Transnational Migration Research Articles

Transnational Migration in the Moldovan- German Context, or: My Totul va fi bine (Road)trip

A research Report of Jana STÖXEN (Germany), Transnational Migration in the Moldovan- German Context, or: My Totul va fi bine (Road)trip

Inter-State Migration to Assam -A Study of Street Vendor in the City of Guwahati

The migration of people from one place to another has been going on since ancient times. It has happened in every look and corner of the world. The main reason behind such migration was the food search. The process is continuing all over the world. Migration in Assam is a burning issue that draws worldwide attention. The issue of migration has been discussed from different angles, like transnational, inter-state, inter-state, and so on. However, it has been observed that the issue of illegal transnational migration has stolen much attention comparatively. Though legal, inter-state migration is also an important concern as it has socio-cultural, political and economic significance. The density of the subject of inter-state migration can be felt in cities like Guwahati, Assam, especially in the informal sector. Migrants from outside the state border are basically visible in areas like, tiny trades, door-to-door vendors, low-income earning jobs, mechanics, carpenters, rickshaw pullers, daily wage labourers, etc. There always has an effect of such migrants which needs to be studied for the greater interest of the state. This paper attempts to make a very modest study of the street vendors of the city of Guwahati. It seems that most of the city street vendors are migrants and they have monopolized the informal sector in the city. During study it will be attempted to know their origin, causes of migration to Assam, and choosing the particular business. It is hoped that the study will be able to find out the consequences of such migration in depth and its adverse effects on the growing problem of joblessness and environmental degradation in the city.

Remembering and dealing with violent past: diasporic experiences and transnational dimensions

ABSTRACTMuch of the world's migration today is driven by civil wars, armed conflicts, genocide and other forms of large-scale violence. These experiences have long-lasting effects on individuals who are forced to migrate and rebuild their lives in new contexts, while coming to terms with the violence they have experienced. The papers in this special issue explore the transnational and transgenerational effects of the violent conflict, focusing on how diasporic communities deal with the memories and legacies of the violent past; how these legacies shape the processes of their integration into new contexts of residence and other dimensions of diasporic existence; and how they affect generations after. The introduction to the special issue discusses some of the findings, highlighting common patterns and themes that emerge from the eight papers and discussing them in the context of scholarship on diaspora, transnational migration, conflict, intergenerational transmission, and memory.

Концепт «диаспора» в современном теоретическом дебате

The article presents an analysis of the transformation of methodological discourse on the concept of diaspora in the framework of migration issues studies. The development of research in a certain area is always associated with methodological issues that give rise to different approaches, despite this, they require their own solutions. The study of the experience of conceptualizing the concept of diaspora seems necessary from the point of view of clarifying the instrumental capabilities and, consequently, the methodological productivity of this concept, which is necessary for the selection and consistent justification of research optics in the process of developing a strategy for studying various aspects of international migration and separately the diaspora as its significant component. The transformation of the theoretical debate is considered within the framework of its periodization proposed by R. Cohen. Based on the analysis of a number of Western concepts of diaspora, the main approaches to the interpretation of this concept are revealed: essentialist and relativistic. Representatives of the first approach (W. Safran, R. Cohen) position diaspora as a kind of the model, which has fixed features that determine its unchangeable essence. The most significant of them are forced nature of migration, the connection with the homeland and the desire to return there. Despite the fact that R. Cohen proposed an expanded somewhat liberalized set of features of diaspora, it continued to be considered from the point of view of the necessary presence of certain features of this community, which makes it possible to define it as a diaspora. This approach has been criticized. Its opponents were representatives of relativism and constructionism (Clifford, Gillroy and Hall). They identified the flexibility of diaspora, the diversity of its causes, a number of acquired features and aspects of existence, in addition to the connection with the motherland. The second approach considers a new type of diaspora – trans-diaspora – in the context of transnational migration. The diaspora began to be positioned procedurally in the new conditions of a globalizing world and transnational living space. Thus, two types of definitions of the concept of diaspora have been formed: reterritorialized and deterritorialized. The author of the article reveals the features of these approaches and their methodological productivity from the point of view of a research strategy.

The Participatory Documentary ‘Age Is Just a Bingo Number’

The film ‘ Age is Just a Bingo Number’ is a mid-length (40 minutes) participatory documentary exploring the experiences of a community of ageing Italians in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. As a product of social science research, this documentary aims to bridge the gap between academia and the general audience, by disseminating research findings in creative ways, through art practices. This documentary constitutes an empirical contribution to the sociology of community studies, by exploring the social interactions of a small place-based group of older migrants. Hence, the documentary introduces the audience to a recreational centre in the heart of the city, where the participants gather on a weekly basis to play Bingo. This place, and the sense of community it conveys, aims at promoting social aspects of the environment for older people. Furthermore, by illustrating how older migrants can become closely attached to places, it aims at raising awareness of issues of ageing in the context of migration. In this sense, the film is an original contribution to the sociology of ageing and transnational migration.

RECONSTRUCTED HETERONORMATIVE TENDENCIES ON REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION

The objective of this article is to offer a critical and analytical examination of transnational migration data, encompassing empirical studies that underscore the "emancipation" and "empowerment" of women in the economic, social, and political dimensions of transnational migration while elucidating how these elements reinforce binary gender conceptualizations. The article will follow this structure: Firstly, an investigation into transnational migration and its ramifications on the 'social transformation' of women's lives will be conducted. Secondly, an exploration into the portrayal of the economic status of immigrant and displaced women as "empowered" in the existing research and discourse, particularly through enhancements in social status. Thirdly, an examination of political empowerment within the context of evolving marital dynamics will be undertaken, delving deeper into the discourse surrounding gender. This article will elucidate how numerous scholars may perpetuate gender binaries by not engaging in a comprehensive critical analysis of gender while contributing to the ongoing discourse concerning women immigrants and refugees.

Sense of Belonging and Transnational Way of Life Among the Turks of Bulgaria

The recent conceptualizations of citizenship, such as the concepts of post-national and flexible citizenship are closely related to transnationality, as people’s sense of belonging cannot just be restricted to holding a passport of a nation-state or residing inside the borders of it. Nevertheless, multiple belongings that minorities and migrants have also indicate that there is more than one relationship model with different nation-states. In that sense, the case of the Turks of Bulgaria offers a perspective of transnationality, in which multiple attachments and interconnectedness of this specific ethnic group regulate and redefine their identity across borders. To what extent the Turks of Bulgaria has transnational ways of life and which elements of transnationality are embedded of their identity are the main problematic of this paper. Hence, by providing theoretical framework of transnationality and transnational migration, and by providing an analysis of the conducted field research, this paper tries to analyze the ways of having a transnational way of life for the Turks of Bulgaria.

Humanising research on (non-)migration decision-making: a situated framework

Recent global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, economic crises, and wars have not impeded transnational migration to continuously unfold. The question of why some people migrate while others choose to stay remains one of the important preoccupations in migration studies. It underlines the need to further conceptualise transnational migration to identify the drivers behind individuals’ aspiration or intention to (re)migrate or stay where they are. Drawing from several migration theories and perspectives in various disciplines, this paper proposes the situated framework of “humanising research on (non-)migration decision-making”, that is, highlighting its human aspects. This scholarly enterprise is critically important as mainstream migration theories put more emphasis on individuals’ rationality, thereby overlooking other human aspects of migration and stasis. Viewing individuals as persons, this framework offers three ways to humanise the analysis: thick contextualisation, life dimensions-focused analysis, and time-situated inquiry. It also calls for the engendering of the analysis and decolonising the methodologies adopted in the study of (non-)migration decision-making.

Melancholia and Magic: Transnational Migration and Fantasy Narratives in The Land of Forgotten Girls and When You Trap a Tiger

Melancholia and Magic: Transnational Migration and Fantasy Narratives in The Land of Forgotten Girls and When You Trap a Tiger

Salsa and the (Eternal) City. Rethinking the pleasure periphery

ABSTRACT This article takes as a starting point one of the classic metaphors in tourism studies, the ‘pleasure periphery’, in order to examine how the embodied labour of subaltern bodies establishes a regime of recognition, visibility, and value. Situated at the intersections of transnational migration, social mobility, and bodily work, this analysis follows the professional and personal trajectories of Cuban dancers in Europe. I discuss the various forms of exclusion that emerge at the intersection of dance consumerism, assumptions about migrant belongings, and hierarchies of performance practices. The ‘pleasure periphery’ serves as a spatial and symbolic metaphor that gives insight into the pivotal role of Cuban dance and music for the transnational dance scene, while shedding light on how peripheralization is reshaped and reproduced in migratory contexts. The transnational contexts of dance labour bring into focus the tensions between its emancipatory potential for Cuban performers and the perpetuation of consumption patterns and business strategies that reify peripherality on various levels (spatial, symbolic, and affective). The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Havana, Cuba, and Rome, Italy among Cuban professional dancers and dance educators.

Between transnational engagements and local integration of Chinese communities in Italy: An analysis of the role of migrant organisations

AbstractChinese communities represent one of the largest migrant groups in Italy. Current scholarship overwhelmingly focuses on Chinese ethnic businesses and identity issues. This article addresses an important but under‐researched topic: the role of migrant organisations in enhancing migrant transnationalism and/or local integration. We examine three predominant types of Chinese migrant organisations in Italy—civic, educational, religious—across multiple cities. We show that, at first sight, educational and religious organisations aim to serve the communities in maintaining transnational links with the Chinese‐speaking world, while civic organisations directly promote interactions with the local society. However, deeper analyses reveal that all three types of organisations can play an active role in fostering both migrant transnationalism and local integration, to different degrees in different domains. We discuss policy implications and how potential synergetic collaborations between host society stakeholders and migrant organisations could be explored.

Career consolidation or reformulation? A careership theory approach to football coaches’ transnational migration and career development

ABSTRACT This article examines the career development of international football coaches in the context of their transnational migration. Previous research has mainly relied on the normative stages models to explain coaching career development, which has limitations in capturing the complexity and diversity of coach career trajectories, particularly in terms of unique individual experiences and contextual impacts on their career development. Drawing upon the theory of careership, this article seeks to bridge the gap by focusing on how individual coaches navigate their careers according to their horizon for action. Careership theory provides a useful lens through which to examine the interactions between individuals and their contexts, in gaining a more nuanced understanding of how these interactions shape career trajectories. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight international coaches who worked in China to gather qualitative data. The results show that the migration of coaches closely intertwined with their career development in a variety of ways, which were manifested in different career horizons for migration within two distinct stages of career development: (1) ‘career-consolidation’ reflecting the willingness to stabilise and solidify the career pathways, and (2) ‘career-reformulation’ highlighting the desires or needs to change the current career trajectories. The findings of this article suggest that career development is a multifaceted process encompassing normative, longitudinal steps, individualised approaches, objectives, constraints and unexpected events. Analysing coaches’ horizons for action allows researchers and practitioners (e.g. coach educators) to gain a holistic picture of individual and contextual distinctions within the longitudinal stages of coaching career development.

Migration and resilience during a global crisis

This study explores the relationship between migration and household resilience during a global crisis that eliminated the option to migrate. We link prior data from four populations in Bangladesh and Nepal to new phone surveys conducted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. While earnings fell universally, pandemic-induced declines were 14%–25% greater among previously migration-dependent households and urban migrant workers, with household remittance losses far exceeding official statistics. Heightened economic exposure during the pandemic erased prior gains achieved by transnational migrants and caused fourfold greater prevalence of food insecurity among domestic subsistence migrants. Economic distress spilled over onto non-migrants in high-migration villages and labor markets. We show that migration contributed to economic contagion independent of its role in disease transmission. Losing the option to migrate differentially increased the vulnerability of migration-dependent households during a crisis.

“This is our country, too”: Embodied Experiences of and Resistance to Neo‐nationalism in a Midwest School District

AbstractNationalist rhetoric is not new to the US political context of transnational migration (Johnson et al., 2018). However, the election cycle of 2016 amplified nationalist rhetoric and policy in new public spaces, including schools and classrooms. In this article, I analyze neo‐nationalist discourse as voiced by the Trump Administration in and adjacent to language classrooms and general education classrooms in a predominantly White, Midwestern school district with growing demographics of students designated as English Language Learners (ELLs). Using intertextual and interdiscursive analysis (Fairclough, 1992) and embodied sociolinguistics (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016), I trace how neo‐nationalist discourses entered the classrooms, homes, and, I argue, bodies of newly arrived, racialized, documented, and undocumented immigrant students. I demonstrate how such rhetoric and policy provoked physical manifestations of trauma coupled with resistance, showing how the circulation of neo‐nationalist ideas contributed to ideological constructions of immigrant student and family identities along lines of race, immigration status, and language. Based on my findings, I center participants' lived knowledge and goals to argue that these moments demand response in schools and language education classrooms and offer implications for research, policy, and practice.

Labour Migration to the Gulf and India’s Emigration Governance: Expanding Bounds of Protection

This article shows how migration from India to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has been the primary determinant in constituting India’s regulative infrastructures that govern its transnational migrations. The article identifies three moments in the history of India–Gulf connection through migration since the 1970s to suggest that the Indian state regulations on the emigrant workers evolved over time progressively in response to specific challenges offered by the labour flows to the Gulf than migrations to other destinations. It suggests that the temporal controls in a sending country are outcomes of complex mediations involving diverse players and conditions and are in a constant state of becoming.

Mitigating Developmental Disparities and Regional Instability through Public Policy Landscaping

Since government is the universally-accepted system that is responsible for midwifing the development and progress of nations and governance is mainly delivered through the making and implementation of public policy, it is imperative to develop a strategic policy view of the root-cause(s) of the bad governance that triggers the developmental disparities within and between nations which invariably engender national and regional instability across many corners of the globe. Developmental disparities within and between nations are especially important as the primary causes of national and regional conflicts as well as trans-national migration and sundry trans-national crimes such as human trafficking. In this article, I argue that public policy is so central to governance and pivotal to national development and progress that it must be recognized as the powerful force that can either unite polities around the pursuit of development and progress or leave them deeply-divided and starved of much-needed development. The crux of this argument is that national development and progress are impossible without national unity and regional stability. My second argument is that commitment to the practice of policy-led governance should be considered doubtful unless it can be proven by the prioritization of the institutionalization of Public Policy systems that are designed to, first and foremost, foster national unity and regional stability. The mission of this article is to introduce the novel concept of Public Policy Landscaping as the strategic means of making the governance landscape suitable for the development and deployment of the environmentally-sensitive public policy systems that can be relied upon to unite policy-led entities around the pursuit of national and regional development. Public policy does to the governance what landscape architecture does to natural land and this means that any neglect of public policy landscaping is bound to leave the governance landscape in a poor state that will invariably impede good policymaking and policy implementation.

Policy tracks and transnational migration on criminalities in Nigerian cities

Policy tracks and transnational migration on criminalities in Nigerian cities

Language-sensitive teaching as an emergent response to increasing linguistic diversity in Irish post-primary schools: Challenges, opportunities and implications for teacher education

The 21st century has been characterised by an unprecedented growth in transnational migration with education systems in many countries challenged to address the implications of this ongoing global phenomenon. This paper reports on a recent study that was undertaken amongst teachers and school managers in post-primary state schools in Ireland to explore the current position regarding language-sensitive teaching as an emergent response to the growing reality of linguistic diversity in schools. Bottom-up research of this kind is vital as it can shed light on the perceptions and experiences of the key stakeholders involved in order to determine their related professional needs and shape future directions in teacher education in this area. The key findings show that language-sensitive teaching remains in its infancy in the Irish post-primary educational context with an urgent need for teacher awareness-raising and upskilling in relation to this approach and its implementation in different subject classrooms. The research has also indicated that language support teachers can play a central role in developing language-sensitive teaching at the whole school level but this potential remains largely under-exploited in the Irish post-primary educational context.

A Fish in Many Waters? Addressing Transnational Habitus and the Reworking of Bourdieu in Global Contexts

This article explores the operationalization of transnational habitus by scholars to understand how individuals experience mobilities across borders. Our scoping study of 21 scholarly publications focuses on the various ways in which transnational habitus is defined as well as the different approaches to theorizing a transnational habitus. In critically mapping the relatively short history of transnational habitus, we are interested in what about habitus appears particularly generative to scholars interested in migratory experiences. The study first charts the sociological scholarship to date on transnational habitus and how it is used to understand the ways in which transnational migrants negotiate and navigate their social and cross-border mobilities. Then, to critically appraise these theorizations, the analysis focuses on two key trends in the literature: treatment of clivé/adaptation and the role of time(lag)/temporality before addressing two key silences in the use of transnational habitus – specifically gender and consideration of differences in class background.

‘I get used to it, I train through it, even though there are some days you cry through it’: Coping behaviours and adaptation of two West African footballers in Germany

Elite African players are a major group in the growing international football talent market, especially in Europe. Through qualitative interviews, this study examined the coping strategies and adaption practices of two West African athletes in the process of transition into German football and society. Examining the players’ narrative through the interpretive biography approach, the findings highlighted subjective adaptive and coping practices, as well as the role of the structures of talent development systems. The strategies included both problem-focussed and emotion-focussed strategies, namely training in a European-modelled football system, culture learning, multilocal belonging, rationalisation and acceptance of circumstance, reconstitution of self-identity, and social support. The key contributions demonstrate the impact of West African football academies on the experience of transnational migration, and the ways a transnational African athlete may redefine his conception of self to make sense of his experiences.