Transnational Futures Research Articles

From a national elite to the global elite: Possibilities and problems in scaling up.

This research note highlights emerging findings that speak to the challenges of joining the transnational elite, particularly for those coming from the Global South. For a longitudinal study of wealth inheritors becoming more transnational via their educational paths, we spoke with 16 young people who were all in their early 20s and primarily from economic elite families in the Global South. Some participants had clear ambitions, while others were less sure about their future, wondering where they should move and what they should do when they got there. Their various narratives reveal that underlying the possibilities and problems of where to locate themselves was our participants' access to different constellations of economic, social and cultural capital, as well as their race, citizenship and 'home' country's geopolitical situation. Their parents' ambitions that they become part of a global elite remained in most cases largely unfulfilled-despite a significant economic investment in their secondary and university educations. Only a small minority of our participants aspired to and/or were able to secure such transnational futures.

Reimagining the Agency of International Students of Color During Global Pandemic and (Neo)Racism

The global imaginary contributes to the perpetuation of neo-colonial and neo-liberal mentalities, which reinforce the political, cultural, and social dominance over international students. Through an exploration guided by interrelated theories of agency and transnational social fields, this study employs a narrative inquiry methodology with a constructivist research approach to comprehend and investigate the agency of international graduate students of Color amidst transnational mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic within a four-year public research institution in the United States. The research findings demonstrate that specific contexts and spaces shape the agency of international graduate students and (trans)form their present and future. This article reveals four distinct forms of agency: agency as negotiation in uncertainties, agency as resistance to forms of (neo)racism, agency for personal growth and (trans)formation, and agency within transnational futures.

The Students We Share: Preparing US and Mexican Educators for Our Transnational Future by Patricia Gándara and Bryant Jensen

The Students We Share: Preparing US and Mexican Educators for Our Transnational Future by Patricia Gándara and Bryant Jensen

Parental aspirations, schools, and the limits of flexible citizenship: Examining elite return migrants’ schooling decisions

This article investigates how return migrant parents navigate primary and secondary education options in Bangalore, a city in southwest India, by addressing the following question: What factors do return migrant parents consider when making schooling decisions? Through analyzing interviews with return migrant parents from 37 different families, the author argues that parents ultimately want to give their children the skills necessary to pursue their educational and professional interests anywhere in the world. To do so, parents select the ‘best’ school for their child, taking into consideration its demographics, curriculum, and reputation. However, in the process of crafting their children’s transnational futures, parents encounter stumbling blocks as they prepare for the transition from high school to college.

Resisting the "COVID-19 Scramble" by Writing Towards Black Transnational Futures

Resisting the "COVID-19 Scramble" by Writing Towards Black Transnational Futures

Introduction: Transnational futures of international labour law

AbstractThis Special Issue on transnational labour law is placed in the context of the ILO centenary and the challenge of achieving the objective of decent work in a new century, under distinct transnational pressures. The author argues that international labour law, as the normative core of transnational labour law, can play a crucial role – in conjunction with a wide range of actors and the ILO in its standard‐setting and convenor capacities – in addressing this challenge and in reshaping the transnational legal architecture.

Religious Nationalism in a Global World

The rise of new forms of religious nationalism at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries is to a large extent a by-product of globalization. As nation-states are permeated by transnational economics and trends and secular nationalism is challenged by the global diaspora of peoples and cultures, new ethno-religious movements have arisen to shore up a sense of national community and purpose. One can project at least three different futures for religious and ethnic nationalism in a global world: one where religious and ethnic politics ignore globalization, where they rail against it, and where they envision their own transnational futures.

Introduction to the Symposium on Transnational Futures of International Labor Law

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Past as Prologue? Theorizing Transnational Labor Law Between Jessup and Jenks

When contemplating the transnational futures of international labor law, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on the origins of that body of law and its relationship to the idea of transnationalism itself. Seeking to establish the universality of human problems, Philip Jessup famously defined transnational law as “all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers,” including both public and private international law as well as “other rules which do not fully fit into such standard categories.” This concept has proven extraordinarily durable, impacting legal theory in a variety of fields, not least transnational labor law. It is noteworthy, however, that Jessup's foundational text makes only a handful of references to the International Labour Organization (ILO) and instead focusses to a much greater extent on problems involving other aspects of international economic relations. This short essay connects and compares Jessup's concept of transnationalism to another conceptual framework in international law, devised at around the same time, which has a more direct lineage in the practice of the ILO and, perhaps, a place in its future development.

The ILO at 100: Institutional Innovation in an Era of Populism

centenary of the International Labor Organization (ILO) provides an opportunity to take stock of the organization’s many achievements. But the centenary also calls for a clear-eyed assessment of the profound challenges that the ILO currently faces – including the growth of the informal and gig economies, digitization and automation, and rising material inequality – and the populist ferment that those trends have helped to engender. This essay, part of a forthcoming AJIL Unbound symposium on The Transnational Futures of International Labor Law, sketches the ILO’s rich history of legal and policy innovation in response to changes in labor conditions worldwide. It then identifies four impediments to the ILO’s ability to ameliorate the hardships and dislocations of the 21st century workplace, including the rapid rise of nationalist populism in many countries.

Theorizing Emancipatory Transnational Futures of International Labor Law

The economic mandate of the “misnamed” International Labour Organization (ILO) has long been “othered” internationally. The ILO's 1944 constitutional annex, the Declaration of Philadelphia, confirms the ILO's “responsibility … to examine and consider all international economic and financial policies and measures in the light of th[e] fundamental objective” of lasting peace on the basis of social justice. After 1945, through decolonization, and prior to the emergence of a Washington consensus-based neoliberal globalization, the ILO enabled some states to mediate the “social” in economic regulation—that is, to adopt free trade economic liberalism promoted transnationally with social redistribution addressed domestically, also referred to as embedded liberalism. States established and harmonized international labor standards through multilateral processes steeped in an organizational tripartism that made workers’ and employers’ representatives ILO institutional actors alongside governments. At least in the global North, the ILO fostered a high degree of normative convergence nationally, regionally, and on shop floors. For the first Director-General, Albert Thomas, the ILO “taught the world to speak something like the same language on social questions.” Its approach has been nuanced, pragmatic, and transnational, taking leadership on issues like social protection that should also have been—but were not—the focus of other international economic institutions.

Reparative transnationalism: The friction and fiction of remembering in Sierra Leone

Analysis of the “productive frictions” that emerge when cosmopolitan paradigms are implemented in local contexts may nuance accounts of how and when memory travels, and when and why it stalls, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the cross-border travels of memory. I explore the frictions of truth-telling in Sierra Leone as articulated in ethnographic analyses of local engagement with the normative paradigm of public remembering and truth-telling promoted by the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and mediated in Aminatta Forna’s post-conflict novel, The Memory of Love. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission disappointed victims’ expectations for meaningful transnational relationships, the novel performs and models what I call reparative transnationalism. Through the intimate but public form of literature it imagines entangled transnational futures that work toward the promise of transnational belonging promoted in much writing on transnational memory.

"Threads thin to the point of invisibility, yet strong as ropes" : Afrofuturistic Diaspora in Paule Marshall’s <i>Praisesong for the Widow</i>

Praisesong for the Widow (1984) tells the story of African-American Avey Johnson’s arrival in Grenada, having abandoned an opulent Caribbean cruise, and her sudden encounter with the local “excursion” on nearby Carriacou. Having experienced physical and psychological unease even before this trip she finds that, in attempting to return “home” to her comfortable life in New York, she discovers a new home, that within the transatlantic African diaspora. Ostensibly, Praisesong is a story of a woman past middle age “rediscovering herself” against the backdrop of an exotic Caribbean tourist imaginary, but Avey comes to an understanding not only of herself but of the people around her, both in present-day Carriacou and in the memories of her childhood and earlier adult life. Her past, present and future converge on her at once and, through the ritual dance that forms the novel’s climax, Marshall portrays Avey’s, and by extension all diasporic peoples’ spiritual healing, and the reclamation of our cultural and historic identity from the debilitating effects of slavery, colonialism and “Western” materialism. Avey represents the diasporic subject who must be reunited with a culture she has trained herself to deny, and this culture is not limited by geography. I will be reading this novel through an Afrofuturistic lens, given its recovery of “the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection.” [1] Praisesong is a figurative reconnection of an imagined past with a destabilised present, and a re-engagement with representations of blackness, Caribbeanness, and Africanness that transcend linguistic and spatial boundaries. The counterhistory that Marshall presents allows for an imagining of an integrated black diaspora, one that exists outside of strict geopolitical chronology. Avey rediscovers herself and her people(s) chiefly through the figure of Lebert Joseph, her unofficial tour guide to the excursion. Joseph, however, is a manifestation of Papa Legba/Eshu Elegbara, the trickster deity of Yoruba/Fon mythology who is at once guardian of knowledge, speaker of all languages, and gatekeeper between this world and the next. Avey, who has been cut off from ancestral knowledge, can only come back to herself and her origins through the ancestors – who communicate, in turn, through him. This reconnection is cosmological as well as cultural, and through my exploration of the characterisation of Lebert Joseph I will argue that Marshall uses African mythology – which she turns into Caribbean cosmology – to envision a black future identity that is not “American,” not “Caribbean,” not strictly “African,” but one that belongs to black people from all of these “nations,” and from which we can all build a trans-temporal, transnational future. [1] Kelly Baker Josephs, ‘Beyond Geography, Past Time: Afrofuturism, The Rainmaker’s Mistake, and Caribbean Studies,’ Small Axe 17, 2013, pp.123-135 (p.126).

De-sacralizing the origin(al) and the transnational future of Translation Studies

ABSTRACTThis article begins with the premise that the shift from source-oriented approaches in Translation Studies to target-oriented approaches has left the concept of the original largely undertheorized. As such it remains haunted by Romantic notions of originality that in turn associate translation with loss, distortion, and contamination. Tracing the transnational circulation of a Russian-themed English poem, Thomas Moore’s ‘Those Evening Bells’, and its Russian translation, the author models a kind of cultural transfer that has long been ignored in literary studies and translation studies as ‘inauthentic’. Only by historicizing the concept of the original, the author argues, can Translation Studies fully participate in the transnational turn in cultural studies, serving as an important critical site for interrogating the legacy of Romanticism it has until now merely replicated.

Indonesian domestic workers and the (un)making of transnational livelihoods and provisional futures

Doreen Massey (2005. For Space. London: Sage.) argued that space and time should not be reduced to a bounded locality of the ‘here and now’ and instead proposed re-imagining ‘space as simultaneity of stories-so-far’. We build on her argument to suggest that an appreciation of migrant aspirations and future trajectories require us to go beyond simultaneous ‘stories-so-far’ but also consider ‘stories-to-come’ which may build upon, divert from, or even unmake the ‘stories-so-far’. We apply these ideas to our study (based on a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews) of the transnational journeys traced by Indonesian domestic workers employed in Singaporean middle-class homes. We argue that socially and culturally specific notions of risk can work to propel and sustain migration into retrogressive occupations like domestic work, as well as disrupt dominant narratives around migrants as strategic actors, necessarily in control of their trajectories and driven by their migration plans. The calculus of risk-taking and aspiration on which transnational livelihoods are predicated is one that takes into account both situatedness in and connectedness across different places (in short simultaneous ‘stories-so-far’). At the same time, future ‘stories-to-come’ may entail both subtle shifts and constant (re)negotiations that propel individual life stories unto different pathways.

‘Let them see a different path’: social attitudes towards sport, education and development in Sāmoa

Drawing on ethnographic data collected over 12 months of field research, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature on sport for development (SFD) by giving voice to alternative constructions of the educative potential of SFD. It does this by exploring the social attitudes of youth, educators, community leaders and government officials in the Pacific island nation of Sāmoa towards sport, education and development. Imagining sport to be like ‘school outside’, my Samoan interlocutors construct sport as an educative platform that prepares young ‘academically unfit’ men to engage an increasingly global political economy in ways classroom education cannot. Viewing international sport as a form of ‘development education’, my interlocutors perceive the educative value of SFD as being rooted in the potential for sport to help move underperforming boys into transnational flows of remittances to the family. In this way, Samoans perceive sport as enabling ‘at risk’ youth to serve their families, to learn English and to become globally minded, ultimately equipping them with the skills needed to achieve transnational futures once beyond their reach. In allowing a grassroots understanding of SFD to emerge, the paper challenges the assumption that the institutions of sport and education are compatible, mutually reinforcing and complementary. Specifically, viewing sport as an alternative to schooling may serve to reintegrate underperforming young men back into an education-to-employment pipeline, but it also carries important implications for the de-skilling of youth and the perpetuation of their positions of marginality. The paper calls into question the role of education and sport in and for development, highlighting important questions that SFD stakeholders should consider.

How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS: Global Pasts, Transnational Futures

Abstract In this paper, I critique contemporary AIDS narratives of historiographic heroism that flatten the complex legacy of intersectional and transnational labor across coalitional lines. I ground my arguments about AIDS gentrification through a critique of the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012) not simply to offer a “corrective” account of AIDS history that fills in missing gaps, but to intervene into the representational terms of AIDS historiography that has crucial biopolitical and epidemiological implications in contexts that are not limited to the Global North. More specifically, I critique the redemption of biomedical discourse in contemporary AIDS narratives, examining its implications in the context of a transnational political economy that continues to mediate HIV drug access and affordability for people living with AIDS in the Global South (specifically, the political economy of India). I conclude my paper with a global focus of early AIDS activisms-both in the sense of a broader vision of coalitional politics as well as a transnational impetus-that moved beyond a drugs-into-bodies goal, which has come to dominate the representational field of AIDS history since 2010. These queer refusals of single-issue politics are in danger of being whitewashed if positivist versions of AIDS discourse lay claim to the “truth” about the epidemic’s historiography. At stake is not simply the need to proliferate and assert different versions of activist histories as more authentic, but to mobilize these alternative archival mediations to challenge the gentrification of AIDS in the Global North.

Mobility and security: the perceived benefits of citizenship for resettled young people from refugee backgrounds

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, the meaning and value of formal state citizenship has shifted dramatically. In the same period, scholarship on citizenship has drawn attention to the proliferation of alternative forms of sub-, supra- and transnational citizenship, at times obscuring the ongoing importance of formal state citizenship. For refugees, however, formal state citizenship remains a critical and widely shared goal. Drawing on interviews with 51 young people from refugee backgrounds in Melbourne, Australia, this article explores the intersecting themes of mobility and security that were identified by participants as the most important benefits of acquiring formal state citizenship in the country of resettlement. In contrast to the insecurity of forced migration, formal state citizenship provides a privileged mobility that enables refugee-background youth to maintain and create transnational identities and attachments and to be protected while doing so, while also granting a secure status within the nation state and insurance against further displacement in an uncertain future. In offering these forms of mobility and security, formal state citizenship contributes to a sense of ontological security among refugee-background youth, providing an important foundation for building national and transnational futures.

New approaches to achieve sustainable regional development

Abstract We are facing a transnational future. Globalization is getting more and more important in economic development, processes are becoming global, and the allocation of goods, capital and resources is carried out on the global market. In such transnational system, the role of large business centers of resource concentration is getting more significant and the ability of nations to balance the allocation of resources is getting poorer. Consequently, the micro-regions, counties and settlements need to face direct global challenges and the self-generated competition as well. Micro-regions, which are not able to adapt to the global resource market and competition, fall out of this allocation space and surely lag behind. Their future greatly depends on how they can represent their interests and how they can improve their positions.

Administrative Constitutionalism and the Political Union

Between the relics of a nation state past and the promises of a transnational future, the normative evolution of the European Union has rightly been described as “an international legal experiment.” Europeanization, in that sense, has been construed as an experimental legal mode for the integration of national economic diversity through harmonized regulation. Even though the European Union's operating code has remained decisively economic, the normative matrix itself has transcended the historical objective of economic homogeneity. European integration therefore experienced anormative turnafter the completion of the single market; the European Union progressively captured the social space of the continent, evolving into asocietal experimentof normative imagination and cultural plurality, taking it beyond economic integration, market freedoms, and monetary stability.