Geographies of migration and relatedness: transmigrancy in open transnational adoptive parenting

Current transnational adoptive parenting is characterized by ambiguous practices of (1) discursively distancing adoptive children from immigrants, while (2) symbolically or actually reconnecting newly constituted families to children's birth countries through charity and culture work. This ambiguity reveals the ubiquity of contradictory and essentialist understandings of categories of familial and national belonging. However, adoptive parents’ strategies for accommodating their children's sense of belonging may also open up space for rethinking care and family building in transnational contexts. Using the case of a Belgian family who adopted a 12-year-old girl from Ethiopia, decided to maintain strong connections with the child's biological family, engage in charity work in Ethiopia and forge strong ties with immigrant communities in Belgium, the article explores how the concept of ‘transmigration’ may further our understanding of identity configurations within adoptive families. Furthermore, this particular case of ‘open’ transnational adoptive parenting testifies to adoptive parents’ efforts to escape from essentialist and exclusionary frameworks and create counter-spaces of multiplicity and transmigrancy in a context of severe social and economic inequality.     

White migrant masculinities in Thailand and the paradoxes of Western privilege

This study examines the counter-paradigmatic migration of Westerners into Thailand, focusing on men in transnational intimate relationships in the northeastern region. We explore how the particular spaces in which they settled affected these migrants' capacities to perform what they saw as hegemonic masculinities over time. We find that they initially experienced an increase in status that they were able to convert into assets in romantic relationships, permitting them to position themselves as ‘providers’ and ‘real white men,’ drawing on masculine ideals from their home countries as well as a diffuse neocolonial imaginary. In the long run, however, these identity constructions were subject to internal contradictions and attrition. They were also place-bound, creating both financial and social obstacles to a return home, particularly for those without ties to transnational capital. The ways these patterns differ from those in existing scholarship underline how both the particular spaces of migrant settlement and temporal dimensions are critical for the analysis of migrant masculinities.     

The transnational one-child generation: family relationships and overseas aspiration between China and the UK

ABSTRACT

Education-motivated migration from East Asia is regarded as a family capital accumulation project where middle class families reproduce their socioeconomic advantage at a transnational level. This study focuses on one-child generation migrants from mainland China who came to study in the UK as teenagers or young adults but remained to work as professionals after their education. Caught between the British social/employment system and the Chinese family system, the one-child migrants showed a fragmented sense of belonging and a high level of uncertainty in the migration plan. The pervasive Confucian family culture in these transnational families also calls for an expanded conceptualisation of the term ‘children’ and a long-term observation of their mobility curve in the project. This paper incorporates rational motivation with human complexity in the context of transnational reality, thus it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of changing intergenerational relationships in the transnational family capital accumulation project.     

Migration,common property,and communal labor: cultural politics and agency in a Mexican village

This article examines the politics of migration in an indigenous Oaxacan village (Mexico), and finds that the village acts, with measured success, to shape the timing and rhythm of migration. Villagers regard migration as necessary yet problematic. Migration provides income for village families yet undercuts traditions of community service and disrupts the integrity of local development networks that link the community to NGOs, state bureaucracies, and product markets. As a consequence, villagers engage in a cultural politics of negotiation and contestation that moulds both the meanings of migration, and the village social practices that regulate migration. Regulation operates via the setting of norms for village communal labor participation: those who do not undertake assigned tasks (cargos and tequios) face loss of usufruct of communal lands. This finding of strong sending community agency is contrasted with recent migration studies that emphasize the agency of migrant networks and transnational spaces. The paper presents a case study of migration that examines the exercise of community agency via collective labor participation, and the study concludes by calling for a greater analytical focus on the cultural politics of sending communities.     

Social Careers Across Imperial Spaces: An Empire Family in the Dutch-British World, 1811-1933

Here the object biography of a scale model of an old Dutch colonial sugar factory directs us to the history of an extended family, and demonstrates the connectedness of people and identities across and within European imperial spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study shows how people in colonial Indonesia became ‘Dutch’ through their social networks and cultural capital (for instance a European education). They even came to belong to the colonial and national Dutch elites while, because of their descent, also belonging to the British colonial and national elites. These intertwined Dutch and British imperial spaces formed people’s identities and status: the family discussed here became an important trans-imperial patrician family with a broad imperial ‘spatial imagination’, diverse identities and social circles. It was mostly women who played important roles in these transnational processes— roles indeed that they played well into the early twentieth century when colonial empires ceased to exist and the nation-state became the ‘natural’ social and political form of the modern world, obscuring these transnational processes.     

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.     

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.     

Re-presentar the religious: nation,community and identity in museums 1

This paper examines the roles that museums play as ‘unofficially sacred’ places, underscoring or challenging the religious life of a people and ‘nation’. It focuses on three key questions: (1) Do sub-national and transnational religious formations pose a challenge to or present opportunities for nation-building strategies, and what part do museums play in this struggle? (2) In what ways do re-presentations of religion in museums contest or reinforce religious community and identity? and (3) What challenges do museum displays pose to the understanding of religious meanings? This paper explores these three key questions about the intersection of religion with politics and ideologies, social relations, and cultural interpretations and transformations using an in-depth case study of an exhibition on the Jewish community in Singapore.     

Revisiting transnational actors from a spatial perspective

Actor-centred approaches feature prominently in transnational history. Studying transnational actors has helped to better grasp the extent, dynamics and mechanisms of particular cross-border connections, and has highlighted the entanglement and mutual constitution of cultures and societies in a more general sense. While empirical research continues to reveal more forms of their interaction, the general notion of ‘transnational actors’ has been gradually flattened out: the transnational sphere is now often studied in isolation and conceived of as a rather homogeneous space, while transnational actors are largely viewed solely in their border-crossing capacities and activities. The authors argue that while such a focus successfully captures their mobility, it overlooks another important dimension, namely their embeddedness in local, national, imperial or regional contexts. To reconnect these aspects, the authors situate transnational actors in their diverse socio-spatial relations. Investigating them in this way brings out their important role not only as connectors, but also as producers of various kinds of spaces. The contributions to this dossier highlight that transnational fields of activity are heterogeneous and deeply entangled with other spaces of action and belonging.     

Ageing masculinities and the nation: disrupting boundaries of sexualities,mobilities and identities

This article draws from a large-scale comparative project to focus on ‘ageing masculinities’ of second-generation Greek-American returnee migrants. In deconstructing multiple hegemonies (ethnicity, nation, patriarchy), the article explores how narratives of longing, belonging, family and kinship, as both experiential and storied accounts of self-imaging, become entangled through migration with social and personal his/stories, childhood upbringings and life-course stages. The analysis aims to explore the tensions and dynamics between structural, individual and cultural factors with respect to masculinities, and to elaborate on the contextualisation of masculinities in specific relational settings in later life. It is suggested that theoretical insights gained from a hermeneutical phenomenological analysis that is attentive to both the emotional/affective and gendered meanings of being and self-identity are important in empirically grounded studies of gender and migration. Such an analytical lens allows issues of masculinity and hegemony to be addressed and contributes to understanding transnational accounts of gendered power relations.     

Religious transnationalism among Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto: a binary logistic regression analysis

Thanks to pioneering work within anthropology, students of international migration acknowledge that most immigrants do not sever their ties with the homeland, but rather maintain them through a variety of cross‐border relationships. While scholarly work has proliferated, since the early 1990s, over the transnational economic and political activities of immigrants, to date, only few analysts have examined the religious practices with which immigrants sustain memberships in multiple locations. In addition, most available studies on transnational migration has dwelled on qualitative methods, such as participant observation, focus groups discussions and in‐depth interviews with a handful of informants, with little or no inclination towards the quantitative measurement of key variables implicated in the process. The prevalence of ethnographic methods in this area of research has, quite understandably, engendered charges of exaggeration, given the tendency of such techniques ‘to sample on the dependent variable’, to borrow the phrase of Alejandro Portes. Using data collected from a survey among Ghanaian immigrant congregations in Toronto, this study seeks to statistically predict the propensity to engage in transnational religious practices by way of a binary logistic regression analysis. In addition, the study examines how the transnational religious activities of the sampled immigrants relate to, overlap with, and differ from other kinds of transnational practices they pursue.     

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.     

A crisis of rights and responsibility: feminist geopolitical perspectives on Latin American refugees and migrants

With the advent of the Trump presidency we are facing the most anti-refugee and immigrant administration in recent U.S. history. This follows on the heels of the Obama era, characterized by record deportations and severe U.S. policies of deterrence towards Latin American refugees and migrants in its own backyard. This aggressive expansion of U.S. Homeland Security migration control included: outsourcing enforcement to Mexico; re-introducing migrant family detention; increasing ‘family unit’ raids; and accelerating immigration court hearings. These strategies of state deterrence and enforcement heightened vulnerability of asylum-seeking women and children from Mexico and Central America to human and legal rights abuses. I employ a feminist geopolitical approach to interrogate the intimate and embodied spaces of migration controls that ground the workings of the state in the normalized, routine, and informal practices of state officials and in the experiences of vulnerable yet resilient women and children refugees. Drawing upon examples from two research projects, informed by personal experience as a volunteer, I critically examine the everyday state practices of U.S./Mexico migration enforcement in three arenas - border security spaces, legal spaces, and carceral spaces. I contend that rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee crisis,’ these restrictive and intimate performances routinely deployed by border and legal bureaucrats reproduce and reinforce the structural and systemic crisis of rights and responsibility we are currently witnessing. Through a feminist ethic of care, social justice, and action, migrant and refugee narratives of everyday restriction may be deployed in resisting rights abuses and fostering responsibility, humanity, and hospitality towards newcomers.     

Heritage on the move. Cross-cultural heritage as a response to globalisation,mobilities and multiple migrations

Globalisation is creating new perceptions of social and cultural spaces as well as complex and diverse pictures of migration flows. This leads to changes in expressions of culture, identity, and belonging and thus the role of heritage today. I argue that common or dominant notions of heritage cannot accommodate these new cultural identities-in-flux created by and acting in a transplanetary networked and culturally deterritorialized world. To support my arguments, I will introduce ‘Third Culture Kids’ or ‘global nomads’, defined as a particular type of migrant community whose cultural identities are characterised high patterns of global mobility during childhood. My research focus on the uses and meaning of cultural heritage among this onward migrant community, and it reveals that these global nomads both use common forms of heritage as a cultural capital to crisscross cultures, and designate places of mobility, like airports, to recall collective memories as people on the move. These results pose additional questions to the traditional use of heritage, and suggest others visions of heritage today, as people’s cultural identities turn to be now more characterised by mobility, cultural flux, and belonging to horizontal networks.     

‘DOING FAMILY’

Drawing on a case study of married female migrants from two rural villages of Hung Yen province to Hanoi City, Vietnam, this paper investigates the implications of female migration on gender roles and relations within families. The paper shows that wives' migration changes gender roles and relations within the family. Being on the move, migrant wives become the main breadwinners while their husbands left behind take on the role of carers. The migrant wives acquire a stronger voice in family matters and a strong sense of pride, worthiness and earned respect, whereas their husbands experience a loss of power. However, these changing gender roles and relations rarely result in family fragmentations; instead, families are still being sustained as migrant wives ‘do family’. By ‘doing family’, they can exploit their increasing power in an acceptable manner, so that patriarchal family ideals are not openly confronted. This paper provides a more nuanced understanding of the implications of female migration on families, i.e. the simultaneity of the reproduction of and the change in gender roles and relations within families.     

Negotiating gender dynamics in heteronormativity: extramarital intimacy among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea

This article examines the liminal space that exists both as a structural condition engendered by transnational migration and as a state that is self-consciously carved out by migrants. It demonstrates that this space provides the grounds for migrants to develop ‘deviant heterosexuality’, such as extramarital relationships while simultaneously causing dilemmas and contestation of gender dynamics in conjugal and familial relationships. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, I elucidate the extramarital relationships among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea. By incorporating discussions of ‘queer heterosexualities’ and Hubbard's geographical engagement of sexuality into analysis, I argue that migrants' extramarital practices are shaped not only by dominant discourse, but also through the particular social and spatial positioning of individuals. First, I demonstrate that the liminal space gives migrant Filipino workers a certain degree of autonomy from the power and ideological interventions of both sending and host societies. Second, I highlight the liminal space that is extended by migrants themselves, especially through the increasing economic ability and mobility of migrant women, which can reconfigure the modes of heteronormativity and gender structure in conjugal, familial and extramarital relationships. In the end, I argue that transnational migration results not only in provisional liminality but also prolonged liminality through migrants' initiative in pursuing their desired heterosexuality and their endeavour to convert extramarital relationships into long-term intimacy. This study contributes to the discussion of the interplay between heterosexuality/heteronormativity and gender in recent human migration.     

Lost boys,invisible girls: stories of Sudanese marriages across borders

Forced migration challenges and changes gender relations. The transnational activities of refugees resettled in the West create gender asymmetries among those who stay behind. This article explores the transnational marriages of young southern Sudanese women (‘invisible girls’), who either stayed in Sudan or remained in refugee camps in Kenya, to Sudanese men who were resettled to America, Canada or Australia (‘lost boys’). Incorporating gender as a relational category into the analysis of transnational practices that migrants and refugees engage in is important. The article argues that there is a need to put feminist analysis at the centre of transnational processes resulting from (forced) migration. It looks at the connections between different geographical locations, the impacts of the migration of young refugee men on bridewealth and marriage negotiations and the gender consequences for young women, men and their families. It is argued that transnational activities, such as marriage, contest, reconfigure and reinforce the culturally inscribed gender norms and practices in and across places. Transnational marriage results in ambiguous benefits for women (and men) in accessing greater freedoms. Anthropological analyses of marriage need a geographical focus on the transnational fields in which they occur. The article seeks to deepen understanding of the nuanced gendered consequences of transnationalism. It shows how gender analysis of actions taken across different locations can contribute to the theorisation of transnational studies of refugees and migrants.     

中韩国际婚姻的跨国家庭纽带研究——以汉族婚姻移民女性为中心

论文以22名嫁韩中国女性为对象,从跨国主义的视角分析她们在韩的婚姻现状、与原生家庭间的跨国联系及这种联系的性质和意义。研究发现,这些女性绝大多数来自中国东北三省和山东沿海地区;中介婚姻占近70%,且与丈夫的年龄差距普遍较大;再婚者占较大比例。其中,60%与韩国丈夫育有子女,已在韩国生活多年,并从事各种非专业化工作。这些女性通过汇款寄物,信息通讯交流,回国探亲,邀请家人来韩等一系列方式维持着跨国家庭纽带。而她们的中国家人也为其提供育儿、家政以及精神抚慰等多方面的支持。通过跨国家庭纽带,汉族女性与原生家庭成员之间实现的是一种灵活变动着的"跨国看护",双方是互惠互利的。     

The social networks of the Buckinghamshire gentry in the thirteenth century

This empirical study offers a contribution to a continuing debate about the county community and the significance of feudal ties by analysing the contacts of twenty small and middling knightly families. It explores their geographical range and the relative significance of horizontal and vertical ties. The evidence indicates a world dominated by local connections, stretching five to ten miles from a family manor. Nonetheless, the gentry were not necessarily restricted by county boundaries in their connections, as patterns of monastic patronage show. Nor were their social networks always limited to their neighbourhood. The search for good marriages mobilised wider networks, while financial pressures led families to look to towns like Oxford and London for credit. Ties with feudal superiors were rare, except for tenants of the honor of Wallingford, who had links with the earls of Cornwall. Horizontal ties with other gentry families and family members significantly outnumbered those with any other groups, and this applied both to supportive relationships and conflictual ones. Placing this study in the context of other gentry studies, I conclude by emphasising the prevalence of local ties mainly with those on the same social level or below. Although there is evidence to suggest that wealthier families with several manors had wider ranging connections, the everyday world of these men was apparently a fairly parochial one.     

The social networks of the Buckinghamshire gentry in the thirteenth century

This empirical study offers a contribution to a continuing debate about the county community and the significance of feudal ties by analysing the contacts of twenty small and middling knightly families. It explores their geographical range and the relative significance of horizontal and vertical ties. The evidence indicates a world dominated by local connections, stretching five to ten miles from a family manor. Nonetheless, the gentry were not necessarily restricted by county boundaries in their connections, as patterns of monastic patronage show. Nor were their social networks always limited to their neighbourhood. The search for good marriages mobilised wider networks, while financial pressures led families to look to towns like Oxford and London for credit. Ties with feudal superiors were rare, except for tenants of the honor of Wallingford, who had links with the earls of Cornwall. Horizontal ties with other gentry families and family members significantly outnumbered those with any other groups, and this applied both to supportive relationships and conflictual ones. Placing this study in the context of other gentry studies, I conclude by emphasising the prevalence of local ties mainly with those on the same social level or below. Although there is evidence to suggest that wealthier families with several manors had wider ranging connections, the everyday world of these men was apparently a fairly parochial one.