth in South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the challenges and coping strategies of undocumented migrant youth in Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on a theatre-based case study conducted with a core group of 10 participants the article shows firstly that participants’ lives are affected by emotional, legal and practical challenges such as loneliness, discrimination and fear. Secondly, the article develops the concept of ‘performative agency’ to illustrate how participants cope with and contest their challenges. Specifically, the article shows that the young people's theatrical performances draw on stereotypical notions of vulnerability and victimhood as a means to denounce the discrimination and oppression they experience. In public interactions with others, by contrast, the young migrants use performative agency to emphasise their strengths and positive attributes, thereby enhancing their integration in a hostile environment. The insights provided by this study can help strengthen policy responses to better support undocumented migrant youth in South Africa and elsewhere.     

Engendering the New Enclosures: Development,Involuntary Resettlement and the Struggles for Social Reproduction in Coastal Tanzania

This article engages with the feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’ to arrive at a richer understanding of the gendered processes and outcomes of contemporary large‐scale land acquisitions, or the ‘new enclosures’. It focuses on the case of a recent land deal for industrial sugarcane production in the Coast Region of Tanzania and the resultant process of involuntary resettlement. It critically analyses people's struggles for land in the face of imminent displacement, and the gendered ways they experience the erosion of their pre‐existing modes of social reproduction. It argues that enclosure of rural landscapes does more than immediately strip peasants and pastoralists of their means of production and turn them into wage labourers. It gradually uproots them from their socio‐ecological knowledges, cultural practices and historical memories, which are rooted on the land and articulated through gender. The highly uncertain processes of enclosure and displacement also force rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood strategies and intra‐household gender relations.     

“Northern Girls”: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the cultural politics of agency, and explores the relationship between cultural form, migrant experience and social change. It traces the emergence of a range of literary forms in south China and how these new cultural forms provide hitherto unavailable space to contest the state- and market-driven narratives, which tend to link dagongmei’s (rural migrant women’s) sexuality with inexperience and vulnerability on the one hand, and criminality, immorality and incivility on the other. The paper suggests that these newly emerging cultural forms present alternative perspectives on the practical circumstances, moral rationalities and emotional consequences that condition and shape migrant women’s sexual experience, and for this reason, they constitute important points of intervention.     

Excesses of nationalism: Greco‐Turkish population exchange

This article studies 1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey through a case study of its experience in Izmir. It traces the ways the early Republican state engaged in the project of reshaping the population by eliminating the non‐Muslims who were rendered as ‘excesses’ in the spatial and discursive matrices of the nation‐state. Through the experience of the exchange in Izmir, it argues that the process of the accommodation and assimilation of the exchangees played a significant role in shaping the modalities of Turkish nationalism by creating new lines and fissures, further dividing the ‘Muslim brethren’ into ever restrictive constructions of Turkishness. It also underlines that this forced displacement is not just a significant episode in Greek and Turkish histories but that it represents a turning point in the project of nation formation in general.     

Rural–urban divide and identity conflicts of migrant Muslim students in Northwest China

Abstract

A huge flow of internal migrants in China is an indicator of the significant changes in the geographical and cultural patterns brought by China’s recent economic growth. The Hui (10.6 million), as one of the largest ethnic minority groups in China, and the Dongxiang, with almost 100% of them holding the Islamic belief, are migrating from rural areas to urban centers in Northwest China. Analyzing the qualitative data from narrative stories, thematic photos, group discussions, semi-structured interviews, and field observations, this study interprets the cultural experience of rural Muslim migrant students in Chinese public schools and examines their complex and fluid rural–urban identities. This study further discusses the possibilities of including and integrating rural migrant students in cities.     

Compare and contrast: understanding Irish migration to Britain in a wider context

This article explores the potential for comparative research across different migrant groups. Research on migration is often weakened by the marked tendency to use a single ethnic/national group as the unit of analysis. Analysing migration from the experiences of a particular ethnic group may exaggerate ethnic exceptionalism and understate the extent to which experiences are shared across different migrant groups. My recent experiences on a range of research projects with diverse migrants to London made me think about similarities with the Irish, but each in different ways. However, there is a dearth of comparative analysis in relation to the Irish experience in Britain. On the one hand, there are many studies of Irish migrants, but these tend to focus solely on the Irish or else examine the relationship between Irish migrants and the ‘native’ British population. There has been little work on how the Irish relate to other migrant groups within British society. On the other hand, studies of other migrant communities rarely refer to the Irish as a comparative group. The article explores the reasons for the dearth of comparative work involving Irish migrants in Britain. In so doing, it considers some of the benefits and challenges of going beyond the ‘ethnic lens’. What would be gained but also lost by viewing Irish migration to Britain through a more comparative perspective? I explore how such comparative analysis might contribute, firstly, to a wider understanding of migration processes, experiences and inter-migrant relations, and, secondly, to a fuller appreciation of varied dimensions of migratory experiences in Britain. These issues are considered through a comparison of Polish and Irish migration to Britain.     

‘Just looking’: domestic workers' consumption practices and a latent geography of Beijing

The post-socialist Chinese city has been an important site to explore the formation of modernity in its everyday shape and manifestations. A common way of understanding urban experiences is through the prism of consumption. Rural migrants in the city cannot compare with urban residents in terms of their consumption level, but they are seen to be equally enthusiastic in partaking in consumption, and their identities are also believed to be (re)shaped by consumption practices. Drawing on several years' extensive ethnographic research in Beijing, this article suggests that these scenarios cannot adequately account for the diversity and complexity of rural migrants' experience in the consuming city. In this article, I put forward a methodological argument for considering the lived spatiality of ethnographic subjects in conceiving and considering consumption. Then, through an investigation of how migrant domestic workers use urban spaces, I consider the ‘dialectic of freedom and constraint’ which marks their agency and their individual choices and decisions. Finally, I explore the social production of space by considering migrant domestic workers' ‘subversive’ behaviours within rather than in opposition to the capitalist commercial logic and space. This discussion demonstrates that consumption practices are at the same time spatial practices, and despite the many obstacles and constraints, migrant domestic workers are actively availing themselves of the opportunities that the city has to offer. This creative process is crucial if we are to gain a new and more nuanced understanding of consumption as a social practice. I further argue that it is also a process by which rural migrants hold on to their sense of dignity and self-respect in an environment of exclusion and discrimination.