Migrant Identity Research Articles

What does data literacy means for you (as an educator)nowadays?

Despite progress in data literacy frameworks associated with a critical discussion of datafication, educators are still perplexed when it comes to working with these issues in their everyday teaching practice. In part, this is due to the complexity of the data infrastructures that permeate educational practice itself. In this context, it seems particularly appropriate to understand the discursive phenomena, the construction of professional practise and therefore the educators’ positionings around the issues of datafication in general, and the development of critical data literacy, namely, “postdigital positinings”.
 This paper proposes a collaborative autoethnographic analysis of the professional experiences of the three authors, as educators.
 As women with complex migrant identities, with roots in the Global South and at the same time, bearers of European métisages, our pathways meet at the crossover of an international project in which we develop materials and design educational activities. Our history lies on an intersectional basis that allows us to express rich positionalities, full of examples and resources that can be resounding notes for the construction of agentic educational practices in this field of post-digital forces.

Barriers to entrepreneurship: an intersectional analysis of an early-stage refugee entrepreneurship programme in the United Kingdom

PurposeThe study deploys Anthias' intersectional framework of social spaces and her concept of translocational positionality to explore the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugee entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom (UK). In particular, the study aims to assess how migrant identities require a specific form of business support.Design/methodology/approachA total of 32 semi-structured interviews with 14 refugee entrepreneurs and 18 business support agents were conducted between April and October 2022 and, together with field notes, were combined for thematic analysis in NVivo 12.FindingsOrganisational, representational, intersubjective and experiential barriers combined to create practical and psychological deterrents to entrepreneurship for refugees. However, an explicitly humanistic and de-centred approach to business support was (partially) able to counter such barriers.Practical implicationsPolicymakers and business support agencies should consider intersectional characteristics and the importance of a compassionate and individual approach when designing business support programmes for refugee entrepreneurs.Originality/valueTwo intersectional concepts of social spaces and translocational positionality are brought into conversation with each other, creating a novel approach to framing the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugees.

Political Attitudes and National Identity of Mainland Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong

Abstract: Using data from the 2017 Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics, this article investigates the political attitudes and national identity of Chinese migrants in Hong Kong. The study reveals a negative association between refugee experiences and support for pro-government parties, a negative association between refugee experiences and national identity, and a positive association between premigration socialisation and support for pro-government parties. Adult undocumented migrants reported lower levels of support for pro-government parties and weaker national identity compared to adult documented migrants. Documented migrants who arrived in Hong Kong at age 16 or older reported higher levels of support for pro-government parties than those who arrived at younger ages.

Widerständige Sprachpraxis und literarische Selbstermächtigung: Postmigrantische Perspektiven auf Ein- und Mehrsprachigkeit in Lena Goreliks Roman Wer wir sind (2021)

ABSTRACT This article analyses Lena Gorelik’s latest novel Wer wir sind (2021) in terms of cultural debates on postmigration diversity and multilin-gualism in modern Germany in recent years. The novel Wer wir sind can be read as a process of dealing with the family experience of migration, shown across generations, as well as the difficult process of learning German and settling into a culturally different context. The analysis of the novel focuses on linguistic and narratological means through which the opposition to the national concepts of monolingualism and the identity of migrants as ‘others’ is expressed. The process of learning German, the role of the German-speaking writer and multilingual identity are presented in the novel as strategies of opposition to the hegemonic national discourse. On the one hand, learning German and writing literary works in this language appear to be subversive activities in relation to oppressive cultural and social norms and acts of self-empowerment. On the other hand, literary images of linguis-tic resistance and self-determination are marked by an awareness of linguistic unattainability and uncertainty. ‘Mastering’ a language, as well as writing literature, is an ambivalent process and work in progress.

‘Say it with a photograph!’ exploring Greek and Italian students’ opinions and feelings about social work and migration through photovoice

ABSTRACT Continuous refugee crises have led to increasing numbers of social workers working in the migration field, yet the subject is under-represented in social work curricula in many European countries. This international research project aimed to investigate undergraduate social work students’ opinions and feelings about social work practice and migration through photovoice in two Universities in Italy and Greece. Two focus groups took place and subsequently two events about social work practice with migration were co-organized for the whole student cohorts in each University with the participation of social work professionals in the migration field and migrants as experts by experience. Data were analyzed based on qualitative thematic analysis. The findings revealed that social work in migration field is an unknown, fascinating but also unattractive theme for social work students, resulting in shallow understandings and negative representations of the migrant identity as well as their own professional role. Several implications for social work education are highlighted such as the need to prioritize content on social work practice and migration as well as the value of using creative and participatory approaches in class, such as photovoice.

Anti-urbanization and rural development: Evidence from return migrants in China

There is a noticeable trend toward return migration in both developed and developing countries, including China. Nonetheless, return migration in China has received relatively scant scholarly attention. It is underexplored whether return migrants and local workers are complements or substitutes. In this study, we develop a theoretical model to disclose the mechanism of return migration on villagers. Using a novel self-collected nationwide household survey dataset combining agricultural production and income information in rural China, we examine how return migrants affect rural household income, including income growth, relative income, and expected income growth. The results show that return migrants negatively impact rural household income. This impact is driven by the competition effect and the spillover effect between return migrants and local villagers. We also analyze the identities of return migrants before and after returning to distinguish the transmission channels. Our findings suggest that the government should persist in its encouragement of urbanization and promote return migrants to carry out work that complements local villagers.

Dissecting Generations of Migrant Identities Within a Diaspora

Dissecting Generations of Migrant Identities Within a Diaspora

Consent, Resistance, and Gender Identity in Social Reproductive Work: The Case of Georgian Migrant Women in Turkey

ABSTRACT Taking Georgian migrant women who work in Turkish homes as a case, this article explores the material and ideological conditions surrounding the extraction of surplus value from live-in migrant domestic labourers. From the perspectives of social reproduction and labour process theories, it documents the migrant workers’ concerted consent and resistance strategies in the workplace with reference to domestic labour processes. Based on an ethnographic study, the findings show the contradictory nature of migrant women’s attainments due to their gendered migrant identities. Implications of these findings in relation to the collective organisation of domestic labourers are discussed.

Migration and mobility in Roman Beirut: The isotopic evidence

Rescue excavations in Beirut, Lebanon, have uncovered large burial assemblages dating to the Roman period. As the first Roman colony in the Near East, the human skeletons from Beirut provide a unique opportunity to explore migration to the city using biomolecular analyses. This study applies strontium and oxygen isotope analysis to nineteen human skeletons and establishes primary local reference values through the analysis of human and faunal dentition and the utilisation of already available environmental and botanical data from Lebanon. Two possible incomers and two definite migrants – both male and female – were identified who originated from different parts of the Empire. The comparison of isotopic data with the material culture of the graves illustrates how migrant identity is not always expressed in burial, and also how archaeological data can supplement biomolecular results in identifying the type of migration involved in a colonial setting. The results from this study contribute to our understanding of the Roman colonization of Beirut, highlight female mobility during the Roman period, and establish local human isotope ratios which can be used in future research on migration to the city and in the region.

‘[P]aying back to the community and to the British people’: Migration as transactional discourse in curated stories by UK charity organisations

This study explores migrant identity construction in the curated stories of UK-based charity organisations. Drawing upon the paradigms of critical discourse analysis and narrative positioning, we demonstrate how the construction of migrant identities as successful, fulfilled, grateful and resilient reproduce a migration as transaction discourse. We problematise these representations as prerequisites to migrants’ acceptance, given that they not only speak to the neoliberal, neo-assimilatory paradigm of wider integration debates in UK public discourse, but also conflict with the overtly philanthropic aims of the charity organisations. The curated stories are, thus, transformed into sites of liquid racism in their entanglement of declared antiracist, covertly racist, positionings of migrants in the UK context. Our work contributes to the body of research that aims to scrutinise the largely unexamined work of institutionalised social actors who aim to ‘do the right thing’ by calling for greater reflexivity and the need for critical dialogue in order to unpack the embeddedness of antiracism in racism.

Across the Pacific Divide: Latin American Experiences of Integration and Well-Being in Canada and Australia

ABSTRACT There has been a paucity of comparative research regarding social inclusion for the Latin American diaspora worldwide, and this is particularly the case for scholarly work that connects countries in the Americas with nations across the Pacific. Rather than recognise the growing number of Latin Americans who travel throughout the regions of the Pacific Rim, scholarship has remained heavily dominated by works relating to the Latin American population in the United States of America and Europe. In this paper, we shift the attention to Canada and Australia, where both countries increasingly interrogate what have historically been comparable models of multiculturalism and interculturalism. Drawing on data from more a survey of 1600 respondents, we argue that personal and social ties are key to cultivating positive post-migration subjective well-being. In so doing, we highlight the effects of subjective well-being and barriers to integration and belonging. We further illustrate the implications of the intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity in relation to migrants’ well-being and inclusion. Such research demonstrates the need for a better contextualised understanding of migrant inclusion, and for detailed analysis of the situated relationships that constitute Latin American migrant identities across the Pacific Rim.

Belonging or estrangement—The European Refugee Crisis and its effects on immigrant identity

This study examines the impact of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis on the ethnic identity of resident migrants in Germany. To derive plausibly causal estimates, I exploit the quasi-experimental setting in Germany, by which refugees are allocated to different counties by state authorities without being able to choose their locations themselves. This study finds that higher shares of refugees in a county increased migrants’ attachment to their home countries, while not affecting their perceived belonging to Germany. Further analyses uncover strong heterogeneities with respect to country of origin and suggest that concerns about xenophobia, experiences of discrimination, and the consumption of foreign media contributed to these effects. Lastly, I find that changes in ethnic identity coincide with the political polarization of migrants.

Transgressive body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

In a society where colour is a major reason for social stratification, the black identity is burdened with the perceived negativities generated by its colour. This reality becomes conspicuous in a space defined by racial superiority and migrant status. In Americanah, unlike her other novels, Adichie migration concerns are more profound to reflect the perception and intense consequences of racial identity for African migrants and black people in the West. Through a close reading of this text from a postcolonial view, this article contends that the migrant status and blackness of African subjects, represented in physical attributes, expose their bearer to racial prejudice. This article further argues that to be integrated and access racial privileges, African migrants must suppress or eliminate the racial burdens attached to blackness by transforming or modifying their identity. Such modification evoked by a transgression is accompanied by a loss of identity.Contribution: The most outstanding feature of this article is the exploration of the interface between transgression, body and space in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (2013) Americanah. This article contributes to the growing discourse on transgression, racism and African migrants’ realities and examine the concerns of black people regarding colour politics through intercontinental migration. This article further seeks to address significant questions about the way race influences the cultural attitude of minority groups and how black immigrants react to racial Othering.

Dismantling Hospitality - Literary Representations of EU Asylum Policy in Dina Nayeri’s Refuge

When we refer to nation-states receiving refugees as “host” countries, we necessarily evoke notions of hospitality, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers with liberality and goodwill.” Yet the exploration of the impact of contemporary EU asylum policy in Dina Nayeri’s 2017 novel Refuge portrays a system far removed from such adjectives. Based heavily on Nayeri’s own autobiography, and hitherto underrepresented in academic research, the award-winning work portrays the journey of an Iranian refugee in Europe to make sense of her migrant identity, informed by her encounters with fellow members of the Iranian diaspora in the Netherlands. Through the friendships Nayeri’s protagonist forms, a vivid fictional representation is conjured of the damaging human impacts of policy areas such as the EU’s Dublin Regulation, referenced and rephrased in the context of the novel. Drawing from Mireille Rosello, this paper proposes a comparative reading of the legal and fictional texts, as analysed through the prism of host/guest relationships. It seeks to demonstrate the capacity of fiction to give voice to the victims of policy failures, as well to provide an affect-based accompaniment to legislation which by nature excludes the emotive language necessary to comprehensively capturing human experience. Ultimately, it explores how Nayeri’s novel calls into question the very relevance of the language of hospitality used in reference to contemporary European asylum policy.

New Research

Abstract Visible Assemblages: Six Affordances of Curating from the Peripheries In this article, the author offers a rationale of her understanding of self-curation. From her position as a native culture-bearer singer of Karnatik music from Southern India, now settled in Australia, a settler colonial country, she elaborates on the characteristics of curation that emerge as important from her perspectives on being and knowing. The key line of inquiry in this article is the role of artist-curators in giving voice to culturally diverse perspectives. Drawing on correspondences between theory and praxis, she proposes that curation is a transactional and interactive sphere of operation where the everyday lives of artists intersect with their roles as transnational creatives who must negotiate their migrant identities, cultural strengths, and multiple belongings. Curating Art/Archaeology: Excavating Through/With Material and Artistic Performativity The transdisciplinary practice of art/archaeology has created a new relationship between post-processual archaeology and contextual arts, allowing archaeologists and artists to strengthen their investigative and performative work. Curating art/archaeology presents new possibilities for experimenting with the present and the past. The performative gestures in art and archaeology challenge hegemonic perspectives and expand tools for surfacing narratives, presences, and absences. This essay presents an experiment in which curating art/archaeology methodologies were used to (re)interpret the archaeological spatiality, narratives, and artifactual records of the Ovil Mount, a proto-historical village in the northern region of Portugal. Through contemporary art formats and gestures, the static fixation of the past is resignified and mediated in dialogue with the present. The article serves to question the definition of artifact, archaeological objectivity, and the ways we relate to the creation of narratives in the past. It assumes the material and artistic performativity of the site and enacts its immaterialities. Curatorial Contemplations on the Conditions of Sound Arts in Diaspora This article is a revised version of an assessment I wrote before (Tabandeh 2022) in response to the conversations, debates, and shared concerns circulated among the participants of a music forum entitled Soundings: Assemblies of Listenings and Voices across the Souths that took place in August 2022 at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. A few weeks after the forum, the outburst of urban manifestations and civil upheavals in Iran in search of gender equality and social justice, followed by the sustained resistance of the Iranian people against oppression, stunned the world. The events of the consecutive months, alongside the ongoing war in Ukraine and several other concurrent conflicts around the globe, support the conjecture that more and more artists will probably keep crossing borders to end up in diaspora. In contrast, many others struggle to avoid becoming strangers in their homelands. In this text, I describe the sounds and voices of both groups as migrant sounds: those who have actually migrated and those who manage to project their voices beyond the border, even if they have never physically crossed it. This predicament is, of course, common to all live artists who need the presence of performers who must deal with real dangers to themselves and others. Nevertheless, the sociopolitical complexities of our time and the many ambivalences in the art of migrant voices, especially those of sound artists and composers, still invite further inquiry. In this article, I aim to reformulate the arguments of my earlier report to investigate the subject matter from a curatorial standpoint: What can event organizers and curators learn from gatherings of artists and researchers such as the Berlin forum? What can such events tell us about the challenges of survivance in diasporic conditions? And finally, how might this knowledge help us to encourage and facilitate similar “intercultural” encounters between sound artists from different ethnographic backgrounds in a community of new audiences and collaborators? Hybridity within an Expanding Field: Entry Points To Curating Contemporary Music And Sound Art In this article, we take a closer look at the issue of (dis)placement from both the spatial and a symbolic point of view introducing to the contemporary music and sound art curatorial field the term “entry point,” broadly used in migration or border studies. This term, both spatial and symbolic, illustrates the Other entering the porous borders between countries and cultures, or borders between disciplines, genres, media, communities, practices, and forms of artistic expression. In our study, we use the term “entry point” to analyze the variety of the backgrounds (both professional and artistic) of the young curators entering the field, the participants of two Sounds Now Curating Diversity Courses taking place in Athens, Greece, and Viitasaari, Finland. We are particularly interested in their personal and professional motivation, responsibilities, and reasons to enter the field of curating as well as the challenges and issues they face.

Formy manifestacji tożsamości lokalnej mieszkańców Podkarpacia w Stanach Zjednoczonych

The purpose of the presented text is to analyze the forms of manifestation of local identity of migrants from the Podkarpacie region in the United States, using selected localities of the region as an example. The research was based on existing data (mainly censuses, personal documents, newspapers, passenger arrival records from the Ellis Island Archives) and elicited data (in-depth interviews). The exploration covered two neighboring counties: Strzyzow (nineteen villages) and Rzeszow (primarily Rzeszow and Harta). Examples of different ways of demonstrating local identity in the context of migration, presented in this text, clearly confirm how important an aspect it remains for the immigrant, and how crucial role it plays in the process of reconstructing identification in the destination country.

A gulf of secrets: Priya Kuriyan’s graphic memoir “Ebony and Ivory”

While the key role that migration plays in the economies of countries like India is widely recognized, subtler affective and cultural circuits are both less easily discerned, and perhaps as a consequence, less explored in scholarly literature. The transnational relation over the past several decades of India to West Asia has produced sophisticated and complex heterogenous forms — both traditional literary novelistic genres, as well as newer forms such as the graphic memoir. Through a close and attentive reading of one such memoir, Priya Kuriyan’s “Ebony and Ivory” (2017), this article seeks to articulate the fraught weight of migration. It probes the construction of migrant identities as they unfold over several generations within a single family. The memoir deconstructs the successful economic migrant as in reality bearing the scars of decades of secrecy and shame. Through the use of several refined visual strategies, Kuriyan tells us another tale of the migrant — one that, even as it seeks to carve a special narrative of courage and success in distant lands, must nevertheless also own up to a dismantling of the entrenched narrative of the happy, hardworking immigrant family.

Rural–urban migration and urban identity differentiation in China

ABSTRACT Previous studies on the social identity of rural-urban migrants in China have often neglected the fact that migration is highly selective. Consequently, the findings generally suffer from survival bias. To overcome this problem, we construct an analytical framework to differentiate six subgroups: rural residents with no migration experience, returned migrants, rural-urban migrants, new urban residents through elite approaches, new urban residents through policy dividends, and urban natives. Employing logistic regression, propensity score matching, and propensity score-based marginal mean weighting through stratification, this study analyzes the 2013 Chinese General Social Survey data and confirms that the urban identity of rural residents, rural-urban migrants, new urban residents, and urban natives changed from weak to strong. The sources of urban identity can be ascribed to three aspects: urban experience, hukou conversion, and generational replacement, among which hukou conversion is the most important. The findings indicate that incorporating rural-urban migrants whose identity status may have changed into the analysis helps overcome the problem of survival bias. This method can be further used to reveal other issues related to rural-urban migration in urbanizing China. Moreover, theories concerning international migrants in western countries should be critically appraised before being applied to explain the social integration of internal migrants in different social contexts.

ВЛИЯНИЕ ВУЗА НА ПРОЦЕСС ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ МИГРАНТОВ ИЗ СТРАН ЦЕНТРАЛЬНОЙ АЗИИ

The author actualizes the role of higher education institution in the process of forming a new identity of migrants from Central Asia studying at Far Eastern universities. It is depicted that in the near future Far Eastern higher education institutions will expect the growth in this kind of contingent. Major ways of higher education institution’s impact in the three directions are denoted in the article, as well as academic activity, extracurricular communications and surroundings’ influence.

Migration as Mission: Alojz-Alexis Strýček SJ in Belgium (1938–1945)

This article presents a case study of Alojz-Alexis Strýček SJ, a Slovak Jesuit in Belgium during World War II, to examine the complexities of migration, identity, and religious mission within turbulent historical contexts. Strýček’s experiences challenge conventional categorizations in migration studies, demonstrating how individual narratives can intersect with and transcend national and religious boundaries. The study employs social network analysis and philological-historical methods, offering insights into the dynamic roles migrants play in the circulation of knowledge and in shaping transnational connections. Strýček’s case highlights the importance of considering non-national factors, such as religious affiliations, in understanding migration patterns and migrant identities. This research contributes to the emerging field of “migrant knowledge,” which focuses on the role of migrants in global knowledge exchange and the redefinition of identities in times of crisis, thereby enriching our understanding of the multifaceted nature of migration.