Transnational identities and immigrant spaces of Polish professionals in London,UK

It has been estimated that about 700,000 Poles moved to the UK after Poland joined the European Union in 2004, with London receiving a large portion of Polish immigrants. In agreement with the British perception of migrants from Eastern Europe, the majority of Polish immigrants can be generally classified as labor migrants with close cultural and national ties to Poland. However, Polish migration to the UK also includes a growing group of professionals and social and financial elites who are often overlooked by academic research. This paper analyzes the migrant experiences of Polish professionals and elites in London, and the relationships between their transnational identities and immigrant spaces such as ethnic enclaves, private and social spaces. Furthermore, this paper uses Polish elites in London as a foundation to explore concepts of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, suggesting that global elites can maintain strong national affiliations, and their global ambitions can be fueled by local contexts and standards.     

Gendered mobilities in the making: moving from a pedestrian to vehicular mobility landscape in Shimshal,Pakistan

Although feminist geographers understand gender and mobility as mutually constitutive social processes, few studies explain how gender relations are constituted in particular mobility contexts, and how and why they shape mobility patterns in specific socio-spatial circumstances. We address these questions in an analysis of gendered mobilities in Shimshal, Pakistan, which until recently have taken shape in the context of a pedestrian mobility regime. The gender and mobility relationship has transformed as vehicular mobilities have replaced pedestrian mobilities with the construction of the Shimshal road. To demonstrate empirically the co-constitution of gender and mobility, we analyze aspects of socio-spatial context that have shaped gendered pedestrian mobilities, followed by those associated with the new vehicular mobility regime that are modifying gender relations in Shimshal. Shifting gender relations reshape corporeal mobility patterns. Road infrastructure has enhanced men’s and youth’s outbound travel as wage earners and students, respectively. These mobilities have reshaped women’s capacity to move, constraining their mobility beyond the village. As prosperity becomes contingent on outbound movement, men’s and youths’ social horizons and mobilities are expanding, while women’s compromised access to mobility as a social resource produces new mobility hierarchies and gendered exclusions.     

The specifics and spatial structure of circular migration in Russia

Abstract

This article aims at distinguishing recurrent population movements within the territory of the Russian Federation between urban localities of different sizes and rural areas in connection to the processes of urbanization, suburbanization, and de-urbanization. Incomplete urbanization and the strong polarization of socio-economic space in Russia have resulted in two powerful contradictory population flows: centrifugal seasonal sub- and de-urbanization and centripetal labor migration from rural and small towns to large urban centers. The article discusses three forms of recurrent population mobility in Russia: (1) daily commuting of urban and rural inhabitants within metropolitan areas; (2) commuting to large cities and their suburbs for long-term employment intervals (weekly, monthly, etc.), (3) second-home commuting to countryside dachas. Unfinished urbanization in Russia not only attracts rural and small towns’ population to major cities but also keeps it within the latter. It slows down the real de-urbanization and induces specific dachas (second-home) suburbanization/de-urbanization, with these processes being closely interrelated. An opportunity to earn money in cities together with the impossibility of moving to major centers due to expensive housing encourages households to remain in small towns and rural areas. Meanwhile, inhabited rural localities (even ones distant from cities) attract seasonal population (dachniks).     

Gendered networks and migration decision-making in Northern Vietnam

This paper examines the gender aspect of migrant networks, particularly the different ways networks are expected to assist men's or women's migration during migration decision-making processes. Through the case study of a farming community in Northern Vietnam, it shows that migrant networks are not gender neutral and, more importantly, men and women capitalise on different functions of networks to facilitate their migratory endeavours. Whilst men tend to be connected to relatively more extended networks primarily for practical support, women are more likely to be tied to family networks, which provide them with not just information and practical support but also social protection. These gender-specific expectations and uses of migrant networks have important implications for men's and women's mobility. The paper provides new insights into the way migration choices are made by men and women and at the same time underscores the importance of understanding migrant networks in researching migration.     

Reproducing,transforming and contesting gender relations and identities through migration and transnational ties

This article contributes to conceptual debates on gender transformations in the context of migration and transnationalism. We do so by discussing developments in gender relations and identities among Polish post-accession migrants in Norway; analysing the intersections of continuities and changes, relationally, as these are produced spatially and temporally. We draw on ethnographic data collected among Polish migrants in the Norwegian cities Oslo and Bergen (2009–2012). Our focus on continuity and change in gender relations and identities, in the context of migration and transnationalism, stems from a realization that migration often leads to assumptions of either radical change, or conservative continuity. Meanwhile through an analytical lens sensitive to relationality and socio-spatial circumstances, we find friction, disagreement, as well as negotiation and resolution, and we argue for the variety of ways in which continuity and change may run parallel, reflective of variations in transnational habitus produced in relation to social class. We pay attention to locations and scales, as salient for how gender relations and identities are reproduced, transformed or contested. The flexible continuum we find reveals diverse strategies of coping with migratory situations, as well as complex interplay between migrants’ agency, existing structures and engendered understandings.     

Internal migration in the countries of Asia: levels,ages and spatial impacts

ABSTRACT

Internal migration, the movement of people between localities and regions within a country, has resulted in a significant redistribution of national populations. Past cross-national studies have been impeded by a lack of data and comparable metrics upon which to base comparisons. This paper examines internal migration in 30 Asian countries utilising a global dataset and a novel suite of measures devised in the IMAGE project. Three aspects of internal migration are explored: overall intensity, age patterns, and spatial impacts. Comparisons reveal that internal migration intensities, while on average lower than in other regions, are highly variable across countries. Migration peaks at earlier ages and is concentrated into a narrower age band than in other parts of the world. Analysis of spatial impacts highlights the contribution of migration to urbanisation, but a comparison of current trends against lifetime migration data also reveals the impact of historical events and government policies on national migration systems. Wide variation in key dimensions of migration among Asian countries reflects a diversity in national circumstances. The way forward lies in further in-depth country studies building on the common analytic framework articulated in this study.     

Gender,migration, mobility and transnationalism

In reviewing the expanding body of work on the linkages between gender, mobility, migration and transnationalism in Gender, Place and Culture over the last decade, this article highlights three significant contributions. First, through critical engagement with transnationalism studies, the journal has produced a sophisticated and variegated strand of work on gender politics and multiple forms of migration and mobility. In this article, we focus primarily on mobility in terms of human movement across national borders, rural–urban migration, as well as the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ that inform the embodied experiences of being here and there simultaneously as iterated in transnationalism studies [L. Basch, N.G. Schiller, and C.S. Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London: Routledge, 1994]. A second area of strength lies in the coalescence of work providing insights into the connections between social reproduction in a globalising world and intimate forms of global mobility and migration. A third highlight relates to the mutually constitutive relationship between the construction of masculinities and masculinist ideologies, on the one hand, and migration, mobility and transnationalism, on the other. The article concludes with a discussion of two more embryonic areas which merit further development in the journal: the first concerns the social and geographical (im)mobilities implied in cross-border reproductive care1^1. CBRC is what Payne (2013 Payne, J.2013. “Reproduction in Transition: Cross-Border Egg Donation, Biodesirability and New Reproductive Subjectivities on the European Fertility Market.” Gender, Place and Culture, doi:10.1080/0966369X.2013.832656. [Google Scholar]) attributes to the rapid development and spread of assisted reproductive technologies that have given rise to a global market for human eggs, sperm and surrogates. and the global mobility and assemblage of body parts, while the second relates to the distinctive role that feminist geographers interested in migrations and mobilities can play in working collaboratively and transnationally across different worlds.     

Intimate mobilities: emotional embodiment and queer migration

This paper offers theoretically-informed empirical insights into queer migration in the contemporary West. Understanding the rationales, patterns and outcomes of migration is important for scholars researching the life experiences of gay men, lesbians and other non-heterosexuals. This paper advances knowledge of queer migration by interpreting interview data from thirty-seven gay and lesbian Australians. The analysis is prompted by a qualitative and narrative turn in migration studies, and the urgings of new mobility studies to account for the embodied and emotional dimensions of migration. Interrogating gay and lesbian Australians' migration narratives over the life course, I scrutinise the emotionally embodied nature of queer migration. I focus on the body as a vector of displacement, and explore how emotions, desires and intimate attachments shape queer mobilities. Respondents particularly emphasised the roles of ‘comfort’ and ‘love’ in relocation decisions. I found that these feelings interleaved with three patterns of emotionally embodied queer migration in the data—coming out, gravitational and relationship migrations. The embodied affects of comfort played a key role in coming out and gravitational migrations, while the exigencies of love underpinned relationship migration.     

Youth,gangs and violence: Analysing the social and spatial mobility of young people in Guatemala City

Youth gangs have become an increasingly significant, and controversial, social institution in low-income communities in many cities in Central America, and yet the local-level impacts of this phenomenon, especially on young people, remain under-explored. Drawing on research with young people in Guatemala City, this paper explores the multiple barriers to the social and spatial mobility of both gang and non-gang members resulting from gang violence. It also examines how young men and women cope with violence, and, given the severe impacts of gang activity on young people, highlights the pressing need for social alternatives to gangs.     

Gendered mobilities and border-crossings: from Elbasan to Athens

The study of migratory movements, with all their changing features in the context of post-1989 political, economic and geographical restructurings, offers a prime site for reflection on the gendered meaning/s and content of mobilities and borders. Particularly in human geography, new questions and different approaches to established themes in migration research are elaborated in this ‘era of globalisation’. Negotiations of geographical and social borders and boundaries, the speed and ease of movement, but also gender inequalities in choice and cases of immobility and/or enclosure, emphasis on agency and the importance of space and place are some such themes and questions. This article is based on research with migrant women in Athens; it follows the trajectories of an Albanian woman from Elbasan to Athens as a starting point for the discussion of gendered practices and perceptions of migration, (im)mobility and border-crossings. In these trajectories, space is involved, in its material aspects but also in terms of representations and codings. Notions of place, local/global relations and gender identities are re-worked in the efforts to set up bearable everyday lives ‘here’, while maintaining links ‘there’. At the same time, ‘here’ (in Athens) and ‘there’ (in Elbasan) come out as open and temporary while borders are (re)produced, negotiated and challenged in multiple ways and at various spatial scales.     

Spatial and temporal tourism considerations in liminal landscapes

Abstract

Anthropogenic geographic studies in tourism should consider the liminality of the experience. Tourism by definition means a temporal and/or spatial movement takes place. How the tourist interacts and behaves during this transitory experience is a logical progression into human leisure behaviour. Several recent international gatherings of geographers provide the foundation to explore liminality in tourism and we build on those papers in this special issue. The papers are varied in geographies, yet have a central theoretical basis in all things liminal. Invited papers in this special issue are founded on the research presented at two international geography conferences in sessions devoted to tourism. The American Association of Geographers meeting in Boston, Massachusetts in 2017 and the Royal Geographic Society with the Institute of British Geographers in Cardiff, Wales in 2018 gathered geographers from around the world to study this theme. The following papers give the most comprehensive geographic review in tourism to date and we encourage additional dialogue.     

On Disciplinary Culture: Archaeology as Fieldwork and Its Gendered Associations

This paper discusses the disciplinary culture of archaeology, focusing in particular on the role of fieldwork in shaping the sense of identity for the profession. Based on the examination of the professionalisation of Australian archaeology, it is argued that there is a distinctive suite of attributes relating to the activity of fieldwork, which are central to the organizational culture of the discipline. These attributes can be seen to have a gendered dimension, revealing the extent to which archaeology is shaped by different gender regimes.     

Teaching English in South Korea: mobility norms and higher education outcomes in youth migration

In many Western contexts, travel has a long historical association with youth, young adults and coming of age, an association that often connects temporary mobility with the lives of the educated middle classes and elite. Indeed, from the colonial adventure and the ‘grand tour’, to contemporary ideas of the ‘gap year’ or ‘overseas experience’, the mobility of Western youth and young adults is often considered voluntary and based on a desire to explore places and develop positive personal attributes, marking a stark contrast to depictions of migration from the developing world as directly or indirectly forced and driven primarily by economic considerations. This paper questions this depiction of developed world mobility in the context of the changing economic conditions that face young graduates in many Western countries. Drawing on survey and interview data I focus on the profiles and biographies of young adults from English-speaking countries working as foreign language instructors in South Korea. Although the personal narrative of travel and exploration amongst these individuals remains significant, findings from this research also suggest that many of these young graduates are also driven by economic circumstances: unemployment or underemployment and high levels of debt usually associated with tertiary studies. This tension between the opportunities available to young people and the constraints imposed by their own circumstances raises important questions about the multiple layers of social and economic differentiation operating through higher education and international mobility in the lives of young people.     

New‐Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint,Brooklyn

In response to research that has downplayed or denied the reality of gentrification‐induced displacement, critical urban geographers have called for rethinking the concept of displacement. This article takes up that call by examining the impact of new‐build gentrification on the everyday place‐making abilities of Polish immigrant tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, this article looks at the forms of “everyday displacement”—the ongoing loss of the agency, freedom, and security to “make place”—experienced by immigrant tenants who struggle to remain in the neighborhood. Drawing upon Lefebvre's spatial triad and Blomley's work on the social relations of property, this article argues that everyday displacement is experienced through the production of new spaces of prohibition, appropriation, and insecurity that constitute a form of neighborhood erasure.     

Gendered geographies of genetic variation: sex,power and mobility in human population genetics

This article explores the ways in which geographies of human genetic variation are increasingly differentiated in terms of gender, and the ideas of reproduction, sex, power and mobility that underpin their interpretation. It thus seeks to extend recent work on the ways in which the ideas of race and relatedness are being shaped by recent accounts of human genetic variation and evolutionary history within human population genetics by exploring the gendered and sexual imaginaries of this field. At the same time, it seeks to extend feminist geographical work on social reproduction by attending to the figuring of reproduction itself. The article focuses on accounts of the geographies of Y-chromosome variation and the differences between the geographies of Y-chromosome variation and mitochondrial variation, and explores the degree to which this work is underpinned by, and potentially reinforces, particular accounts of gender, sex and the reproductive strategies of women and men. More specifically, I argue that despite some differences between the perspectives of those involved, much of this work deploys a model of male sexual competition that is at the heart of claims about the universal and determined fundamentals of reproduction, and indeed all social life, within evolutionary psychology. Gendered geographies of human genetic variation are being used as evidence for hitherto asserted but unproven claims about human nature. This article is a critical feminist engagement with the renaturalisations of culture within this strand of human population genetics.     

The Matter of Makira: Colonialism,Competition, and the Production of Gendered Peoples in Contemporary Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain

Since civil tension disrupted Solomon Islands between 1998 and 2003, the Arosi of Makira have elaborated discourses according to which their island contains a secret and preternaturally powerful subterranean army base. These discourses have clear antecedents in Maasina Rule, a post-World War II socio-political movement sometimes analysed as a “cargo cult”. Offering an alternative interpretation, I compare Arosi discourses about the Makiran underground to the Matter of Britain as represented in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (completed c. 1138). I argue that both sets of discourses arise from the dynamics of mutually precipitating communities mythologizing themselves and each other in terms of the analogous oppositions colonizer is to colonized as allochthon is to autochthon as male is to female. This comparison, I conclude, recommends the medieval European phenomenon of a “matter” as a productive model for understanding contemporary ethnogenetic myth-making in and beyond Melanesia.     

Environmental influences on skilled worker migration from Bangladesh to Canada

We conducted focus groups in Toronto with 44 recent skilled worker immigrants from Bangladesh to explore whether their decisions to migrate to Canada may have been influenced by environmental problems. Previous research has documented how floods, cyclones, droughts, and seasonal precipitation variations affect rural‐urban migration patterns within Bangladesh, and to its neighbours. Most participants had not experienced such environmental hazards, having lived in Dhaka prior to migrating. However, Dhaka's ongoing problems with air and water pollution, sanitation, lack of green space, and food adulteration were cited by 70% as being relevant considerations for the decision to migrate. The degree of influence varied considerably among participants. Roughly 16% said pollution was their primary motivation for leaving, household members having suffered from illnesses traceable to air pollution or poor sanitation. Another 54% stated that Dhaka's environmental problems were part of a wider range of quality‐of‐life concerns that had some influence on their decision. The findings suggest that current migration to Canada is not connected with environmental migration that takes place within Bangladesh, but that urban environmental problems combined with other social, economic, and political factors can help drive migration.     

Exploring student mobility and graduate migration: undergraduate mobility propensities in two economic crisis contexts

This article explores the issue of mobility propensity among undergraduates, focusing on plans for long-term and short-term movement, including migration after the completion of present course of study. We also assess the strength of the relationship between a decision to move abroad and the personal impact of the ongoing economic crisis, using evidence from two recent surveys conducted with students in the capital cities of Portugal and the Republic of Ireland. Results provide an indication of the popularity of moving abroad and identify justifications for seeking an exit, potential destinations and anticipated lengths of stays. Regression analysis further confirms that the crisis is having a significant bearing on mobility decisions among respondents in Portugal but not the Republic of Ireland, with the concluding discussion integrating the main findings into existing debates on international student mobility.     

Great Ancestral Women: Sexuality,Gendered Mobility,and HIV among the Bamu and Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

Faced with a potentially devastating epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Papua New Guinea (PNG), sexuality and mobility have become a focus of national research and prevention programs. In Gogodala and Bamu communities in the Western Province, gendered mobility and sexuality intersect with ancestral narratives that form part of a wider series of Hero Tales found in the southern regions of PNG and Irian Jaya. In this paper we highlight the way these stories detail the travels and activities of female ancestors – known as Sagalu among the Bamui and Sawiya among the Gogodala. We outline the way such ancestral figures are now linked to understandings of contemporary STIs such HIV/AIDS as well as gendered mobility and sexuality more generally. Among the Bamu such links are sometimes directly asserted, with Sagalu represented as the origin if not cause of a uniquely defined variant of HIV/AIDS. Among the Gogodala, however, HIV/AIDS is predominantly understood as something external to the Gogodala and unrelated to ancestors like Sawiya. To explain this difference we note that, historically, Gogodala women have been less mobile and less transactable than their Bamu counterparts who have continued to enact unique understandings of the intersection of heterosexual marriage, gendered mobility, and illness. We argue that the mobility and sexuality of gendered ancestors is salient to understanding these contemporary enactments and their potential implications in light of the HIV epidemic in PNG.