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.     

Home divided,home reconstructed: children in rural–urban migration in contemporary China

This article is centred on the geographies of Chinese children in contemporary China – an area which has been problematically overlooked in geographical literature on childhood. In employing unique mobile research methods by tracking migrant children through the migration cycle, the author conducted an extensive ethnographic study of rural migrant children aged 8–17 in China. The article explores rural children's everyday lived experience of migration and how migrant children negotiate and articulate home and belonging while on the move. The study demonstrates the dynamic environment that migrant children inhabit, the fluid, contextual and mobile nature of their life in rural migrant households, their migrancy and their active involvement in homemaking.     

‘They have to abide by our laws … and stuff’: ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism

The long established distinction between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism is useful heuristically to understand different dimensions of nationalism and perhaps track a movement from ethnic forms to civic allegiances, though some have challenged its empirical veracity and others question the normative implications of such a distinction. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the two are elided in everyday discourses about migrants in Australia. We argue suspicion of cultural difference, identified more than three decades ago as the new racism, has given way to talk of the need for migrants to ‘follow the law’. This serves rhetorically to reinforce the notion that migrants, often implied to overlap with the category ‘Muslims’, are insisting on breaking the law and/or changing it and are therefore culturally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy. We argue that since ethnic nationalism, like racism, is out of favour normatively, ethnic nationalist arguments are now superficially concealed beneath the acceptable language of civic nationalism. The manner in which this occurs is mapped discursively using data from a corpus of twenty seven focus groups conducted around Australia.     

Thai migrants in Singapore: state,intimacy and desire

In this article, I analyse Thai migration to Singapore, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2004–06) to discuss the experiences of male construction workers and female sex workers in negotiating heterosexuality during their temporary residence. I argue that these Thai migrants engage in transient heterosexual encounters as one of many calculated, strategic ways of negotiating their intimate identity and subjectivity in the survival circuits of this global city. Their transient sexual acts are intimate products of negotiated moves, which form a major part of their semi-anonymous, temporary life in a foreign land. The sexual practices of Thai migrant workers in Singapore, I argue, are best understood by taking the following factors into account: the host government's regulation and control of its migrant population; the foreign workers' economic and social situations of mobility as inscribed in their highly dynamic traveling biographies; and their rationalized willingness and desire to embrace transient sexual intimacies as part of their employment and/or struggling lives in the global city's survival circuits.     

危险的愉悦：早期美国华侨赌博问题研究（1850—1943年）

论文勾勒了早期美国华侨的赌博情形,分析了他们参赌、设赌的各种原因和社会危害,探讨了华侨社会、中美两国政府对华侨赌博问题管理和控制的效能。作者认为,早期大部分美国华侨热衷于赌博,主要是赌博为特定历史场景中的华侨提供了一种重要的社会活动方式,被他们视为实现黄金梦的一条捷径。经济利益的驱动致使华侨热衷开设赌馆,也使华侨堂号勾结警察,暴力护赌。赌博对美国华侨社会的危害是巨大的,它使一些华侨不能履行自己对家庭的义务和责任,还引发了吸毒、盗窃、＂堂斗＂等其他社会问题。在控制赌博的行动中,由于华侨社团和中国驻美领事权力有限,威望不高,而华侨赌商和堂号与美国警察互相勾结,致使禁赌行动难有成效。     

‘Washing men's feet’: gender,care and migration in Albania during and after communism

This article compares the interrelationships between gender, family structures and intra-family care arrangements during two markedly different periods of Albania's recent history. The first of these, the communist era, was dominated by the autocratic state-socialist regime of Enver Hoxha. In contrast, the post-communist period that followed was characterised by a kind of reactive free-for-all capitalism and high rates of both internal and international migration, the latter mostly to Greece and Italy. Families have been torn apart by this mass emigration, resulting in husbands separated from their wives and children, and older generations left behind by their migrant children. All this contrasts with family, residential and care arrangements during the communist period when not only were families generally living in close proximity, but also state welfare was available to support vulnerable and isolated individuals. Across these periods, however, the burden of care responsibilities fell almost wholly on women, despite the egalitarian ideology of the socialist era and the potentially modernising and empowering effects of post-socialist migration on the agency of women. The article provides a valuable lesson in historicising regimes of gender, family and care across dramatically contrasting social models.     

Migration,the Urban Periphery,and the Politics of Migrant Lives

This paper explores the politics of migration through a focus on labor migration regimes and the urban lives of migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region of South Korea. In particular, it draws attention to the ways in which migrant lives highlight the limits of the contemporary emphasis on control in migration management regimes. The paper contends that while migration management certainly reworks the socio‐legal status of migrants, the desire for control is often displaced in the everyday presence and practices of migrants as urban residents. In order to develop this argument I focus on the notion of the urban periphery as a spatio‐temporal configuration that manifests marginalization but is also potentially generative, innovative and destabilizing. The paper proceeds by exploring three dimensions of the periphery: (1) the mobile commons that emerges in everyday life; (2) the process of becoming undocumented and the subversion of control; and (3) the tactics of recognition that challenge the peripheral location of migrants. In each case the focus on the urban periphery draws attention to the importance of visibility and invisibility in migration, to the uneven spatio‐temporal configuration of migrant lives in the city, and to the ways in which migrant desires constitute a politics that exceeds what is normatively expected of them.     

Public service broadcasting in Italy: Historical trends and future prospects

The article outlines the current structure and organization of public service broadcasting in Italy and explores various options for its future development. With moves towards digital broadcasting, RAI is set to enter a discrete next stage which will bring new challenges and will inevitably lead to a revision of its public service remit. While it is currently unclear how far Italian public service broadcasting will change, there is evidence that members of the government and senior RAI managers wish partially to privatize core elements of its public service. Focusing on the development of television, the article addresses some of the salient issues facing RAI and other public service broadcasters who have become the victims of a pervasive disenchantment with public provision of goods and services.     

Gender Equality and Decent Work in Australia

In 1998 the International Labour Organization (ILO) advanced the notion of ‘decent work’ as a way to enhance opportunities for women and men to obtain productive work in conditions of freedom, equality, security and human dignity. This concept is now both salient and contested in national and international policy debates. In a 2008–09 campaign, the ILO asserted that ‘gender equality [is] at the heart of decent work’. This article examines appeals to decent work in Australian parliamentary discourse and proposes how best to make use of the concept. It argues that gender equality is fundamental to decent work.

1998年世界劳工组织提出了“体面工作”的概念以促进男女在自由、平等、安全和尊严的条件下从事有益的工作。这个概念在国家和国际的政策辩论中都占有显要的位置。国际劳工组织在2008、2009年的活动中,强调性别平等位居体面工作的核心。本文考察了澳大利亚议会的相关言论,并对使用好这个概念有所建议。作者认为性别平等是体面工作的基础。     

Behind the Cold War: rethinking the left,the state and civil society in Italy (1940s-1970s)

This article stresses the longue durée features of the Italian political system. It examines the role of two historical factors: (1) the existence of some peculiar (and quite 'sophisticated') state financial institutions; (2) the influence of certain long-enduring social traits (regional differences, family values, the Catholic Church, political religion) on the relationship between state and citizens. It discusses the specificities of the Italian political system (with its historical Fascist heritage and the biggest Communist Party in Europe) and the reaction of the political elite (especially on the left) to international developments in the 1940s and the 1970s, since these years (of the economic 'miracle' and the origins of Italy's political 'landslide') offer the best comparison of Italy with other European countries. These two periods also enable us to examine the Communist Party's (PCI) crucial contribution in the two worst times of national crisis: the post-war years and the years of terrorism. The first part of the article examines the heritage of Fascism and how Italy's new political elite exploited it to strengthen the country's political and economic position after the war. The second explores how behind the Cold War the mass parties helped the country to expand in the international market by controlling social conflict. The third draws some conclusions about the 'success' of the 1940s and the heavy legacies that contemporary Italy has inherited from the 1970s.