Transnational Career Research Articles

Suzanne Labin: socialist, anti-communist and ‘Globalist’

This article follows the transnational career of Suzanne Labin, a French socialist and anti-communist professional, in order to analyse the roles and agencies of individuals while the global connectivity of anti-communist actors was growing during the ‘long 1960s’ (approximately 1955–1980). Retrospective analysis, as well as accounts from contemporaries, describes this period as a time of multi-polarisation and globalisation. I will chart Labin’s path from anti-Stalinist circles in France to conservative circles in the US, to finally becoming the first and only female permanent member of the global anti-communist umbrella organisation, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), chairing its French chapter in 1972. An analysis of Labin’s seemingly ambiguous alliances as a socialist with anti-communist and right-wing organisations will shed light on the particularities of international anti-communism during the ‘long 1960s’ on three levels. First, it will show the dynamics between anti-communist networks and actors on national, transatlantic and global levels, especially their contact points. Second, it will underline the diversity of anti-communism and its capacity to integrate several (even contradictory) ideologemes. Third, by following Labin’s global anti-communist engagement within the WACL and her cosmopolitan lifestyle, this article will argue that anti-communist actors were actively involved in the process of globalisation during the ‘long 1960s’.

Coaching Across Borders: Lessons From Finnish High-Performance Ice Hockey Coaches

Sport coaching has become globalized. Finnish ice hockey is an example of this globalization of a coaching workforce. Indeed, the success of Finnish ice hockey teams in the international arena has been fueling the demand for coaches and players from this country worldwide. Yet, despite the increasing trends of migration of the workforce in sports, there is limited research that is conducted on the experiences of foreign coaches. Thus, in this study, we aimed to expand our understanding of the work of high-performance coaches in the globalized sports context. A case study design was adopted. The participants were 14 Finnish high-performance head coaches with transnational career experiences across 11 nations. Qualitative data were collected via semistructured interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis guided how the authors made sense of these data. Three major themes were (a) preparation practices, (b) acculturation, and (c) emerging learning experiences. The findings provide helpful insights for (a) coach developers when preparing practitioners to work in different cultural settings, (b) club administrators to further inform their decisions when recruiting and working with foreign coaches, and (c) sports’ governing bodies to develop policies to support coaches’ acculturation in the new country.

Precarious employment as a prerequisite for career surfing

The subject of the study is the conceptualization of the phenomenon of career surfing and precarization of labor as a prerequisite for its manifestation. The object of the study is the phenomena of precarious employment and career surfing. The authors consider in detail such aspects of the topic as the role of career surfing in the perspective of the concept of fluid modernity; multidimensional manifestations of career surfing, as a result of which generalization the types of precarization are highlighted (change of job, type of work, sphere of work, directions of professional or career development; search and evaluation of vacancies or employers, areas of professional training and/or educational institutions; transnational career surfing); the ambivalent nature of career surfing, including both positive and negative manifestations; the interrelationships and qualitative differences of career surfing with the phenomena of social surfing and labor mobility. To achieve the goal, conceptual and theoretical analysis, subject-categorical analysis, systematization, generalization of scientific research results and social practice data were used. The design included solving the following tasks: identification of essential features and varieties of career surfing manifestations; differentiation of career surfing with a number of similar concepts characterizing the instability of career development; systematization of the causes and problems of studying career surfing. The main conclusions of the study are: 1) Career surfing is a multifaceted phenomenon that consists in changing the trajectory of professional career development. The types of career surfing include changing and/or searching for: a job, position, type of work, profession, specialty, sphere or direction of professional or career development. Thus, precarization of labor illustrates the manifestation of career surfing; 2) In methodological terms, career surfing is a social and psychological construct that has deep connections with the constructs of social surfing, mobility, fluid modernity, etc.; 3) The reasons for the expansion and development of career surfing are diverse and include: transformation of workplaces and types of work (including digitalization), the development of flexible forms of employment, the expansion of geographical and social migrations, etc.; 4) Career surfing is ambivalent in its social role and includes both constructive consequences (for example, coping with situations of career and social uncertainty) and destructive ones. The novelty of the research lies in the author's generalization of the results of the theoretical and methodological analysis of the studied phenomena and the justification of the definition of career surfing.

The Queen of the Violin

The commercialized nineteenth century lyceum circuit provided the vehicle for Camilla Urso (1840-1902) to become America's first celebrity female violinist. Vizualizing six seasons between 1873-83 where Urso toured under lyceum bureau management in digital maps of my own creation, I argue industrialized transportation networks combined with the commercialized advertising and publicity of the lyceum circuit created a popular concert model that expanded Urso's audience and raised her concert fees. Urso's time on the lyceum circuit laid the foundation for her transnational career. Urso was never solely a lyceum musician, though exploring the role of lyceums and their bureaus in her career plays a key role in determining how she rose to fame and became America's most celebrated female violinist. Futhermore, Urso's lyceum career argues for classical music as a rural and commercial phenomenon of American popular culture in the nineteenth century.

Nicola Guerra (1865–1842) at the Budapest Opera: A Crucial Turning Point for Hungarian Ballet

This study aims to investigate the contribution that the Italian maestro Nicola Guerra brought to the Budapest Opera House Ballet (from 1902 to 1915), founding a corps de ballet capable of competing with the best corps de ballet of other international theatres and endowing the theatre with a consistent and valuable number of choreographies, some of which were performed even after Guerra had left Hungary. It also aims to investigate the transnational career of a choreographer in the early twentieth century, exploring the circulation of mindsets in a range of dance concepts. The investigation explores first-hand sources, many of which come from the Guerra family archives, dwelling also on the notations transcribed by the maestro himself, in particular of the ballet Havasi Gyopár (Edelweiss), which allow us to draw with some reliability on his compositional style that was particularly fruitful in choreographies for large groups.

Re-encoding Glamour from Ghana to England: Illustrated Magazines, Gender Norms and Black Identities through the Lens of James Barnor (1950s–1980s)

How have gender and racial norms conveyed by illustrated magazines—whose circulation exploded in Africa in the 1960s—affected photographers’ local practices? And how, in turn, have they themselves generated this gendered visual order? This article aims to shed light on this two-fold question by proposing a diachronic analysis of the influence of models of femininity transmitted by the illustrated press on the visual imagination of a Ghanaian photographer—as seen in his photographs taken between the 1950s and the 1980s. It explores the links between the publications of the pan-African magazine Drum (the most widely circulated magazine in English-speaking Africa at the time) and its translation into the art of portraiture as practiced by James Barnor (1929-), a photographer with a transnational career, between Ghana and England. Because his professional and personal career path tracked the evolution of these gendered norms, James Barnor became both the repository and the instigator of an idealized vision of “the” African woman.By means of an intersectional focus, the issues of gender norms and of racial biases are examined in parallel to better understand how the photographer appropriated throughout his career the shifting codes of a “female glamour” reinvented for Africa during the post-independence period. While numerous studies have examined the modalities of this codification, in the present paper they are addressed through an in-depth exploration of the photographer's archives, now held in Paris, and combined with an analysis of early issues of Drum. The aim is to juxtapose images intended for publication, i.e. public, with private images in order to consider how the standards of fashion photography infused Barnor’s practices which lie at the crossroad of different social worlds. The corpus composed of portraits of young women is also informed by numerous interviews with the photographer and some of his models, which provide behind-the-scenes insights relative to the published images by exploring their political and social contexts.We first look at Drum’s editorial strategy from its launch in South Africa to its expansion throughout West Africa. While the magazine initially borrowed from white Western references such as Life, it gradually became, to some extent, a showcase for black pride on the continent and in the global diaspora. Then, we study Barnor’s early studio practice as already acutely aware of the codes of femininity enacted by the magazine: this is shown through his “recycling” of the poses and the composition of the images. During the ten years he spent in England, from 1959 to 1969, his collaboration with Drum gave rise to a gallery of portraits of anonymous young women, who became ordinary icons for an ideal African femininity in the context of the diaspora. Finally, in the 1970s, Barnor’s return to Ghana saw the reuse of these codes inherited from the globalized fashion industry combined with the emerging iconography produced by African-American models as a means to create social documentary. In this way, he contributed to an aesthetic of blackness that was constructed within a transnational framework.

Lost in Transition: A Two-Year Collaborative Autoethnography of South Korean Doctoral Students’ Development and Identity Negotiation

This collaborative autoethnography (CAE) explores the lived experiences of two South Korean doctoral students’ transnational career transitions during 2019–2021. The purpose of the CAE is twofold: (a) to analyze international doctoral students’ development during the transition; and (b) to investigate negotiations of their intersectional identities. The data came from our biweekly multimodal narratives on our development (96 total) and biweekly meeting transcripts (48 total). We thematically analyzed (Braun & Clarke, 2006) the data first, found two themes, and reconstructed our two-ear narratives and visually represented them. The data analysis revealed that our major challenges during transition were to receive developmentally appropriate help (responsive mediation; Johnson & Golombek, 2016) and to build transnational, intersectional identities in a liminal space (Bhabha, 1994) between different geographical locations. Based on our two-year dialogue data, we offer suggestions for negotiating appropriate levels of mediation and reframing intersectional and liminal identities in a liberating way.

Lost in Transition

This collaborative autoethnography (CAE) explores the lived experiences of two South Korean doctoral students’ transnational career transitions during 2019–2021. The purpose of the CAE is twofold: (a) to analyze international doctoral students’ development during the transition; and (b) to investigate negotiations of their intersectional identities. The data came from our biweekly multimodal narratives on our development (96 total) and biweekly meeting transcripts (48 total). We thematically analyzed (Braun & Clarke, 2006) the data first, found two themes, and reconstructed our two-ear narratives and visually represented them. The data analysis revealed that our major challenges during transition were to receive developmentally appropriate help (responsive mediation; Johnson & Golombek, 2016) and to build transnational, intersectional identities in a liminal space (Bhabha, 1994) between different geographical locations. Based on our two-year dialogue data, we offer suggestions for negotiating appropriate levels of mediation and reframing intersectional and liminal identities in a liberating way.

Agricultural productivism, cosmopolitan plant-breeding, and the severed roots of agroecological thought

ABSTRACT This article provides a historical account of the emergence of crop ecology, a precursor of modern agroecology, in the twentieth century. It focuses on the transnational career of agronomist Ioannis Papadakis, a founding figure in this scientific discipline, while contextualizing his work as part of broader state-led projects of agricultural modernization in Europe and Latin America. This study has two implications concerning the history of agroecology. First, that agricultural productivism and a cosmopolitan outlook on plant breeding, often considered to be at odds with agroecology’s principles, were in fact necessary elements for the emergence of crop ecology, and therefore of agroecological thought more generally. Second, we argue that the excesses of the Green Revolution, against which agroecology reacted in the last decades of the twentieth century, did not just stem from a disregard for the agricultural knowledge of indigenous peasants. They also resulted from the marginalization of intellectual dispositions that had taken shape in peripheral areas within the global geography of scientific production. A third implication, specific to the history of Greek agriculture, is that the claim that interwar Greece’s rural economy failed to substantially develop needs to be nuanced when the priorities of Greek agronomists are taken into consideration.

Negotiating a transnational career around borders: Women's stories in boundaryless academia

The study aimed to give voice to two women sport scientists' life stories to centralize the challenges and ways of coping their career journeys entailed, and enlighten our understanding of the lived experience and meaning of academic migrating. They shared transnational career stories through interviews and ongoing conversations which we re-story in a creative non-fiction story where we blended the two. Our data collection, analysis and representation were informed by theoretical, methodological and interpretive bricolage. As the creative non-fiction story shows, the academic entrepreneur ideal was somewhat disrupted in the women's lives, as migration experiences, aside from thrills, also involved rough and complex negotiations and challenges. However, the experiences and lessons learned from migration experiences informed subsequent decisions and relocations while work and home became a state of mind and a sense of comfort for the two women who relentlessly swapped priorities between home and work. We identified three strategies – negotiating, redirecting, and accepting – that the women applied to their home and work life while trying to stay true to themselves and their values. The literature on transnationalism and academics as mobilised professionals helped us bring to light ‘silenced’ elements of the academic narrative as forms of women's professional development in sport sciences that are not part of ‘official’ narratives of career-building were uncovered.

Recovering the TV career of Korean American comedian Johnny Yune

ABSTRACT This article examines the late Korean American stand-up comedian Johnny Yune’s television career at NBC. Yune made his comedy debut on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson in 1978 and charmed the nation’s most beloved talk show host of that era. As a result, NBC signed Yune as the lead in three pilots over the next two years but his career on network television abruptly ended in 1980. Some of the factors that contributed to this end include the mystification of South Korea(ns) as a nation and identity, NBC’s struggle to compete against ABC and CBS, and systemic racism in the US. Yune’s stand-up routine was rooted in racialized and politicized self-deprecation which appealed to the dominant biases of mainstream (white) Americans in the late 1970s. With that said, given America’s hazy recollection of its involvement in the Korean War (1950–1953), Yune’s comedic material produced a memory in place of its forgottenness. This paper historicizes Yune’s transnational career as an actor, comedian, filmmaker, and talk show host in Los Angeles and Seoul, as well as his reception in America, which was impacted by the ‘cold’ war between the US and USSR.

(Im)Mobile imagination. On trailing, feeling stuck and imagining work on-the-move

Emerging research focuses on the role of time in the context of mobility and explores the conditions of ‘wait’ and ‘stuckness’ as conceptual tools for understanding the tempos and socio-cultural implications of mobile experiences. This paper contributes to this research by exploring these conditions in the context of work and geographical mobility, with a special focus on people who migrate and follow their working partners in international professional migration and temporarily live in Switzerland. The increasingly mobile and changing conditions of some professional sectors have made transnational career trajectories imaginable also for many partners. Yet, at times, their working life is not easily reconstituted on the occasion of the move, and the timing for job-search and unemployment can extend indefinitely. I will discuss how mobile professionals’ partners, by transiting from a working situation to another one that is not yet in place, experience a condition of stuckness between identities, phases of life and destinations of migration. I will ask how the subjective experience of stuckness can trigger and at times block a person’s capacity to imagine work under conditions of geographical mobility.

Foreign women in academia: Double‐strangers between productivity, marginalization and resistance

This article examines the professional experience of foreign women academics working across geographic boundaries in today's neoliberal academia characterized by liquidity. Framed within an intersectional perspective, we use the concept of the ‘double‐stranger' to examine data stemming from 20 in‐depth semi‐structured interviews conducted with scholars at different stages of their career in the social sciences. This article advances understandings of academic careers theoretically by identifying a temporal and hierarchical dynamic in the intersection of two categories of difference (gender and foreignness) that constitute a position of simultaneous belonging and non‐belonging for foreign women academics; and empirically through a qualitative investigation that explores three areas in which academic professional experiences are mobilized for double‐strangers: (i) transnational career moves; (ii) productivity and performance in today's neoliberal academia; and (iii) self‐induced estrangement as a form of resistance.

Online communities as points of observation of the transnational migrant career: a case study on Italian immigrants in Toronto

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore the significance that social media plays in the lives of transnational migrants. Building on data collected during a six-month online/offline ethnography conducted among the members of a Facebook group for Italian migrants in Toronto, it is argued here that diasporic online communities provide a privileged location to capture the complex process of identity transformation undergone by migrants. Data suggests that research into online communities allows for a dynamic and adaptive understanding of the migratory experience capable of recognising the lives of migrants not just as the results of single events, but as trajectories that could help reach a better understanding of the evolution of life courses, as well as changes in social status.

Spanish Composers within and without Borders: On National Belonging in the Work of Ramon Lazkano and Carlos de Castellarnau

This article looks at two Spanish composers active in France—Carlos de Castellarnau and Ramon Lazkano—to develop a reflection about how national belonging is used in contemporary art music, specifically for its evaluation and the discourses that are created around it. We see that despite both composers rejecting any essentialist definition of themselves as ‘Spanish’, ‘Basque’, or ‘Catalan’ composers, these labels are continually used to describe them and their music, even though these labels have no specific aesthetic meaning. We reflect on why national origin is used to categorise composers, even in light of their typically transnational career paths. The conclusion addresses the tension between universalism and authenticity that is present when evaluating the work of composers who have followed migratory paths.

Being international in times of war: Arthur Sweetser and the shifting of the League of Nations to the United Nations

Transnational actors are increasingly surfacing when it comes to understanding the global dimensions of the modern nation-state. Thinking of the modern state from the diversity of its personnel and its many intersections with private and semi-private actors or institutions with a transnational reach, the new diplomatic history acknowledges the embeddedness of states in border-crossing agencies. What has been conceptualized as ‘network diplomacy’ grasps both the role of transnational epistemic communities for the making of particular policy fields and the perception of diplomats as an integral part of transnational initiatives. Taking the League of Nations as a case study, this article analyses how its personnel attempted to spell out ideas of network diplomacy and to make their exposed position at the intersection of transnational civil society, state politics and international institutions work to effect political change. We focus on the transnational career of Arthur Sweetser (1888–1968) who, as a journalist, a long-term member of the League secretariat, the UN staff and the US administration, was at the forefront of developing new techniques of diplomatic practices beyond institutional mandates. Sweetser’s trajectory allows us to illuminate the mechanisms of network diplomacy by probing into multi-layered negotiation processes that engaged state practices, international institutions and the border-crossing agency of individuals. Characterizing him as transnational enables one to interlink his mobile trajectory with a particular scope of action that unfolded beyond the political demarcation of the nation-state and its instituted logics of rule and diplomacy. We further carve out the main features of a diplomatic practice that was formally non-existent yet crucial to the transfer of League principles, practices and personnel to the new United Nations.

The transnational career aspirations of France’s high-achieving second-generation Maghrebi migrants

ABSTRACTThis article examines the mobility aspirations of France’s high-achieving second-generation Maghrebi migrants. Drawing on in-depth, open-ended interviews with students and graduates of grandes ecoles, prestigious higher education institutions, it delves into the career trajectories they intend to embark on beyond the French borders. Three distinct mobility projects are envisioned by the respondents. While some contemplate intensifying their ties with their parents’ homeland, others envisage moving to a ‘third space’ in which they have commonly lived during their studies and established strong connections. Another group of informants seek to set up hyper-mobile careers spanning multiple global-cities. The article suggests that the threat of discrimination and the desire to defy the nation-based assimilationist rhetoric frame the desire to set up transnational pathways. It further disentangles the role of educational resources, social capital in the places envisioned, as well as gender processes in informing these distinctive ways of engaging with the transnational among second-generation migrants. Lastly, the article examines the specific trajectories of respondents who intend to remain in France.

Doubling Offscreen and Onscreen: Queering the Star and the Fan in Fan

Doubling Offscreen and Onscreen: Queering the Star and the Fan in Fan Nilanjana Bhattacharjya (bio) At the climax of Maneesh Sharma’s film Fan (IN, 2016), an obsessive, deranged fan chases a Bollywood megastar onto a rooftop, and the megastar pleads, “Be a good son to your parents—a good friend, a good boyfriend. Stop being a fan!” But the fan refuses to let go of his obsession with the star, and in doing so, he rejects heteronormativity as he plummets to his death. The relationship between the star and the fan necessarily distances the idol from his admirer, a relationship that S.V. Srinivas has defined as the fans’ “surplus investment” in their stars’ performances.1 Fan portrays the collapse of that distance between the fan and star in multiple ways—as the obsessed fan pursues his star, the double casting of Shah Rukh Khan in the role of star and fan, and, with CGI modifications and makeup, the uncanny resemblance between the star and the fan. But the film also portrays what happens when the star pursues his fan and, in doing so, inverts the conventional relationship between the fan and his star—which is itself al ready non-normative. Furthermore, the consistent seepage and deliberate interweaving of the excessive narrative of actor Shah Rukh Khan’s established stardom onscreen and offscreen into his double roles in this film serves to undo the present narrative of Shah Rukh Khan’s stardom. Khan’s contemporary stardom has been most memorably established over the last two and a half decades in his repeated casting as the heterosexual, romantic hero onscreen and through the entertainment media’s frequent allusions to his offscreen relationships with his wife, Gauri, and their children in his actual life. At the start of the film, the audience familiar with Shah Rukh Khan’s stardom [End Page 161] offscreen recognizes Fan’s fictionalized star Aryan Khanna as a stand-in for Shah Rukh Khan himself and thus conflates those roles. Therefore, when the star in Fan pursues the fan as an object of his obsession, the star assumes the non-normative subject position previously occupied by the fan and, in doing so, queers his identity as the fictionalized star onscreen and, through the conflation of his real life and fictionalized identities, his real life offscreen identity as well. The fan’s pursuit of the star and, later, the star’s pursuit of the fan both recall Shah Rukh Khan’s memorable antihero roles in the early 1990s that preceded his rise as the romantic hero. In films such as Darr/Fear (Yash Chopra, IN, 1993), Baazigar/Gambler (Abbas-Mustan, IN, 1993), and Anjaam/Aftermath (Rahul Rawail, IN, 1994), Khan’s violent characters stalk their victims and either cannot or will not engage in conventional heterosexual romantic relationships. In this sense, Fan’s citation of these early roles undermines the narrative Khan’s stardom has constructed as a conventional romantic hero. The double casting and seep age of offscreen and onscreen stardom narratives generate these unexpected, queer relation ships, all of which converge into the suggestion of narcissism. The trope of the deranged, deviant fan unhealthily obsessed with his star is well rehearsed in stories about fans, especially on film, and as the film Fan starts, it seems as if it will tell this story too. As Joli Jenson describes it, in these stories a deranged fan fixates on the star as “a form of psychological compensation, an attempt to make up for all that [his] modern life lacks.” Unsuccessful in his own social relationships, the fan attempts to address this lack of social connection by trying to establish contact with the star.2 As he focuses on the star, the fan forgets his own inadequacies and becomes potentially dangerous as he loses the ability to distinguish between states of fantasy and reality. In the film Fan, the star Aryan Khanna is internationally famous, leads a transnational career, has a beautiful wife and two children, and, at several in stances throughout the film, self-consciously refers to how his hard work transported him from his humble, middle-class origins in Delhi to his present identity as a global...

Disappearing act: The silent film career of Aud Egede-Nissen (1893–1974)

Abstract In 1916, Norwegian actress Aud Egede-Nissen established a film production company under her own name in Berlin: the Egede-Nissen-Film Compagnie GmbH. The company created approximately 30 star vehicles for Aud and her sisters Ada and Gerd, with Aud Egede-Nissen also working in the capacity of producer. The company existed until 1921, capitalizing on the German import ban on films during the years 1916–20. Until recently, the transnational career of Aud Egede-Nissen has left a void in the film archive and film documents collection held at the National Library of Norway, where very little material relating to the actress-producer’s success on the European continent is found. As Jane Gaines has demonstrated with the Women Film Pioneers Project, the careers of women working during the silent era have largely been left out of film histories. An important aspect of writing female film workers’ careers back into film history therefore also relies on creating archives and collecting material, ensuring that future researchers can piece the puzzle back together. This article presents the discovery of fan ephemera and promotional material sold on the online auction website eBay relating to the career of Aud Egede-Nissen.

Moving beyond Latin America: Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness and the epidemic of transnational co-productions

This article provides a textual analysis of what is arguably one of Fernando Meirelles’s less financially and critically successful films, Blindness, in an attempt to situate it as a key text in the increasingly transnational career of its Brazilian director. The English-language adaptation of José Saramago’s novel Ensaio sobre a Cegueira becomes a self-consciously transnational artefact through the reinterpretation of, and subtle distancing from, its original source. This transnational impulse is evident in terms of production, but it surfaces more solidly in its celebration of a hybrid cosmopolitan consciousness. The film can be read as a transnational allegory that reflects on Meirelles’s own evolution from a locally-entrenched cinema to a cinema that navigates across nations, affected by the broader international shift undergone by the Brazilian film industry in the late 1990s. Relying on the popular virus genre, the film’s epidemic of blindness serves as an apt analytical tool in the way it expresses these border-crossing preoccupations. The rich logic of the epidemic embodies the ambivalent global forces that govern contemporary Latin American co-productions and transnational cinema in general.