Transience as method: A conceptual lens to understanding evolving trends in migration, mobility, and diversity in the transnational space

Abstract

AbstractMigration as an act and as a concept is becoming more complex and nuanced not only because of increasing numbers of people and groups criss-crossing and circulating international borders but also because of push–pull factors that determine agendas and aspirations affecting transnational mobile actors. Static and binary understandings of migration as either settled or temporary are thus disrupted with new and impactful rising trends in the migration-mobility nexus identified. Based on observations of global political and community responses to transnational migration, and various research projects I have been involved with on temporary migration (international students, working holiday makers, and university-educated professional workers) in the Asia-Pacific, this article puts forward the idea that transience—a phenomenon where migrants regardless of visa and residency status are, for different reasons, spatially unsettled and transnationally mobile—be used as a conceptual lens in order to see emerging dynamics within the migration-mobility experience. Transience as a conceptual lens provides a disjuncture in our understanding of the migration-mobility nexus beyond the categories of temporary and permanent, and is a useful method in helping us understand the complexities, nuances, and ecologies which emerge from the migration experience, and making us aware of evolving patterns of diversity. Transience, in other words, becomes a new method in understanding evolving and emerging migration patterns by investigating the unevenness of the migrant(ion) journey.