Transnational Theory Research Articles

KENNEDY AND SOEKARNO IN POPULAR MOVIES: A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

A leader is someone who is perceived to represent a community. In nations that apply democracy, where people can choose their president through general election, the chosen leader is certainly someone who can meet the majority’s taste and criteria. President Kennedy from the United States and President Sukarno from Indonesia are two examples of the popular leaders that have been adored by their people through generations. This research examines leadership representation of Kennedy and Sukarno in movies, how their characters are built on screen, and the significance of their appearance in movies. This research employs Representation Theory from Stuart Hall combined with Transnational Theory of New American Studies. This research is able to explain the connection between popular fiction and the social and political phenomena in both countries, the US and Indonesia, in the time before the general election. Besides, this research finds shared values and ideology in Kennedy’s and Sukarno’s leadership represented in movies. Keywords: leadership, movies, representation, ideology, transnational

The Paris Paradigm

Global public discourse asserts that the Paris Agreement represents an irreversible turning point in the fight against climate change. The public outcry was correspondingly great when the Trump administration announced its intention to abandon the Paris Agreement. The Trump administration since has acted swiftly to repeal key regulations promulgated to implement U.S. Paris commitments, chief among them the Clean Power Plan. Problematically, the U.S. constitutional law literature on the Paris Agreement so far submits that neither the Paris Agreement nor commitments made pursuant to the Paris Agreement are an impediment to this policy reversal by the Trump administration. This directly contradicts the global expectation of what was achieved at Paris. The Article submits that the existing constitutional law literature incorrectly treats the Paris Agreement as a purely procedural executive agreement. The Article relies upon transnational law theory to show that the Paris Agreement and action taken pursuant to it instead constitute a global governance network. The Article then develops a “Paris Paradigm” governing presidential authority to commit the U.S. in such global governance networks. The Article uses the under-theorized category of implied Congressional delegation of foreign affairs authority in Youngstown to shows that the President has the authority to enter into, and unilaterally to make commitments within, such a global governance networks in reliance upon domestic rulemaking authority. The President must however act with constitutional good faith to make and such commitments. The Article concludes that the Paris Paradigm has important repercussions for attempts by later administrations to undo administrative rules that support global governance commitments (such as the Clean Power Plan). Statutory canons of construction presume that acts of Congress comply with U.S. international legal obligations. This presumption requires that administrative agencies may not rely upon statutory authority to repeal a rule when doing so would violate an international legal obligation of the United States. To repeal or replace regulations promulgated as part of a global governance network commitment, a later administration thus has to show that the original regulation fell outside the good faith regulatory authority of the agency promulgating it or that the new proposed rule continues to meet existing global governance commitments. Reconceived as a global governance network, the Paris Agreement therefore represents a paradigmatic impediment to current efforts by the Trump administration to repeal regulations such as the Clean Power Plan.

Learning Music Literacies Across Transnational School Settings

This article examines an adolescent’s music literacy education across Caribbean and U.S. schools using qualitative research methods and theories of multimodality, transnationalism, and global cultural flows. Findings include that the youth’s music literacy practices continuously shifted in response to the cultural practices and values of the physical geographies in which he alternatively lived; however, transnational movements combined with extended physical sojourning contributed to the youth’s development of progressively generative perspectives about the potential of U.S. contexts for building his music literacies and a correspondent constraining view on Caribbean geographies for his music literacy development. Amid an abundance of research on the significance of online worlds to transnational youths’ identity and literacy development, this article contributes insights into how formal literacy education physically experienced within and across nations shapes the nature of literacy learning.

A stratified analysis of the ICT-based communicative practices and networks of migrant women

This paper reports on a study of 60 women migrants in the US and their information and communication technology (ICT) based communication practices within their networks. Drawing on transnational feminist theory and the extended case method, differences amongst the participants emerged. Those participants who migrated with abundant human, social and cultural capital reserves used their greater online presence, technological resources, and digital aptitudes to connect to their families from a far through ICTs, which had the effect of widening their networks. Their intensive and widespread use of ICTs with family and friends fueled their aspirations to move onwards or return to their countries with greater leverage. Those participants with marginal levels were not online and they used domestic landlines to contact their away-families. They connected more with local co-ethnics and institutions on a face-to-face basis, thereby strengthening their community bonds. They concentrated their few resources on making social and economic investments for the next generation, and therefore could afford little in-depth contact with their families abroad. The findings have implications for expanding education initiatives and communication infrastructures, as well as relaxing restrictive immigration policies that keep families physically apart.

Górnoślązacy. Tożsamość regionalna i etniczna ponad granicami

Silesian identity is what connects regardless of national identity. The aim of this article is to present the problem of identity of Upper Silesians living in Poland and in Germany in the context of conception of the imaginary community and transnational theory. The issues of the social worlds in which Upper Silesians live in Poland and in Germany will also be tackled. The paper is based on research devoted to the Upper Silesian identity, which I have been conducting for several years in Poland, and recently also in Germany.

Polluted Postcolonialism of a White West Virginian, or, A Transversal Gaze toward Transnationalism

I'm not sure what to do with being somebody's This article is an exploration of my own sense of being Othered (Brown, 2005) in contradictory ways, and the responses to that othering my research is taking, arcing between postcolonial theory and transnational theory--all the while, looking for home. On one hand, I'm nobody's Other. White, married, presently living in a middle-class home; what could be more normative? Writing this as a self-reflection likely fits the norm of progressive, liberal White women trying to find themselves, too. I cringe about this over-autobiographical reflection, but I need to write this. The perspectival voice I try to articulate is one that has been too long suppressed (Delgado, 1989). This article is an attempt to decolonize, to claim the voice from drowning in Whiteness, capitalism, patriarchy (Smith 1999)--the many faces of hegemony. It is also an exploration of my positionality as an educational researcher and my attempts to locate myself in the historical moment, which is strongly linked to transnationalism. Theoretical Beginnings Postcolonial theory best frames the story of the place where I grew up, a place where structures of power were generally mystified by my formal schooling but where subaltern resistances created fissures which would support my adult discovery of postcolonial theory and my yearnings to reframe the story of where I was raised. I share some of those subaltern resistances and theorize more broadly about the conditions of my home state, West Virginia, and how it has been internally colonized in the U.S. I explain the postcolonial sense of exile (Said, 2000) I have experienced as someone who is now an outsider to West In this article, I explore demonstrative events from growing up in West Virginia, the ways race plays into the postcolonial condition and the role of poor Whites, and how West Virginia's historical trajectory has become better explained through transnationalism. I then turn toward transnationalism as a conceptual acid which can be used to demonstrate the contestations, interruptions, and contradictions of globalization (Briggs, McCormack, & Way, 2008, p. 627). I theorize that my exile has pointed me in the direction of transnationalism, in both my life experiences as someone who became bilingual after living off-and-on for many years in Mexico and in my research agenda, where I seek to highlight what can be learned from the potential of those who live their lives in both hybridity and transnationality. As a first-generation college graduate from a working-class West Virginia family, I am someone's Other. In Theorizing modernity in Appalachia, Susan Keefe explains: Mountain people have been typically cast along with non-Western peoples as the Other in the modern paradigm, representatives of an earlier traditional era at one end of a unilinear continuum with modern Western society marking civilization's progress at the other end. (2008, p. 160) I think to middle school when my brother, a graduate of West Virginia University, explained what it was like to attend college in our home state with so many people from New Jersey. They come to West Virginia to study because it's so cheap, but they all think they are so much better than West Virginia. This sounds just like the kind of tourism and even credentialing available to individuals from the centers of empire who visit former colonies for similar reasons. Sure enough, three years later after I got out of West Virginia at 18, I was on a study abroad trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, in a bus, with a young woman on the program from New Jersey. I had been lucky and gotten out (typical brain drain phenomenon of former colonies and economically backward places like West Virginia). She argued with me, red in the face, that people from West Virginia simply were not intelligent. She did this in front of the 20 or so student colleagues and faculty advisor from my small liberal arts college based in North Carolina. …

The Death of Citizenship: Tolling the Bell for Academic Scholarship

As managerialism and corporatization increasingly pervade higher education, historical citizenship practices and norms sustaining the academic community continue to fray. In particular, the academic citizenship behavior that sustains the entire peer reviewing system is under threat. By examining the paradoxical relationship between the highly rewarded behavior of research productivity and the unrewarded, invisible behavior of blind peer reviewing, we argue that peer review as it currently exists cannot continue. Theories of transnationalism and multiple citizenships help us rethink a failing system of privilege, and we advocate for recasting peer reviewing work as the intellectual contribution it is.

Crossing Boundaries in Multi-Sited Ethnography

This paper draws upon several transnational theories from Glick Schiller, Wimmer, Faist, and Sassen and analyses the major theoretical and methodological shifts in migration studies. In response to such changes, multi-sited ethnography has been introduced as a main research method; it differs from the traditional way of doing migration research, where spatially-defined ethnic minority communities serve as the primary fieldwork sites; instead, moving between different sites allows researchers to follow individual migrants, whose social networks have become the main focus. Moreover, such a research method also redefines the traditional notion of “field”, which is now believed to be with blurred and softening boundaries. Through my research project, I have analysed how translocal communities constitute global diasporic networks; I have also come to the conclusion that transnational migrants themselves are involved in very fluid patterns and complex processes of identification and affiliation; their social networks, which consist of multiple relationships such as familial, economic, social, organisational, and political, are not geographically bounded, but these networks cross over and connect different types of social spaces in a wide variety of cultural, institutional, professional, and other kinds of context.

The G20 and Global Justice: The Potential of Transnational Deliberative Democratic Theory

The G20’s capacity to promote global justice is up for debate. This article contends that the G20 has both problems and possibilities with respect to helping advance global justice. The potential of the G20 to promote global justice stems from its importance as a site for deliberation of policy ideas and its recent efforts to promote greater outreach and engagement with societal interests and states outside its narrow membership. Ultimately, G20 policy discussions could be more effective if its processes were more deliberative and better considered questions of justice and the perspectives of people affected by its decisions. The article utilises a transnational application of deliberative democracy theory to outline this potential. It attempts to identify this potential by drawing a practical balance between the normative importance of justice and the contemporary reality of the G20’s purpose and function.

Literary transnationalism: A Europeanist’s perspective

Literary transnationalism is a relatively new term critically mediating the relationships between national literatures and the wider forces of globalizing culture. ‘Literary’ or ‘critical’ ‘transnationalism’ describes aspects of literary circulation and movement that defy reduction to the level of the nation-state. The term originated in American Studies as a means of bringing American literary discourse into a new relationship with the world that it inhabits. Can the concept of ‘transnationalism’ help in broader discussions of world literature and literary globalization? Literary transnationalism in this sense would identify that point at which two or more geo-cultural imaginaries intersect, connect, engage with, disrupt or conflict with each other in literary form. In this article I discuss transnationalism in terms of its origins and intellectual history in order to suggest ways in which transnational theory might be developed as an analytical tool of both global breadth and historical depth with particular reference to European literature.

Critical Fictions of Transnationalism in Latinx Children’s Literature

In this essay, we provide an overview of the theories of transnationalism and critical fictions as they relate to children and children�s literature. We define �critical fictions of transnationalism� as texts that position readers across locations and times, making visible contemporary overlapping politics of border crossing, global markets, and cultural production across spaces and its implications for transmigrant communities. We then apply key theoretical elements of transnational literacies in literature to discuss the book Cafecito Story (2001) by Latina feminist author Julia Alvarez. Her books depict children and families whose lives are impacted by transnational markets and international borders.

Blending ‘home’ and ‘away’: young Israeli migrants as VFR travelers

ABSTRACTThis study explores the nexus between migration and tourism by focusing on the experiences of young Israeli migrants who engage in return-visits to their country of origin. The experiences of the migrants are examined with respect to transnational theory, VFR (visiting friends and relatives) travel and conceptualizations of ‘home’ and ‘away.’ The migrants’ sense of ‘being at home’ is deconstructed in terms of familiarity with place, privacy and situational control, and sociability in associations. The findings of this multidimensional analysis reveal that the young migrants’ experiences of ‘home’ and ‘away’ is transformed across time in accordance with their sense of adaptation in the receiving country. While in terms of familiarity with place and sociability in associations the sense of being at home is weakened considerably, it is actually strengthened in terms of privacy and situational control. These findings stress the complexity of VFR experiences in the context of transnational migration.

State, Society and Enterprise Development: Southeast Asia–China Investment Flows

The governments of China and Malaysia have deployed their state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to channel investments between both countries. This is to increase private investment flows into the mainland, while in Malaysia it serves an urgent need to draw foreign and domestic investments. These state-led investments have resulted in joint ventures that have included private enterprises owned by Chinese entrepreneurs, an attempt to continue to encourage private investment in business ventures. This article provides insights into three issues. First, it deals with the question of why investments through business networks by Southeast Asian Chinese enterprises in China have not led to the emergence of this community as a global economic force. The second issue deals with the question of whether these state-led infrastructure projects, now comprising SOEs and privately owned Chinese enterprises, will inspire the latter to increase their investments in each of these countries. The third issue involves a review of the theory of transnationalism, in order to determine its applicability in explaining cross-border investment patterns involving Chinese-owned enterprises from Southeast Asia

Are Migrant Churches Missional? A Case for Expanding Our Geography of Missions

Many church leaders conclude that immigrant churches are not engaged in missions, based on a limited view of the geographic scope of missions. The “going principle” assumes that mission activity involves cross-cultural engagement, while the “staying principle” refers to embracing the local neighborhood where the church is located. While useful, both principles limit our vision of missional engagement. It is helpful to employ the theory of transnationalism to expand the notion of place and geography, allowing us to capture the full scope of missional engagement by many immigrant churches. The article concludes with a case study of Kerala Pentecostal churches.

Transnational governmentality and the ‘poor white’ in early twentieth century South Africa

This paper reexamines the anxiety over poor whites that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, positing the ‘poor white problem’ as a distinctively transnational phenomenon, concerned with the spectre of a racial degeneracy and decline that respected no national borders. Focusing specifically on the Carnegie commission's 1932 report into the condition of poor whites in South Africa, this paper considers transnational theories of racial decline and the transnational team of experts put together to investigate the causes of ‘poor whiteism’ and to offer solutions to the problem. The Carnegie commission is presented as a form of transnational governmentality, directed at the management of poor whites wherever they were found. Entirely consistently, however, poor whiteism was put forward as the product of different circumstances in different places, to be met with contrasting remedies. The cause was constructed as hookworm in the United States, for instance, and in South Africa as malaria. The Carnegie report's findings are thus transnational both in their racial and biopolitical framing, and in their specifics.

“I can think, I can wait, I can fast”: Teaching food literature and experiential learning

The idea of self-sufficiency resonates with feminist activists because the political thrust of the various movements for women’s rights—beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s plea for women’s access to education in her famous Vindication—hinged on finding sustainable solutions to the stranglehold that social, political, and economic institutions have on women’s lives. If the pivotal movement of feminism, in other words, is about increasing women’s sovereignty in a patriarchal world, the emerging “local/global” food movements provide a dynamic opportunity to understand how the personal can be refashioned into political action. The point of this essay is thus twofold: first, to show that food literature is an excellent medium to teach transnational feminist theories and practices; and second, to offer some of our strategies for feminist civic engagement through reclaiming the idea of “the personal is political.”

How, Where and for Whom? Interrogating Law's Forms, Locations and Purposes: Inaugural Lecture, Kinggs College London, 28 April 2016

This inaugural lecture, delivered at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, on 28 April 2016, followed a day after the official launch symposium of the Transnational Law Institute. While the launch brought to London a selection of legal scholars, anthropologists, political scientists and historians to underscore the multi- and inter-disciplinarity of transnational legal theory through examples of post-colonial historiography, labour law and climate change governance, sex work, trade and corporate responsibility, the lecture focused on what Thomas Nail has called the ‘figure of the migrant’. In reflecting on the precariousness of migrant workers’ lives in a city such as London, notions of ‘home’, ‘belonging’ and ‘membership’ point to the fleeting nature of the human condition. As the European refugee crisis is increasingly seen as a challenge for problem management and emergency administration, it becomes part of global ‘problem solving’, albeit driven by ambiguous motivations and on the basis of selective knowledge. The ‘datafication’, the numerical counting of economic, political, social and even cultural ‘facts’, which finds expression in a seemingly irreversible turn to computable “indicators” creates the illusion of there being a ‘way out’, a ‘right answer’, a ‘promising approach’. Meanwhile, desperate people board hand their and their dependants’ lives to traffickers in order to board unreliable vessels in the hope to arrive in a better, safer place. A place that might never be ‘home’, but one in which lives that were set adrift in the seas of global monetary expansion, ‘structural adjustment’, privatization and foreign direct investment, might be rearranged, re-assembled, for the time being. What can “law” do in this context beyond operationalizing state practice under the labels of ‘refugee’, ‘asylum’ or ‘immigration’ law? Can law serve as a critical lens to transform helplessness into political agency, exploitation into autonomy, despair into collective action?

The Changing Landscape of Online Pornography: Translocal Networks and Transcultural Practices

Pornography's massive growth online in the last 25 years, and the emergence of technologies such as broadband, webcams and smartphones, has led to fundamental changes in the ways people encounter, consume, and relate to online porn. Pornography has undoubtedly infiltrated the Western mainstream; it is now woven into the fabric of ordinary life and everyday online multitasking. The ways porn is accessed and consumed continue to evolve, keeping pace with broader changes in Web use. While there is much work being done in contemporary porn studies which examines these changes, there is an aspect of porn's evolution online that has for the most part been neglected: the ways it is linked to globalization and the spread of ideas across nations and borders. Processes of globalization, the Internet, and developing media technologies have facilitated global access to pornography. Pornography now moves across geographic space, transcends national borders and links global communities – spreading narratives, norms, and social texts across global contexts. Despite these changes, contemporary porn studies has, for the most part, remained insulated from the theoretical work coking out of transnational studies. Conversely, transnational theory—as well as the theoretical positions developing out of transnational theory, such as translocal and transcultural theory—has all but ignored pornography as one of the flows of information that increasingly moves between and connects global spaces, and that has specific impacts on relations of intimacy, sexuality and desire. This paper explores how, when taken together, each of these approaches has the potential to broaden the scope of the other, and potentially answer some important questions around the ways globalization is impacting sexualities.

Does helping them benefit me? Examining the emotional cost and benefit of immigrants' pecuniary remittance behaviour in Canada

The existing literature has largely focused on how immigrants' pre/post-migration experiences affect their health in destination societies. Hence, little is known about the extent to which immigrants' choice to maintain transnational ties to their family and friends abroad influences their health. This study makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to the sociology of health literature by examining how immigrants' pecuniary remittance behaviour affects their emotional health using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC, 2001–2005). Our weighted logistic regression analyses demonstrate that sending remittances within the first six months of arrival predisposes immigrants to emotional health problems. However, remitting after six months of arrival provides an “emotional advantage” for immigrants, but this advantage is greater for female immigrants compared to their male counterparts. The study clearly shows that immigrants' remittance behaviour has far reaching gendered implications on their emotional health, which underscores the importance of including transnational theory and gender in the conceptual toolbox for explaining immigrants' health transitions. Admittedly, insights from this study can help professional healthcare staff, and immigrant settlement and integration agency workers better understand and address the mental health needs of immigrants in order to enhance their contribution to the Canadian economy.

When transnational learning theory met business group-level organisational learning: evidence from globalised Korean chaebols

When transnational learning theory met business group-level organisational learning: evidence from globalised Korean chaebols