Transnational Space Research Articles

Asia in the Austrian Imaginary: Anna Kim's German Transcription of Korean History in Die große Heimkehr

This article explores how in Die große Heimkehr (2017) Anna Kim provides her German-speaking public entrance into stories situated geographically in Asia (the Korean Peninsula and Japan) and during the early to mid-twentieth century. It highlights how Kim complicates notions of home, belonging, and generational trauma across time and transnational spaces. The article also explains how she intertwines literary practice with historiography in engaging with the politics of memory culture, that is, with concepts of "cultural memory," "entanglement," and "witnessing by adoption." Taking Michael Rothberg's notion of "multidirectional memory of trauma" as a point of departure, the article examines how Kim's aesthetic of "ethical storytelling" brings Korean historical trauma into proximity with the history of European trauma. Moreover, in drawing on Michael Rothberg's concept of "implication," the article probes how the engagement with Kim's historiography can potentially encourage her German-speaking readers to reflect on their own implication in troubling historical legacies, for example that of colonialism and the Cold War, that impact the contemporary West as well as Korea.

The Portuguese World as a Transnational Space: Political Dimension

The Portuguese World as a Transnational Space: Political Dimension

“Doing Gender”: Women Labor Migration and Households Transition in Nepal

The increasing trend of women migration in transnational space doesn’t open a new discourse in global labor market but also assists in social construction of gender. Though government of Nepal doesn’t have any objection over men migration but it dispirited female labor migration due to various reasons. The growing incidents of physical assault in foreign land and patriarchal ideology such as: prevalence of male breadwinners, female homemaker, managing work within the domestic space and cultural restrictions restricts on women to participate in public spaces. This paper examines the reconstruction of households structure and the changing roles, with a focus on gendered power relation in the slum community of Pokhara Metropolitan City, Nepal. Particular, attention is paid to the transformation of breadwinner power of men to women and increasing women participation in decision making process. The evidences presented here use data from both secondary literature and primary sources. The data have been purposively selected from the 199 households of the women migrants families who have been migrated at least three years before the study conducted in between March and July 2022. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were chosen for the data collection and analysis. The results explain changing scenario of gender role and households transition due to access of social, cultural and economic capital accumulated by migrants. Once women depart for labor migration, the family left behind especially mother and husband are more responsible to carry both inside as well as outside activities along with childcare. In joint family, mother/mother-in-laws were replacing the role of migrant and doing migrants tasks; whereas in nuclear family husbands is more responsible for all conducts performed by their wives and acts as like that. The study also provides a more nuanced understanding of the involvement of migrants women in decision-making power in household’s domain and the way of dealing with upcoming socio-cultural obstacles that hinder their participation in public sphere.

Transnational Cultural Migration. Mexico-U.S. Border Experiences: A Case Study

This paper looks at the transnational cultural experiences of a Cantonese migrant while border crossing the United States and Mexico. Specifically, we explore his experiences while residing in transnational spaces (Mexico, the United States, and Canton (Guangzhou)). Fieldwork including participant observation and qualitative data were collected through ethnographic interviews carried out during the period 2014-2016, at a Chinese food restaurant in Puebla, Mexico. Our goal is to understand the border crossing experience as a confluence of activities, which contribute to the construction of epistemologies from below and the understanding of transnationalism from a cultural approach.

Оборонные проекты PESCO и НАТО: координация или конкуренция?

The EU’s PESCO projects and NATO’s High Visibility Projects are aimed at strengthening the defence capabilities of the member states of these two structures, creating new military technologies, jointly purchasing equipment and weapons, optimizing countries' defence spending and coordinating the transformation of their armed forces structures in accordance with collective interests. At the same time, the projects of the EU and NATO have different tasks that align with the foreign policy goals of these different in nature structures. Due to the participation of various states in each of them, primarily the United States in NATO, a number of contradictions between them remain. However, most of them are offset by the EU–NATO cooperation. The latter has significantly intensified since 2016. Two bilateral declarations were signed and two packages of measures for their implementation were adopted. The parties have strengthened political cooperation, interaction during operations, coordination of defence planning, they jointly develop projects for the formation of military infrastructure, develop deepen military-technical cooperation in areas of common interest. The article analyzes the PESCO and High Visibility Projects projects, compares them and identifies the links and differences between them. It is substantiated that, despite the various tasks, in the conditions of the modern transformation of the world order and the evolution of threats to their member states, the EU and NATO are expanding coordination in defence planning and developing a division of responsibilities between the two. The PESCO and High Visibility Projects are being implemented in full synchronization with each other, with the participation of a number of EU member states, but not-NATO members, in NATO projects and vice versa. Rather, the projects complement each other, although the scope of PESCO is much broader due to the peculiarities of the nature of the European Union as a regional integration association. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is a spatial approach. It is substantiated that the EU and NATO, both being already transnational political spaces, form a superstructure space of EU-NATO cooperation, in which the actors of the first level – these two structures themselves – and the second level – the states – interact more intensively than with external actors, participate in the struggle for power, redistribution of resources, form the identity of this transnational space. It is concluded that in the future, coordination between the PESCO and High Visibility Projects, as well as between the EU and NATO in general, will expand.

Critical pedagogy and educational research in the U.S. and Brazil:

This text presents partial results of an international collaborative project, which has Paulo Freire's philosophy as a pillar. This article is both a descriptive report and also a register of individual and collective questions about the intentions of the project in relation to its outcomes and implications. The project was developed as an international partnership between three researchers from three different universities, Tiradentes University (Aracaju, Brazil), the University of Massachusetts Boston (Massachusetts, USA), and Molloy College (New York, USA). The perspectives of Freire's pistemological curiosity (2019) and critical awareness (1967) provide the foundation for our discussion, as this article aims to present the results of the International Dialogical Seminar as an integral part of the project. The voices of the participants (teachers and students) will be the focus with the intention to weave links between them, shedding light on the results of this collaboration of teaching and research across borders. Our work speaks to the importance of transnational and local dialogic spaces for teaching and researching as we have been doing in this work together. The intersections of our worldviews and lifeworlds enable us to see how much more needs to be done to ferret out social injustice locally and globally, and sometimes in our own practices as researchers and educators. Yet, our work also offers hope and possibility as we see the power of epistemological curiosity and dialogue in bringing about strengthened critical consciousness. Freire's work for and contributions to social change remains current and relevant.

Towards a theory of diaspora formation through conflict deterritorialization

AbstractBuilding on different cases of conflicts in homelands triggering diaspora mobilization, we develop a theory of diaspora formation through processes of conflict deterritorialization. We argue that an armed conflict in the country of origin can trigger specific processes of diaspora formation in the countries of settlement and in the transnational space, depending on the actors involved and the particular context in both the home and host countries. We suggest that this specific non‐linear process of diaspora formation can happen at the individual and collective levels, and can both turn a migrant into a diasporic individual as well as mobilize diasporic individuals for collective action. This mobilization, we argue, builds on narratives about and from the homeland, the country of residence, and the transnational space, and can, in turn, lead to conflict autonomization in diaspora settings.

Transnational Networks and Institutional Embeddedness: Reengagement of the New Generation of Malaysian Chinese Entrepreneurs with China

The new generation of Southeast Asian Chinese society, who were locally born and grew up, have largely weakened their interaction with China. However, the growing business opportunities presented from the Belt and Road Initiative (the BRI), which was launched in 2013, serve as a big impetus for the new generation entrepreneurs to reengage China. Drawn upon an empirical case study of the new generation of Malaysian Chinese entrepreneurs, this paper argues that, the entrepreneurs regard institutional embeddedness as a critical channel to enhance their abilities to accumulate transnational social capital and strengthen their socio-economic networks with China. The transnational networks facilitate them to seize business opportunities from the BRI, and simultaneously reinforce their Malaysian national identity. Moreover, this study demonstrates the emergence of knowledge networks in the transnational space. It not only reflects the increasing interests of the new generation entrepreneurship in China's innovation and technology, but also reveals the developmental strategies of both the Malaysian and Chinese states.

Interview with Gordon Henry

Gordon Henry is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota and professor of American Indian Literature, Creative Writing and the Creative Process in Integrative Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. He is the author and co-editor of many books and collections, including The Failure of Certain Charms: And Other Disparate Signs of Life (2008). His novel The Light People (1994) won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Following some of the stages in his career and personal story, which he kindly accepted to share with me, this interview highlights some of the crucial key issues concerning Native American people and cultures, questions that still need a wider transnational space both inside and outside academia. Discrimination based on language has influenced the history of Native American people for centuries, starting from the forced education of the young in the 19th century and continuing in the 20th, in the context of Hollywood film productions. Linguicism, language-based racism (Phillipson 1992), is a topic that needs to be addressed in the light of the recent flourishing of extremist thought worldwide, which carries the abused rhetoric of ‘us vs them’ (van Dijk 2015) and, at the same time, spurs protest movements. This reflection goes hand-in-hand with the controversial topic of the appropriation of Native American cultural practices by old and new wannabes (non-people who are so much fascinated by Native American cultures that end up imitating them by, for example, choosing a Native name or emphasising certain aspects of the culture which they admire, often basing their beliefs on stereotypes), whilst people living in the Reservations are still neglected and the Native American and Alaskan Native population register extremely high suicide, homicide and alcoholism rates compared to the U.S. all races population (especially women). But, the efforts and educational programs aimed to preserve languages and cultures (like the Lakota Language Consortium or the Rosetta Stone Endangered Language programs), the vibrancy of the artistic scene in the visual, literary and music fields, the various forms of activism and community engagement projects (such as, for example, the MMIWG movement – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – the water protectors protest at Standing Rock, known as #NoDapl, or the prayerful journey called Run4Salmon in California) are also to be acknowledged as milestones in the process of regaining self-sovereignty by Native people. Against the background of these considerations, I am pleased and honoured to share thoughts, feelings and emotions with Gordon Henry.

Being and becoming internationally minded: Snapshots of novice Canadian teachers in international schools

This paper examines the experiences of three Canadian teachers beginning their formal careers in international schools. International mindedness is taken up as a sensitivity that international schoolteachers both bring to their international teaching assignments and further develop in the transnational spaces of international schools. As such, the internationally minded teacher is able to respond and learn from the intercultural complexities of teaching and living overseas. Findings suggest some elements of international mindedness are more readily appreciated and practiced by these novice teachers while others require greater awareness and effort to attain. The findings also suggest that ‘cosmopolitan learning’ (Rizvi, 2009), foregrounding the importance of critically reflecting upon one’s ‘locatedness’ in the world, represents a generative orientation for teachers wanting to deepen their international mindedness.

Introduction

Histories of gender in the modern Middle East and North Africa have flourished in the last three decades, fueled in part by JMEWS. Yet much of this work is circumscribed by the nation-state, which remains the primary framing for discussions of women’s activism and gender-based reform. Existing scholarship includes glimpses of women collaborating across national, regional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries but rarely foregrounds these transnational connections or emphasizes how formative transnational spaces and conversations were in shaping gender norms. This roundtable brings together the work of gender historians whose research collectively ranges from Morocco to Afghanistan, and traces a variety of connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Its five short essays highlight modes of movement, organizing, and exchange across borders, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We demonstrate the many ways in which women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with women in other world regions in the name of national independence, women’s rights, and economic justice, often shaping gender norms in the process. But should all modes of cross-border collaboration be described as “transnational”?One area of debate that the roundtable addresses is whether “transnationalism” is the best analytic mode for studying women’s activism across local and international borders. While thinking entirely beyond the national has its own historiographical value (Ludden 2003), transnationalism as a methodological approach begins with the nation, then demands that scholars think above and below it in ways that have the potential to challenge its solidity and salience as a category of analysis. Pursuing a transnational approach, we acknowledge the nation as a salient political unit while refusing to be confined within it, whether in linguistic, spatial, or ideological terms. Another key concept running through these essays is “transnational feminism,” which foregrounds feminist cross-border collaborations in the name of disrupting systems of power (Mohanty 2013). During the colonial era, many feminists in the Middle East and North Africa engaged in transnational organizing in opposition to colonialism. More recently, transnational feminist organizing in the Middle East and North Africa has been anticapitalist, prodemocracy, and has often sought to end US military occupation in the region.This roundtable also touches on questions of what counts as “transnational” activism and the scales on which it operates. Our essays reveal how micro and macro transnational feminist organizing contributed to reshaping gender norms in the wider Middle East. Marya Hannun’s work reconstructs a web of feminist organizing that connected Afghan women with women from Cairo to Bombay. Nova Robinson’s piece reveals how Syrian women collaborated with US and Swiss feminists to try to secure representation from the “East” on the League of Nations’ Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women. Anny Gaul’s research demonstrates that multiple generations of Moroccan women activists engaged with ideas and movements circulating through the Middle East and beyond as they advocated for liberation. Focusing on these models of exchange and activism encourages new spatial frameworks for understanding women’s organizing. Lucia Carminati’s essay addresses such frameworks by asking how the inherent transnational nature of certain spaces, like the Suez Canal, impacts gendered subjectivities and histories in unique ways. Finally, Gülşah Torunoğlu’s essay addresses the promises and limitations of transnationalism as a method of analysis, and discusses “relational comparison” as an alternative analytic lens through which to scrutinize the interconnected feminist networks in the Middle East prior to the 1920s.In addition to highlighting the circuits and exchanges of people and ideas, this collection of essays in conversation with one another demonstrates how a transnational approach can push gender history in the Middle East and North Africa in exciting new directions. Questions that animate this roundtable include: In what ways did feminisms in the Middle East and North Africa transcend the nation and even the region during the interwar period, a time when the nation-state emerged as the default vehicle through which patriarchy was wielded and contested? What were the geographic limits of these connections? How does the fact that women of a certain class around the world had more in common with one another than they did with those who shared their national frames shape our writing of women’s history? How do these divisions endure in the present debates around global feminist movements? Our essays do not definitively answer these questions. However, we suggest that a denationalized analysis of feminism can give us a clearer picture of women’s movements and subjectivities in the early twentieth century, within and beyond national contexts. We hope that our collective exploration about the potential benefits and challenges of transnational analysis sparks further debate and inquiry.

Transnational Spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

This essay maps the unmapped nuances of transnational/cultural spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s debut novel, The Circle of Reason (1986; 2008) which underscores the inter-territorial itinerary of Alu, the protagonist, who after being accused of being a terrorist, runs from Lalpukur, near Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Goa to Al-Ghazira, a fictional gulf-state and finally to Algeria. The novel, Bildungsroman in nature and thematic treatment, poignantly deals with James Clifford’s idea of ‘assimilation’ (of) / ‘travelling’ cultures, geo-political boundaries and hybridization of language. The rationale of the paper is to deconstruct the binaries—tradition and modernity; oriental and occidental cultures; and emigration and immigration, which are, to me, the themes of the narrative of the novel. Ghosh has dexterously intertwined the cultural matrix of different spaces in the novel to show how in this age of mobility, open economy and transnational migration, transcultural awareness is all to value. This essay also traces the trajectory of mobility in the age of fluidity and underpins patterns of movement which affect cultural orientations, sensibilities, and, consequentially, creative expressions.

Multilingualism in Migrant Contexts in Pakistan and the UK: Transcending Physical, Social and Symbolic Borders in Transnational Social Spaces

This paper is based on a four-year ethnographic study of multilingualism in transnational Mirpuri families in Azad Kashmir (Pakistan) and Lancashire (United Kingdom). Data were collected in a range of physical settings in Pakistan and the UK as well as social spaces online. Migrants’ literacy practices are often related to the standard language variety of the country to which the migrant is moving. However, this paper suggests that migration requires different kinds of literacies, not all of which relate to standard writing system use. The study sought to understand how these literacies are shaped in Pakistan before they are taken up in the UK, by seeing them as part of migrants’ everyday translanguaging. This perspective involves exploring how different language varieties (such as Punjabi, Urdu and English) and different linguistic resources (such as scripts, styles and registers) are appropriated by migrants at different stages of their migration trajectories alongside migrants’ own perspectives on these practices. The findings demonstrate how migrant families counter discrimination in their everyday multilingualism as part of the translingual practices which transcend physical, social and symbolic borders.

Teachers’ Transnational Identities as Activity: Constructing Mobility Systems at the Intersections of Gender and Language Difference

AbstractWhile studies following a translingual orientation have demonstrated the potential for decolonial pedagogical practices (Cushman, 2016), including teachers’ self‐decolonization by drawing on their translinguistic identities (Motha, Jain, & Tecle, 2012), a translingual paradigm and pedagogy also has the potential to address “the intersection of several structuring nodes in the colonial matrix of power” (Cushman, 2016, p. 238). Some studies have put forth women’s narratives and lived experiences as teachers (Motha, Jain, & Tecle, 2012; Park, 2017); however, few studies have investigated identity construction at the intersections of language and gender when teachers are asked to explicitly engage in translingual and transnational labor. Drawing on mobility systems (Fraiberg, 2018), Individual Networks of Practice (INoPs) (Zappa‐Hollman & Duff, 2015), and translingualism (Canagarajah, 2012), this qualitative study offers a detailed account of how four emergent teacher scholars construct their teaching identities when they were encouraged to scrutinize transnational spaces and identities. In particular, the study has two purposes: 1) to investigate the decolonial potential of translingual and transnational paradigms as emergent teacher scholars reflect on their identities at the intersections of language and gender and 2), to document identity reconstruction in relation to the environments and sociocultural contexts of their transnational experiences. Besides the affordances of narrative and/or autobiographical writing through translingual and transnational perspectives, the study demonstrates the benefits of identity reconstruction through mobile systems (Fraiberg, 2018) in creating opportunities for agency within oppressive discourses of language and gender in the TESOL field.

Deportees in Transit Between Ecuador and the US: A Historical and Ethnographic Approach to Migrant Disobedience and its Spatial Impacts

AbstractBy focusing on the Ecuador−US postcolonial and transnational space and reconstructing trajectories of Ecuadoreans who migrated to the US, were deported and recommenced their undocumented transits to that same destination, this article analyses the migrant disobedience and its spatial impacts. The article proves how deportees in transits are not docile figures: their unruly mobilities re‐actualise historical disobedience against insurmountable colonial legacy that has produced indigenous people as second‐class racialised citizens confined to super‐exploitation and hyper‐precarity. Their migrant disobedience is thus twofold: against that historical legacy and current border regime. It also proves that the Ecuador−US postcolonial and transnational space configuration is incomprehensible without considering the US policy of interventionism across the Americas, including Ecuador, and the unequal geo‐political and geo‐economic relations between the two countries. Deportees’ unruly mobilities unsettle premises of territorial membership based upon nationalist premises while transforming Ecuador into a place of transit disputed by the country’s nationals.

Reinterpreting Jewish Petitioning Practices During the Shoah: Contestation, Transnational Space, and Survival

ABSTRACT During the 1930s and early 1940s, members of the Jewish community, converts, and men and women of partial Jewish heritage across German-controlled Europe wrote tens of thousands of petitions. As tools to redress grievances and request support, these petitions ranged from rushed appeals for exemptions from deportations to elaborate protest entreaties to fascist officials. Too readily dismissed by scholars as ‘sham possibilities,’ petitioning practices and the question of their ‘success’ were multi-layered phenomena. Even petitioners who ultimately failed could use the often lengthy petitioning process to buy time and prepare other responses such as going into hiding. This rereading of entreaties submitted in Central Europe and occupied France reveals the widespread existence of trans-European networks that connected families and communities, created unique transnational spaces, and profoundly shaped reactions during the genocide. As part of integrated histories, these transnational petitions demonstrate the need to eschew oversimplified binaries of resistance versus collaboration in favor of more complex taxonomies.

The transnational continuum of conditional inclusion: from marginalized immigrants to rejected returnees

ABSTRACT Research on Dominican migration to the United States ranges from analyses emphasizing incorporation to those exploring diaspora formation and the weaving of transnational ties. Based on a juxtaposition of ethnographic research conducted among Dominican families in New York City in the early 1990s with a recent fieldwork with deported nationals in Santo Domingo, this article approaches conditional inclusion in transnational social space. I examine the structural conditions that shaped the criminalization of Dominican migrant youth in the United States and later let to their deportation. More particularly, I illustrate how the crack pandemic in New York City in the late 1980s affected ongoing processes of conditional inclusion. By focusing on how conditional inclusion manifests itself from departure to arrival, through settlement and marginalization, to deportation and struggles for (re)integration in the Dominican Republic, the article aims to contribute insights to the comparative development of the concept in this special issue.

Uneasy belonging in the mobility capsule: Erasmus Mundus students in the European Higher Education Area

ABSTRACT Taking Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters students as exemplifications of the intensification of mobility in educational trajectories, this article considers their modes of belonging in super-mobility. Their educational experiences take place within a consortium of universities, necessitating intensive and routinized collective movement to multiple locations. This novel way of practising mobility within higher education calls for new frames to describe the distinctiveness of the super-mobility experience and how belonging is enacted and reflected in this transnational space. It aligns itself with the critical approach to hypermobility, especially with regard to its impact on mental well-being. Through an empirical, multi-year qualitative study of student experiences, we propose a new concept of the mobility capsule as both a meso-level structure and a particular way of practicing mobility which implies a transnational group experience, usually organised within an institutional framework of studies. Our results show that the experience of the mobility capsule is characterised by intense speed, routine uprootedness and cosmopolitan social closure. These features weigh heavily on the construction of personal and group belonging and have particular consequences for well-being. We conclude with a critique of such institutional set ups given the persistent glorification of hypermobility.

Practice Theory and Postsocialist Civil Society: Toward a New Analytical Framework

AbstractWhen discussing postsocialist civil societies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), scholars have predominantly focused on the nonparticipatory and advocacy-oriented activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), effectively narrowing the concept of “civil society” to that of the “civic sector.” This actor-focused and normative approach has resulted in a systematic obfuscation of less structured forms of everyday resistance, civic engagement, active citizenship, contentious politics, and social movements, giving only a partial view of civil societies in the region. Through a critical dialogue between state-of-the-art research on postsocialist civil society and the practice turn in international political sociology (IPS), this article postulates an analytical distinction between contentious and compliant practices in order to arrive at a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the ways in which postsocialist civil societies are manifested, enacted, and actualized. On the one hand, the proposed practice turn moves the research agenda away from abstract, universalist, and normative assumptions of what civil society should be in favor of an embedded, contextual, and critical understanding of what it actually is; on the other hand, this shift opens venues for theorizing not only about, but also from the “postsocialist condition” of civil societies in the transnational space of CEE.

Vâlâ Nureddin’s Comic Materialism and the Sexual Revolution: Writing across Turkey and the Soviet Union

Abstract Focusing on the life and work of the Turkish novelist and translator Vâlâ Nureddin (1901–67), this article provides a historical overview of Turkish and Soviet literary entanglement in the early twentieth century. A collaborator of the globally acclaimed Turkish communist poet Nâzım Hikmet, Vâlâ was educated at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East from 1922 to 1924. Returning to Turkey in 1925, he launched his career in the daily Akşam (Evening), bringing Soviet and Turkish literature into conversation in his serialized translations and literary adaptations of Soviet erotic fiction. In reading Vâlâ’s neglected 1928 erotic historical comedy Baltacı ile Katerina (Baltacı and Catherine), unique among Vâlâ’s writings in its direct and explicit imagination and specification of an entangled revolution, this article suggests, by way of specific attention to this work’s comedic elements, that Vâlâ imagined the collapse of both Russian and Ottoman imperial sovereignty in terms of sexual revolution. It argues that a study of this unjustifiably neglected erotic comedy not only deepens our knowledge of early republican Turkish literature and culture, but provides a more nuanced understanding of the Moscow-centered transnational literary space produced in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, or what scholars in Slavic studies have called the “Soviet republic of letters.”