The South American population living in the UK and Europe has grown decisively over the past decade (Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2007, McIlwaine 2007).1 With an increasing number of economic migrants, students, and family reunifiers supplementing the earlier flows of those moving to seek asylum and to participate in skilled labor markets, the community has greatly diversified. The fact that, like many immigrant populations, South Americans tend to concentrate in some areas and not others introduces further diversity between, in the UK, the South American communities in London and the North. Understanding how growing immigration and diverse communities affects British, European, and South American societies in interdependent ways is important to debates on citizenship, belonging, and multiculturalism (Yuval-Davis 2006), development and position of South America in the global economy (Munck 2009, Robinson 2004), and convergence and divergence across Europe (Koser and Lutz 1998; Pellegrino 2004).

My doctoral thesis, through a case study of the theocratic-nationalist politics of the Iranian regime and the imperialist politics of the U.S., Russia, and Western Europe in the Middle East, investigated the ways in which gendered-, ideological-, and raced social-relations sustain armed conflicts and generate disability/injury. The study contributed to the emerging field of materialist/Marxist disability studies and critical race moves in disability studies by engaging the dialectics of geopolitics in order to contextualize war, and by proposing a new transnational theory for theorizing disability. In this paper, I extensively discuss my theoretical framework, along with the methodology for collecting and analyzing data in order to offer a radical alternative research method to traditionally biomedical, post-conventionist, liberal, and bourgeois approaches to disability. Additionally, I discuss how I built the new model using the case study in details while introducing its core theoretical constructs emerging directly from the case study. My conceptualization of a transnational theory/model interrogates the violence of the global political economy in producing disablement on a global scale. Finally, I discuss possible directions for further development of the transnational disability model not just as a theory, but also as praxis, active revolutionary knowledge, and political consciousness.

Prior research suggests that international migrants, taken together, experience alcohol and other drug (AOD)-related problems at lower rates than do non-migrants. However, many migrants do, in fact, misuse AOD, with elevated levels of risk observed among those who migrate during childhood and those who experience adverse/stressful events. In our prior work, we have advanced cultural stress theory, which is concerned with the ways in which adverse migration-related experiences can create disruptions in family functioning and, in turn, increase risk for adverse behavioral and mental health outcomes, including AOD misuse. In this article, we provide an overview of prior research on AOD misuse among immigrants and highlight critical gaps in research and theory. In turn, we present a framework for AOD misuse research and prevention that (1) considers the importance of pre-migration, transit-related, and post-migration stressors; (2) prioritizes cross-national and multisite comparative designs; and (3) highlights transnational dynamics in migration.

This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants’ attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation-states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants’ extra-local socio-cultural relations. Through an ethnographic study of dispersed family networks of Caribbean origin, I explore the wide range of migration practices in which differing actors engage and the nature of the sociocultural systems that emerge as migrants move between places.