Racialised sexualities: the case of Filipina migrant workers in East Malaysia

In national narratives of ‘Malayness’, a specific language (Malay) and religion (Islam) have become key aspects of an identity that excludes migrants and those of ‘questionable’ sexualities. Consequently Filipina migrants working in the nightlife industries in East Malaysia have been subjected to disciplinary discourses of ethnicity and sexuality that underpin these national narratives. Attempts to tighten migration laws and curb nightlife activities have resulted in a racialisation of Filipina migrant sexualities. Using ethnographic methods, this article explains the impacts of dominant state and public discourses of migration, ethnicity and gender, which Filipinas encounter in their everyday lives in their destination country. In the process the article also reveals how Filipinas resist these discourses and hence participate in the formation of their subjectivity.     

Globalised dreams,local constraints: migration and youth aspirations in an Indian regional town

Youth in India’s regional towns face a paradox: they are exposed to discourses of neoliberal globalisation through education and media, yet are unable to seize the benefits of globalisation, due to regional isolation. In this paper, we explore how aspirations of youth in India’s regional towns are influenced by their geographic marginalisation. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Darjeeling, a regional town in West Bengal, we demonstrate that regional youth feel disadvantaged in their access to middle-class jobs, modern education and lifestyles associated with neoliberal globalisation. Consequently, they express strong desires for ‘exposure,’ which can only be met through migration, particularly to India’s metropolitan cities. They are frustrated in their aspiration to migrate, however, as they feel constrained by the traditional family structure, discrimination in the larger cities and the uneven temporalities between regional towns and ‘global India.’ Their experiences highlight the geographically uneven effects of neoliberal globalisation.     

‘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.     

Forging a ‘Good Diaspora’: Political Mobilization among Somalis in the UK

This article is about a campaign that was initiated by Somalis in London in 2013 against Barclays Bank's decision to shut down the accounts of four Somali remittance companies in the UK. It explores how young Somalis mobilized politically around the issue, and how, in the process, they created and reified a particular ‘imagined community’. By drawing on multicultural notions of community, and development idioms of diaspora engagement, they fashioned themselves around a notion of ‘good diaspora’ based on generation, pan‐Somali unity, and ideas of ‘professionalism’. In so doing, they were able to mobilize politically as both national and transnational actors, but were also confronted with some of the limits of the ‘good diaspora’ identity category. This article establishes a dialogue between the literature on diaspora engagement and that on migrant political mobilization by exploring how young Somalis navigate across these different national and transnational conversations, discourses and social categories.     

LIVING WITH MIGRATION

In the Philippines, large-scale overseas migration has raised concerns about left-behind children, who are perceived to be most affected by the absence of fathers, mothers or both. Without their ‘real’ parents (especially mothers) to rear and guide them, left-behind children are perceived to bear the brunt of the social costs of migration. Based on data collected from a 2003 nationwide study, this article examines how left-behind children (specifically those aged 10–12 years old and adolescents) cope without their migrant parents. Three questions are explored: (1) how children are raised in the absence of one or both migrant parents; (2) how children (re)configure family, family life and family practices; and (3) what roles children have, if any, in how the family unit copes with the migration of one or both parents. Although migration creates emotional displacement for migrants and their children, it also opens up possibilities for children's agency and independence.     

Rural Youth Migration Trends in Australia: an Overview of Recent Trends and Two Inland Case Studies

Much of what has been written on the topic of Australian rural youth migration trends and processes has often proceeded from data‐free, or data‐poor grounds. In this context, this paper analyses recent trends in youth (15 to 24 years of age) migration for a temporally‐consistent set of Statistical Divisions (SDs) in inland rural Australia, and for local government areas within the Northern Tablelands and Slopes and Ranges of northern New South Wales and the Western Australian Central Wheatbelt. The paper finds that rates of youth loss from rural regions have increased over the past twenty years. Yet the patterns, processes, causes and impacts of rural youth migration are distributed in a spatially‐uneven fashion. Some remote areas are receiving net migration gains while booming ‘sea change’ coastal regions have experienced heavy losses. While the ‘flight to the bright city lights’ syndrome is evident, relatively high proportions of young people in the Northern SD of NSW move within their immediate region. Nevertheless, some common understandings concerning youth mobility were also confirmed. Gender differentials in migration propensity between women and men are evident even at quite local scales. Young people are also more likely to search out capital cities than the rest of the population. Most inland areas still continue to experience heavy losses of local youth. A more precise understanding of rural youth migration trends is an important stepping stone in the establishment of a reinvigorated research effort into young rural people's perspectives of their changing life chances in their home communities.     

Brands of youth citizenship and the politics of scale: National Citizen Service in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the politics of scale in the context of youth citizenship. We propose the concept of ‘brands of youth citizenship’ to understand recent shifts in the state promotion of citizenship formations for young people, and demonstrate how scale is crucial to that agenda. As such, we push forward debates on the scaling of citizenship more broadly through an examination of the imaginative and institutional geographies of learning to be a citizen. The paper's empirical focus is a state-funded youth programme in the UK – National Citizen Service – launched in 2011 and now reaching tens of thousands of 15–17 year olds. We demonstrate the ‘branding’ of youth citizenship, cast here in terms of social action and designed to create a particular type of citizen-subject. Original research with key architects, delivery providers and young people demonstrates two key points of interest. First, that the scales of youth citizenship embedded in NCS promote engagement at the local scale, as part of a national collective, whilst the global scale is curiously absent. Second, that discourses of youth citizenship are increasingly mobilised alongside ideas of Britishness yet fractured by the geographies of devolution. Overall, the paper explores the scalar politics and performance of youth citizenship, the tensions therein, and the wider implications of this study for both political geographers and society more broadly at a time of heated debate about youthful politics in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

Performing ‘Oriental’ masculinities: embodied identities among Vietnamese men in London

The young British-born Vietnamese are a largely unrecognised group in society and are generally not considered part of multiethnic Britain. A key characteristic of their racial positioning has been the very specific forms of hegemonic gendered labelling shaped by discourses of Orientalism. These Orientalist discourses subject Vietnamese men to pernicious stereotyping linked to ‘passive’ and effeminising forms of ‘subordinate’ masculinity. The ethnic and gendered dimensions of male Vietnamese youth experience are further compounded by the intersecting processes of social class and urban geographies which provide a distinct range of identity outcomes; these are particularly acute for working-class men living in highly urbanised areas. This article explores how young Vietnamese men subvert Oriental labels and stereotypes by using a range of unexpected, creative and ‘spectacular’ manipulations of hair, dress, style and comportment. I argue that Vietnamese men negotiate and perform ethnic masculinities through conscious and strategic forms of agency which entail everyday mundane forms of ‘risk’. The article draws upon primary data from in-depth, narrative interviews and participant observation.     

‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

Young people’s everyday securities: pre-emptive and pro-active strategies towards ontological security in Scotland

Abstract

This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitisation are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialised, gendered and religious landscapes.     

Securing disunion: Young people's nationalism,identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009, Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.     

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.     

Do ‘in vitro children’ exist? The ‘ontological choreography’ between public debates and private experiences in Poland

ABSTRACT

Children who were born used IVF in Poland are subject of vivid discussion nowadays. In this article, we probe the ontology of the in vitro child: do in vitro children exist? If so, how and where? We analyse how an ‘IVF child’ is constructed through public discourses and private narratives. We explore media publications, as well as doctors’ and parents’ narratives concerning IVF children. A very strong voice in the debate has Catholic Church, which opposes medically assisted reproduction. Our main interest in this text are the answers of children and adults born using in vitro. Even young children recognize some focal points from the debate over assisted reproduction and refer to them. Their narratives show that they feel interpellated into existence by various discourses. In this manner, we argue, being an ‘in vitro child’ in Poland is a political status, not a biological one.     

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.     

‘Knowledge that moves’: emotions and affect in policy and research with young migrants

ABSTRACT

Migration is an emotional experience, and so is the policy and research work associated with it. Yet, discussions on emotions and affect remain largely absent from the literature on children and youth migration. Writing auto-ethnographically, I revisit my research with/about young Lao migrants with the aim of teasing out how emotions, of young migrants, of my own and in policy making emerged in relation to various dimensions of young people’s migration. On this basis I make the case for appreciating emotions as knowledge. While emotions are ‘moving’ in an affective sense, I proceed by arguing the productive dimension of emotions through the idea of the emotive as ‘knowledge that moves’. I substantiate this point by discussing instances in which emotions as a particular form of knowledge ‘move’ research decisions, policy making processes, theorizing the youthful dimension of migration as well as the interpersonal relations through which ethnographic research is realized.     

Migrant mothers,left-behind fathers: the negotiation of gender subjectivities in Indonesia and the Philippines

The distinct feminization of labour migration in Southeast Asia – particularly in the migration of breadwinning mothers as domestic and care workers in gender-segmented global labour markets – has altered care arrangements, gender roles and practices, as well as family relationships within the household significantly. Such changes were experienced by both the migrating women and other left-behind members of the family, particularly ‘substitute’ carers such as left-behind husbands. During the women’s absence from the home, householding strategies have to be reformulated when migrant women-as-mothers rewrite their roles (but often not their identities) through labour migration as productive workers who contribute to the well-being of their children via financial remittances and ‘long-distance mothering’, while left-behind fathers and/or other family members step up to assume some of the tasks vacated by the mother. Using both quantitative and qualitative interview material with returned migrants and left-behind household members in source communities in Indonesia and the Philippines experiencing considerable pressures from labour migration, this article explores how carework is redistributed in the migrant mother’s absence, and the ensuing implications on the gender roles of remaining family members, specifically left-behind fathers. It further examines how affected members of the household negotiate and respond to any changing gender ideologies brought about by the mother’s migration over time.     

‘They never pass me the ball’: exposing ableism through the leisure experiences of disabled children,young people and their families

In this paper, we explore the participation of disabled children, young people and their families in leisure activities. Drawing on the accounts of disabled children, young people, and their parents and careers, we reflect on the leisure spaces that they access and record some of their experiences within them. Using the concept of ‘ableism’ [Campbell, F. K. 2009. Contours of Ableism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan] we interrogate the data gathered as part of a two-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Does Every Child Matter, post-Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods' (RES-062-23-1138). By doing so we identify some of the inherent and embedded discriminations in favour of those children and young people who are perceived to be ‘able’ that simultaneously work to exclude the young ‘kinds of people’ [Hacking, I. 2007. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets.” Proceedings of the British Academy 151: 285–318] categorised as ‘disabled’ and their families from leisure facilities and opportunities. We suggest that currently, disabled families and children occupy a mix of ‘mainstream’, ‘segregated’ and ‘separate’ leisure spaces. We discuss the impact of occupying these spaces and ask what the experiences of accessing leisure by disabled children, young people and their families reveal about the processes and practices of ableism.     

‘Building Kachin’: Youth and Everyday Action in one of Myanmar's Ethnic States

In 2011, Myanmar started its political transition after decades of military rule. In Kachin State this coincided with the breaking of a 17‐year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/A) and the state army, the Tatmadaw. For youth living in Kachin State, this meant that opportunities for civic and political participation opened up while at the same time their context remained volatile and uncertain. Using citizenship theory and the concept of the ‘everyday’, this article analyses how youth in Kachin State connect the challenges they experience to their sense of citizenship, and how this informs everyday forms of youth action as well as youth participation in policy processes. The article argues that young people act out of moral and political reasons to ‘build Kachin’, in response to deeply historically rooted experiences of discrimination and state repression. While the agency of young people living in conflict settings is often believed to be limited to tactical agency for individual and immediate survival, an analysis of youth's experiences of citizenship shows that they also act strategically to advance the interests of their society.     

Loosening/tightening spaces in the geographies of hanging out

The article is based on research conducted with young people who spend their free time hanging out in a shopping mall and its surroundings in the city centre of Helsinki, Finland. ‘Geographies of hanging out’ is understood here as an interaction between the location and young people: the space offers affordances to the young people and thus affects their ways of being. At the same time, they give new meanings to the space by hanging out and thus take part in the production of that space. Empirical material gathered in the project includes the researcher's observations, in-depth interviews conducted with young people, youth workers, the police and the management of the mall and the photographs taken by the young participants. In this article, hanging out is interpreted as a process where ‘looseness’ and ‘tightness’ of space are negotiated and re-defined. Shopping malls are seen as spaces where boundaries between public and private are often blurred. The presence of young people can make these commercial spaces tighter or looser and thus change the nature of urban space not only for the young people, but for other urban dwellers, too.     

Learning to belong? ‘Culture’ and ‘place making’ among children and young people in Hull,UK City of Culture 2017

ABSTRACT

Despite the rise of ‘child-friendly cities’ internationally, and a growing interest in youth engagement in urban planning, the role of children and young people in culture-led regeneration and ‘place making’ schemes, remains under-researched. Notwithstanding the wealth of research into childhood and youth cultures, little is known about the ways in which the abstract (and perhaps predominantly ‘adult’) notions of ‘culture’ and ‘place’ are negotiated by younger citizens. Drawing on participative research with schools across Hull, the UK City of Culture 2017, this contribution explores children’s and young people’s understandings of culture and place within this cultural regeneration event. Although our findings suggest that the City of Culture designation has brought benefits to children and young people in a marginalised city, there is still much to be learned from their often personal and informal interpretations of ‘place’ and ‘culture’, as well as the role played by schools in this context.