Translocal Networks Research Articles

Transnational, translocal, and transient: Economic communities of Arab entrepreneurs in Yiwu, China

AbstractDespite an accumulation of literature on ethnic, immigrant, and transnational entrepreneurship, we still know very little about transnational entrepreneurship among less‐developed countries especially when culture and religion are concerned. Based on long‐term ethnographic work in immigrant Arab communities, this study examines the economic communities of transnational Arab entrepreneurs in Yiwu, a global wholesale hub city in China. We find that the motivation of profit‐seeking and transitional chain migration set the premise and foundation for Arab immigrant communities. The transnational networks of kinship and geo‐relationship are further integrated with Arab entrepreneurs' translocal networks based on religion, culture, profession, and educational experiences in shaping the economic activities of Arab entrepreneurs. At the same time, taking profit‐seeking as the primary goal instead of evident political and religious pursuits, their experiences also feature with transiency under the current institutional constraints. This study provides different evidence of transnational mixed embeddedness of immigrant ethnic entrepreneurship from a less‐developed economy where the state has a dominant role in economic, cultural, and political control.

This Must be the Place: Partnerships for Disaster Preparedness in San JosÉ’s Historic Japantown

Abstract Because upheavals, oppression, and disaster feature so prominently in the history and (re) making of Japantown San José, preparedness and recovery are in many ways structuring idioms of Japantown and its translocal networks. Memories of generational traumas and recoveries are passed through generations and across cultures in Japantown, as key processes in its history are memorialized in monuments, museums, artwork, plaques, benches, and everyday storytelling. We introduce a community-based disaster preparedness organization, Japantown Prepared, as an outgrowth of the structuring idioms of preparedness and recovery and how their work continues in a partnership with the Department of Anthropology at San José State University.

Inclusion in urban environmental governance of small and intermediary cities of the global South

Urban sustainability is governed beyond the urban scale through trans-local networks and assemblages of actors and institutions. There is an emerging field of interest that aims to understand the outcomes of urban sustainability interventions, both from the environmental and social equity perspectives. This paper contributes to the literature on governing urban environmental sustainability transitions, with a distinct focus on small and intermediary cities of the global South. Actors in cities of the global South are adopting a variety of ways towards achieving urban sustainability transitions in the realm of disaster risk reduction, adaptation building, greenhouse gas emission reduction, and natural resource management. Our paper employs an analytical framework derived from Bai et. al. (2010) to chart the actors, drivers, finances, barriers, and the inclusivity and sustainability outcomes in seven interventions led by different actors. Five of the cases are drawn extensively from literature, while two case studies reflect on our primary engagement in the cities of Nakuru in Kenya and Udon Thani in Thailand. We find that the actors leading and financing the projects and the drivers of the intervention can explain differential outcomes in the inclusion processes and the framing of environmental solutions. We then delineate the opportunities and barriers to achieve multi-level governance approaches that are relevant to planning transformations in the South.

Editorial: Creative industries at the intersection between local agglomeration, national regulation, and global networks

Editorial: Creative industries at the intersection between local agglomeration, national regulation, and global networks

The emergence of city food networks: Rescaling the impact of urban food policies

Hundreds of cities across the globe are mobilising the convening power of food to deliver food security and sustainability outcomes supported by an increasing number of national and international city food networks devoted to scale-up and out this urban food revolution. This paper presents the first comparative analysis of this increasingly networked urban foodscape based on data from 13 national and international initiatives which together represent more than 500 cities across the globe. By applying a translocal governance framework, the paper explores the different aims, structures and mechanisms activated by this complex landscape of networks and how these intrinsic characteristics endow them with diverse strengths and limitations. To examine further the role of networks in rescaling the impact urban food policies, I analyse the metagovernance of these initiatives exploring discourses around coordination of these networks and identifying potential convergence points. Results from this study are translated into policy recommendations aimed at unfolding further the transformative capacity of translocal networks and elevate their role in unfolding a more integrated and equitable new urban food agenda; mainly by proposing to reinforce the cross-scalar alignment of food policies, making the case to invest in connective infrastructure such as network and backbone organisations, work with a wider diversity of agents, and provide open spaces that democratise access to collective knowledge and capacities. c. As urban food policies become the new norm, this research stresses the need for rescaling food system interventions that effectively deliver social and spatial justice in an increasingly polarised word.

GTR1 and GTR2 transporters differentially regulate tissue-specific glucosinolate contents and defence responses in the oilseed crop Brassica juncea.

GTR1 and GTR2 transporters are components of the source to sink translocation network of glucosinolates, which are major defence metabolites in the Brassicaceae. These transporters can be genetically manipulated for reduction of seed-glucosinolates without inhibiting glucosinolate biosynthesis, thereby maintaining the inherent defence potential of plants. However, the different roles of GTRs in influencing tissue-specific distribution of glucosinolates in agriculturally important Brassica crops are yet unknown. Here, we report functional characterization of two groups of glucosinolate transporters (GTR1 and GTR2) from Brassica juncea based on gene expression data, biochemical analysis, gene-complementation studies in GTR-deficient mutants and RNAi-based knockdown followed by insect feeding experiments. Although both GTRs showed ubiquitous expression patterns and broad substrate specificity, the single-gene knockdown lines displayed different phenotypes. The GTR2-knockdown plants showed a significant reduction of glucosinolates in seeds and a higher accumulation in leaves and pods, while the GTR1-knockdown plants displayed a smaller reduction of glucosinolates in seeds and significantly lower glucosinolate levels in leaves. Consequently, knockdown of GTR2 resulted in higher resistance towards the generalist pest, Spodoptera litura. Overall, our study highlights the distinctive roles of B. juncea GTRs in tissue-specific accumulation of glucosinolates and the potential for manipulating GTR2 for enhanced nutrition and plant defence.

‘Staying’ as climate change adaptation strategy: A proposed research agenda

This paper brings work on mobility and ‘staying’ together with theoretical ideas of resilience to consider responses to climate change. To date, the majority of work that has explored the impacts of climate change on human populations has taken a migration-centred perspective, with an emphasis on mobility as a key response in crises, including extreme climatic events and civil conflict. However, evidence suggests that people may alternatively – and pro-actively – adopt a different approach involving “staying” as a climate change adaptation strategy. This is important as recent evolutionary approaches to resilience have highlighted how resilience is an on-going process of adaptation which emphasises the temporal, fluid and open-ended aspects of individuals’ experiences and practices in shaping everyday lives. In turn, this means that individuals’ experiences and practices can lead to different strategies of staying (as well as moving) in the face of climate change. Consequently, the paper highlights four key areas where more research is required in order to explore the links between climate change, ‘staying’ and resilience. These include the importance of historical context in disentangling and contextualising the “multicausal” nature of individuals’ mobility decisions; translocal networks in shaping mobility or immobility; the influence of equity, diversity and gendered social expectations on staying; and the importance of governance responses in facilitating resilience, adaptation and subsequent decisions by individuals to stay or move.

Affective paragrounds: alternative envisionings through multidisciplinary contemporary arts in Singapore

ABSTRACT The socio-political transformations of East and Southeast Asia, their direct impact on the changing norms of censorship, cultural and urban policies, and on growing surveillance have led people involved with the socially engaged artistic and creative practices to develop varied tactics and strategies to renegotiate the (im)material boundaries set for them. These mainly discursive, spatial, temporal and aesthetic forms of affective civic engagement aim to disseminate alternative envisionings without necessarily having a directly antagonistic agenda towards the establishment. Inspired by the recent discourses of affect and its potentiality not only in arts but more broadly in temporary, human/nonhuman encounters, and also in the urban environment, I propose that this kind of liminal and fluid self-positioning between ‘underground(s)’ and mainstream could be better understood as ‘affective paragrounds’. As an organic and continuously reconfiguring rhizomatic translocal network of protagonists – and their (in)tangible spaces – affective paragrounds are premised on mixed-method temporary approaches and alliances of communal collaborations with continuously changing positions, roles and strategies. By paragrounding themselves in ‘in-between-ness’ of private and public, they function on the borderline of (in)visibility to re-envision gradual transformations of socio-political and cultural conditions, at the same time raising awareness of freedom of expression, participatory citizenship and civil society formation.

Affirmatively Reading Post-consumerism. Distributed Participatory Creativity and Creative Destruction of the Malled Metropolitan Centres of Auckland, New Zealand, during COVID-19 Lockdown

The impact of the progressive spatial financialisation of contemporary on the centres of public life has involved the privatisation of a relevant portion of their social, cultural, political and economic nodes and their polarisation into the private precincts of integrated shopping and entertainment enclosures. This dispossession and dislocation have increased spatial inequality and atomised the networks of local communities. A recent occurrence of creative destruction presided by the inexorable logics of capital reproduction has hit the paradigm that informed these enclosure. The production of the ultimate model of these centres, here defined as ultra-modern centres with totalising superlative simulated civicness, has intimately combined consumption with production in what Ritzer calls prosumption. I submit that the novel prosumer has become a primary actor of dynamic choral practices of semi-complicit participatory consumption that originate counterspatial associative assemblages by articulating three novel digitally augmented phenomena: networked translocalisation, multiassociative-metastable transduction, and desiring-resistant transgression. To validate this hypothesis I set out an observational analysis of grassroots social networks of digital spatialities emplaced in the malled urban centres of Auckland, New Zealand during COVID-19 lockdown, a period of outright access negation to the physical centres of public relational life. Empirical findings not only provided evidence of the formation, high resilience and independence of the novel emplaced translocal networks, but also documented their explicit redistribution of orders of ownership and belonging, and their assertive reappropriation and reassociation of commoning spatialities. The found effectiveness of these assemblages in breaching of the fundamental rule of non-response of dominant powers controlling the places of superlative abstract civicness, deconstructing the dominant spatial logics of the simulative infrastructure that inhibit the elaboration of sign values that affirm the right to identification, and supplementing the post-consumerist use-exchange value amalgamation that sustains the commodity fetishism mechanism of these civic simulacra underpins my critical affirmative interpretation of the post-consumerist condition.

Artefact Transfers

Abstract The paper explores the flows of artefacts between public and private settings in alternative political and social relations in Mongolia. It investigates sacred places such as Buddhist temples and monasteries as well as museums (which were former temples) and examines movements of objects such as Buddhist figures, sacred books and ethnographic objects. The ‘artefact transfers’ not only relate to massive movements such as the displacement of sacred objects or deities (burkhan), their transformation into museum objects and the concealing of items underground, but the phrase also implies changes in perception, value and attitudes towards artefacts. Material culture also needed to be fitted into another order due to the process of ‘modernisation’ and societal transformation in Mongolia. Objects that suddenly appeared ambivalent had to be dealt with in order to conform to new or changing ideologies. Following the ‘biographies’ and ‘efficacy’ of artefacts, the authors argue that, through various cultural and economic exchanges in translocal networks, changes of perception and value activate artefact transfers.

The Transnationality of the Secular

Abstract This essay discusses in how far we can understand the evolution of secularism in South and Southeast Asia between the end of the First World War and decolonisation after 1945 as a result of transimperial and transnational patterns. In the context of the growing comparative literature on the history of secularisms around the globe, I argue for more attention for the mobility of ideas and people across borders. Conceptually, I suggest to capture the diversity of 20th century secularisms in terms of family resemblance and to understand this resemblance less as colonial inheritance but as the result of translocal networks and their circuits of ideas and practices since 1918. I approach these networks through a combination of global intellectual history, the history of transnational social networks, and the global history of non-state institutions. Empirically, I illustrate my argument with three case studies: the reception of Atatürk’s reforms across Asia and the Middle East to illustrate transnational discourses around secularism; the role of social networks in the form of translocal women’s circles in the interwar period; and private US foundations as global circuits of expertise. Together, these illustrations are an attempt to sustain a certain degree of coherence within globalising secularism studies while at the same time avoiding conceptual overstretch.

Pathways to Scaling Agroecology in the City Region: Scaling out, Scaling up and Scaling deep through Community-Led Trade

Scaling agroecology has the potential to support more sustainable and just food futures. This article investigates a case of community-led trade operating in the city region of London. Drawing upon interviews with stakeholders and practice-based ethnographic fieldwork, challenges and opportunities for agroecology are examined. Three dimensions of scaling agroecology are identified as pathways to sustainable and just food futures in the city region: scaling out, scaling up and scaling deep. Findings suggest scaling out agroecology requires access to secure, affordable land and infrastructure for agroecological communities of practice, alongside investment in capacity building for agroecological communities of practice via learning platforms (such as training programmes) and knowledge exchange (such as farmer-to-farmer and trader-to-trader learning). Second, scaling up agroecology requires transformations in policy, planning and legislation that value and invest in agroecological practices and divest in unsustainable and unjust food systems, supported via translocal networks for exchange of good practice. Third, scaling deep agroecology requires investment both in transformative learning opportunities and networks that support agroecological communities of practices, including those with lived experience of food injustice. Findings have implications for the question regarding scaling agroecology in the city region.

Spatial and organizational aspects of anti-eviction strategies

Informal urbanization is inherently tied to threats of eviction. This article contributes to the expanding study of evictions by depicting and framing anti-eviction strategies taken by informal inhabitants in two interrelated evolving aspects: collective organization and production of space. The former is analysed as a gradual weaving of social–political connections, starting from the community level and maturing into a trans-local network of connections and collaborations against eviction. The latter is composed of placing facts-on-the-ground, acting to produce alternative knowledge, and acquiring symbolic recognition. These themes have been mentioned and debated in the literature but have not yet been integrated under a theoretical umbrella that covers both elements, to allow a comprehensive understanding of how anti-eviction strategies fundamentally shape current urbanization around the globe.

Belonging from the margin: The changing village and its others

This article discusses how belonging is negotiated in a context of newly emerging forms of poverty and social exclusion in rural areas. We contend that coping with poverty and social exclusion produces specific ways of being (in the) rural that traverse, blur and renegotiate its dominant meanings and proclaimed specificities. This argument builds on life course history of an Afghan-born refugee, and his relation to the Belgian rural place he calls home. Results show how belonging is related to shifting notions of rurality and urbanity, in which past, present and future come together. Rural place attachments are complicated by the need for urban survival infrastructure and translocal networks in coping strategies. Local social capital increases a sense of belonging, but does not counterweigh the impact of exclusions produced at other levels of society. Conclusions suggest that the negotiations to belong by today's rural Others inform their deliberations of staying or going and the development of translocal strategies and attachments in complicated ways.

Transformative innovation and translocal diffusion

This paper develops a conceptual understanding of transformative innovations as shared activities, ideas and objects across locally rooted sustainability initiatives that explore and develop alternatives to incumbent and (perceived) unsustainable regimes that they seek to challenge, alter or replace. We synthesize empirical work from two European research projects (TRANSIT and ARTS), in which initiatives and networks were empirically studied, to develop a broader conceptual understanding of the emergence of transformative innovation. The development of initiatives can occur through growing, replicating, partnering, instrumentalising and embedding. This is supported through translocal networks that connect initiatives by sharing ideas, objects and activities across local contexts. This translocal characteristic of transformative innovations harnesses an enormous potential for sustainability transitions, but requires further understanding as well as governance support. The perspective we present provides a conceptual starting point to further explore the development and diffusion of transformative innovation as well as transition governance strategies.

Bologna and Its Cineteca: Building Trans-cending Networks


 The article analyses the network level strategy of Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna (FCB), namely an Italian world-leading film archive, committed to the restoration of world cinematic heritage. This analysis is conducted by assuming a translocal gaze, so as to point out FCB’s critical actors/agents, identify other connected local actors, outline the nature and the outcome of exchange processes, and thus observe key elements in the evolution of this network. For this purpose, this article proposes a bird-eye view on the history, development of FCB and of its main activities, projects and initiatives. In doing this, I outline the local and the international reach of these activities and how FCB has been able to connect and combine these two dimensions through its network. Therefore, I argue how the international development of FCB’s translocal network is a key element of this foundation’s long-term strategy.

Feeling the vibe: sound, vibration, and affective attunement in electronic dance music scenes

ABSTRACT This article explores the conceptual and methodological innovations made possible by the encounter between ethnomusicology and affect theory. It draws on fieldwork among a translocal network of electronic dance music practitioners, many of whom employ sonic metaphors of vibration and resonance to link affect to collective experience. In doing so, these musicians and dancers develop emic notions of vibrational affect that converge with developments in sound studies on vibration and resonance. In addition to giving texture to collective musicking, electronic dance music’s tactile sonic-social metaphors lend traction to the task of reconciling affect theory to ethnomusicology. On the one hand, affect theory challenges ethnomusicology to broaden its analytic horizon beyond canonical understandings of culture. On the other hand, ethnomusicology calls affect theory to more clearly trace not only its modes of ‘escape’ and ‘autonomy’ but also its re-articulation, entanglement, and capture into the cultural webs of collective life.

Gangnam Plastic Beauty. La transformación del urbanismo a través del rediseño del cuerpo

El trabajo explora los cambios sociales, políticos y culturales que provocaron la redefinición del sistema de salud surcoreano y el cambio en la percepción de los cuerpos como objetos de consumismo aspiracional en la sociedad contemporánea. Se recorren las distintas influencias externas que llegaron a Corea: desde el periodo colonial japonés de principios de siglo XX, hasta los discursos occidentales, que, junto a la globalización del país, impulsaron una revisión de la cultura popular y las tradiciones neo-confucionistas hasta convertir Corea del Sur en la república de la cirugía plástica mundial. La práctica estética se ensamblan arquitecturas, agentes, discursos y tecnologías que redefinen el espacio urbano de Seúl desde la transformación de los cuerpos más allá de las redes translocales.

Beyond the local – Exploring the socio-spatial patterns of translocal network capital and its role in household resilience in Northeast Thailand

Livelihood studies have highlighted social support networks as critical sources of social capital and as an important feature of rural households' resilience, however so far, have contributed little the understanding of network capital's socio-spatial patterns. Accordingly, livelihood studies have tended to omit relevant determinants of rural households' resilience, especially in emerging and developing countries, such as Thailand, where rapid agrarian change and migration have resulted in increasing translocal connectedness between rural and urban areas and unevenly distributed livelihood outcomes. This paper aims at closing this gap, by systematically assessing the socio-spatial patterns of rural households' translocal networks in Northeast Thailand. Applying a translocal network approach combining methods of formal social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative network research, we find that translocal network capital matters more for accessing advice than for labor, but particularly for accessing financial support. Although poor households have less translocal network capital at their disposal, they depend more critically on translocal networks than rich households. While poor households rely particularly on migration-related bonding ties to provide financial means for coping with precarious livelihood conditions, rich households can leverage institutional translocal bridging ties to access advice and finance for the transformation towards market-oriented agriculture. These findings suggest that, in Northeast Thailand, translocal network capital contributes less to the poors' than to the richs' resilience. We conclude by calling for a more nuanced consideration of the socio-spatial patterns of network capital and propose applying a translocal network perspective as a fruitful means to this end.

Development of wine industries in the New-New World: Case studies of wine regions in Taiwan and Japan

Abstract Drawing on multi-year fieldwork in two wine regions in two emerging wine producing counties, namely Erlin in Taiwan and the Kofu Basin in Japan, this paper discusses key institutional arrangements contributing the development processes of wine sector in the New-New World. Unlike existing studies on the catch-up experiences of wine industries in the New World with emphases on the capability-enhancing mechanisms embedded in the state- or MNC-initiated trans-local networks, this paper finds that the development of Taiwanese and Japanese wine sectors in these two regions has been driven mainly by local actors' active exploration of competence residing in their regional networks. This article employs the Triple Helix (TH) and Innovation systems (IS) as principal frameworks to narrow the research focus on the industry-government-university interaction, and examine the development process and nature of critical institutions supporting the interactive learning and collaboration among the TH actors. Through studying the cases of Taiwanese and Japanese wine industries, this paper goes beyond stating “institutions matter” as in existing IS and TH literature, by illuminating on how to develop institutions to allow actors' interaction to occur and be boosted especially when their local TH are still in the early phase of formation.