Transnational Studies Research Articles

Between Queer Joy and Injury

This article expands the notion of queer domesticity from the vantage point of the global South. Drawing on autoethnography, ephemeral archives, and secondary sources, the authors examine Nanur Basha, the residence of a Bangladeshi queer activist and community mentor, which in 2016 was the site of two murders committed by a local chapter of Al-Qaeda. By empirically interrogating the events leading up to the unmaking of Nanur Basha, the authors argue that global South queer domesticities — constituted by quotidian practices of queer worlding and expanding from apartments to rooftops to streets to political discourses — aspire to greater political freedom by deploying imaginative and counterhegemonic practices. As queer domesticities open up interstitial sanctuaries in nationalist discourses and within the urban fabric, they are also unmade by competing postcolonial nationalisms. Contesting Nanur Basha's reduction to a site of victimhood under Islamic terrorism and homophobia, this article illustrates how Nanur Basha indexes a subterranean modality of southern queer domesticity that negotiates secrecy, safety, celebration, and survival under heterosexist nationalist surveillance and violence. Such queer domesticities underpin an affective sanctuary at the borderlands between queer joy and injury. The article contributes to emerging conversations in transnational queer studies by situating queer worldmaking practices within landscapes of authoritarianism and queerphobia.

Validation of the Global Belief in a Just World Scale within the Spanish Population

The concept of justice, though inherently universal, is subject to substantial influence from social factors, affecting its perception. This study is dedicated to the adaptation and validation of an assessment tool for Global Belief in a Just World Scale (GBJWS) in the Spanish context. Our investigation delves into the relationship between Belief in a Just World and key constructs such as Social Dominance, System Justification, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism, while also addressing the dimension of potential gender disparities. Our findings demonstrate robust reliability coefficients, attesting to the scale's aptitude for assessing GBJW and exhibit highly favourable adjustment indices. Notably, our score analysis reveals elevated levels of BJW among men. This comprehensive research endeavour offers an invaluable global metric, facilitating transnational studies for understanding of justice perceptions on a global scale.

The role of geographical distance in transnational institutional engagement of the Czech diaspora: a comparative study

Engagement with institutions from migrants’ country of origin, both in the destination country and in the country of origin, is distinct transnational behaviour. This study investigates the impact of geographical distance on the institutional engagement of migrants from Czechia in five global regions. We examine how geographic (physical) proximity to Czechia shapes institutional engagement with the country of origin and identify factors beyond distance influencing institutional engagement. We analyzed survey data from Czech emigrants (N = 940) in neighbouring countries, Western and Northern Europe, Southern and Eastern Europe, overseas Anglo-Saxon countries, and other countries. We found that respondents from all more distant regions have higher levels of institutional engagement in the destination country than those from neighbouring countries. Length of stay and education were relevant factors for all selected regions, while place of residence (living in a metropolis) and the level of transnational behavior had varying impacts across regions. Concerning institutional engagement in origin country, the level of transnationalism was consistently the strongest predictor across. Transnational studies should incorporate geographic variables, such as physical distance into their conceptual frameworks. We expect our findings to be generalizable to other countries similar to Czechia, i.e. high-income countries whose citizens benefit from liberal visa regimes.

Civic Place Literacies: Tracing Urban Migrant Girls' Democratic Meaning‐Making Through Virtual Transnational Practitioner Research

AbstractHistorically marginalized youth shape public life through civic literacies that are rooted in their identities and experiences with systemic injustices. Literacy scholarship has accordingly traced how practitioner inquiry, a participatory approach to knowledge production, can educationally support the flourishing of these literacies. But while marginalized youth negotiate public life across multiple national contexts of inequality, this research has remained mostly nation‐bound. This paper extends prior scholarship in a comparative, cross‐national direction by exploring how, in a virtual transnational practitioner study, two urban migrant girls based in the United States and India—multiply marginalized youth from two of the world's largest and most unequal democracies—engaged in democratic meaning‐making. Tracing how youth took up learning invitations across two separate inquiry communities and one‐on‐one conversations with the teacher‐researcher, it foregrounds their civic place literacies: that is, their meaning‐making practices which reflected how their intersectional identities in their democratic communities shaped, too, their socio‐spatial navigations of those contexts. Tracing two themes related to girls' civic place literacies across India and the United States, the article concludes with implications for how future research and praxis can center urban migrant girls' civic place literacies, agency, and resistance across borders. (WC = 203).

Beyond Nazism: the impact of native persecution dynamics on the genocide of the Roma and Sinti

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the persecution of Roma and Sinti in Germany, France, Italy, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War to highlight the impact of pre-war attitudes on the transnational persecution of the Romani. This study posits that native involvement in the persecution was, especially significant to the persecution dynamic in each country and the evolution from persecution to genocide. This transnational study, therefore, introduces a greater understanding of the genocide of the Roma and Sinti and the dynamics in society that created it.

Translation and gender in contemporary Mapuche dramaturgy

ABSTRACT The theater company Kimvn Teatro, under the leadership of Mapuche playwright and director Paula González Seguel, produces and features documentary dramaturgies performed and written by a collaborative group of mostly female Mapuche artists and non-professional actors. The present study seeks to critically examine multilingualism in the written text of Kimvn Teatro's debut work, Ñi pu tremen - Mis antepasados, from a transnational feminist translation studies approach. This analysis focuses on the intersections of drama translation, female solidarity, feminist politics of authorship, and cultural representation of Mapuche women in the diaspora. The research explores how collaborative authorship and translinguistic strategies disrupt intersecting regimes of patriarchal and colonial power. Furthermore, the significance of translation is examined in terms of addressing the limitations imposed by monolingualism in contemporary Latin American drama. This entails the deterritorialization of Spanish and the affirmation of Mapuche culture and language within the framework of a “minor documentary dramaturgy”.

Retranslation as a means to reinvigorate a feminist agenda: the cases of Beya Durmiente (Dj Beya) and Desertoras

ABSTRACT This collaborative feminist and transnational study revises a selection of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s literary works. Expanding beyond literature, we focus on the theatrical realm, exploring how Cabezón Cámara’s feminist agenda in writing translates into stage adaptations. Centered on the novels Le viste la cara a Dios. La Bella Durmiente and Las aventuras de la China Iron, our analysis aligns with post-translation theories and examines Cabezón Cámara’s retranslation of the feminine subject(s), from narrations to performances. Adopting a framework that integrates multimodality, intermediality, and transdisciplinarity, we trace the construction of feminist subjectivities across various phases in the translation process, considering verbal and non-verbal elements.

Transnational Holocaust studies in history and memory

Transnational Holocaust studies in history and memory

Canadian foreign policy analysis and Inuit within Canada

ABSTRACT This article examines transnational Indigenous cooperation among Permanent Participants in the Arctic Council using decolonialism and Indigenization in Canadian foreign policy analysis. The mainstream IR approaches primarily consider Indigenous NGOs as civil society groups united by common interests and cultures and as organizations that promote social change. This study argues that unlike other types of NGOs, Indigenous organizations have a complex social identity, which is influenced by settler-colonial heritage. Besides this, transnationalism promotes collective Indigenous agency. Like feminist IR, Indigenous IR scholarship challenges dominant worldviews and conceptualizations of Westphalian sovereignty, nation-state, and security. This study suggests comparing the state-centred IR concepts and Inuit within Canada’s understandings of the same terms. Although the Inuit within Canada perceive international relations distinctly, their conceptualizations of IR should be recognized by state structures. The article suggests that CFPA should incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and promote transnational Indigenous IR studies to decolonize foreign policy and include Indigenous views in analysis.

The “Indios” of Spain and the Mexican Revolution: Racial Ideologies and the Labor of Internationalist Solidarity

This article examines the influence of the Mexican Revolution (1906–40) on Spanish anarchists’ views on racial and class solidarity. Whereas recent transnational studies of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) have highlighted the conflict's lingering imprint on Latin American politics and society, this essay explores why Spanish anarchists interpreted the Mexican Revolution as an insurrection led by Mexico's Indigenous communities. It argues that such readings of the conflict, most of which were advanced by non-Indigenous revolutionaries, both challenged and reinforced racialized notions of social and political upheaval. This article therefore demonstrates how these views challenged orthodox interpretations of social revolution while exposing the obstacles to building internationalist solidarity among laboring classes in postimperial and postcolonial societies.

Dennis DIJKZEUL and Margit FAUSER (eds.), Diaspora Organisations in International Affairs (Oxon, Routledge, 2020)

Diasporas and their organisations, which traditionally aimed to serve their interest in the homeland and abroad, have long been studied under several social science disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, political science, and geography. At the beginning of the 2000s, for instance, human and political geographers started to focus on diaspora realizing that it is a geographical concept, which addresses various geographical themes such as dispersion, boundaries, territory (as homeland), and identity. The “geographical turn” contributed to the concept theoretically, and also to transnationalism and migration studies empirically by which cases were reconsidered through the lens of geographical concepts, such as space, place, and time. Similar to geographers’ arguments, diaspora organisations (DO) -as a distinct form of collectivity- and their activities are very relevant to what we study in International Relations (IR), especially when it comes to exploring DOs’ role that transcends state borders in development, human rights, conflict, and peace. In that regard, attempts to introduce novel contributions from various disciplines have the potential to significantly enhance our comprehension of the theory of diaspora and its associated organizations.

Transnational socialist encounters in the Second Socialist World: the case of the Chilean Museum of Solidarity

ABSTRACT The objective of this article is to analyze from an interdisciplinary perspective, that uses transnational and cross-regional cultural studies of the Second Socialist World, the unique example of the Chilean Museum of Solidarity in the context of its relations with the socialist countries in Eastern Europe during the 1970s. The originality of this case study is that it has not been previously analyzed and it helps explain the threads uniting countries of the Second Socialist World and the role of cultural relations as they were established during the Cold War between socialist countries in the south and the east. As a methodology, this article uses a qualitative “small number” approach to analyze cultural relationships between socialist countries. The conclusions show that, for some countries, such as Romania, cultural relations were important in establishing an autonomous policy from Moscow, such as that of Nicolae Ceausescu, but the type of artistic exchanges promoted witnessed an aesthetic paradox, supporting a depoliticized version of art. Moreover, the path-dependency argument for cultural relationships between socialist countries is partially verified.

Gig work in transnational spaces: infrastructures of migration and the simultaneous lives of migrants in the gig economy

ABSTRACT This article explores how platform-mediated gig work is entangled in the migration process across transnational, national and local scales. Drawing on the concepts of simultaneity and migration infrastructure from critical transnational migration studies as well as qualitative interviews with migrants, the analysis focuses on the figures of three migrant gig workers from both EU and non-EU countries to elucidate two matters. First, we analyse how different forms of citizenship produce different ways of responding to the migration infrastructure that results in frictions and/or smoothness across different times and spaces in the migration process. Second, we analyse how migrants who perform platform-mediated gig work on a local scale in Copenhagen, Denmark, establish particular transnational lives. Thus, this article contributes a timely transnational perspective on the relationship between the growing gig economy and migration.

Exploring the Nexus of Democracy and Mental Health: a Study of Urban People in Solapur City

Purpose: The present study aimed at understanding the intersections of democracy and mental health of people with reference to urban people of Solapur city. Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework integrates insights from political understanding and social determinants of mental health to explore the nexus among democracy and mental health in Solapur city’s citizens. Study assess how individual perceptions and perspectives of democracy, including political efficacy and trust in social institutions, intersect with social factors such as access to resources, political power, to influence mental health outcomes. Research Method: The study has incorporated mixed method approach. The sample consisted of 231 adults (117 male and 114 female), in the age range of 18 to 65 years. The participants were administered the Democracy indicators developed by National Democratic Institute, Iraq (2007) after voluntary oral consent. Findings: The result of percentages shows that less than two-fourth of respondents opened that they have more democratic state, more than two-fifth said they have less democratic state, less than one-tenth of them opined that they have least and most democratic state respectively. It has found that the opinions are not associated with their age, gender, and earnings. However, the study tried to explore intersections of democracy and mental health of people in the context of eleven subscales of democracy index. Research Practical and Social Implications: The article intends to raise the debates and deliberations around democracy and mental health. They article pave the way for future in depth study on understanding the democracy and mental health with a larger sample size and in transnational study areas. Originality/value: Mixed research on mental health and democracy is need of the time and it’s become crucial to study democracy and mental health in different nations democratic nations.

The pasts, presents and futures of transnational and global Irish Studies: “Snapshots”

ABSTRACT As with any other discipline, we are periodically drawn towards reviewing the trajectory of Irish Studies, contemplating possible future directions: What is happening now? What should come next? Four scholars at varying stages of their academic careers and located in tertiary institutions in Ireland, USA, and Australia address these questions with specific reference to the transnational or global aspects of Irish Studies, a key focus of this special issue. Their brief “snapshots” take us on a journey starting with gendered migrant histories and the methodological challenges facing the often-disappointed researcher seeking the experiences of Irish-speaking diasporas, before engaging with new ways of confronting age-old questions about both Irish migrants’ implication in the dispossession of Indigenous populations and the historical racialisation of Irishness in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. We are then introduced to research into revolutionary Ireland’s collective global consciousness and the development of a Global Irish Studies which seeks to create a sustainable dialectic between Irish and non-Irish-based scholars, finishing with the assertion that Ireland has always been a porous and transnational space, and that while it may have been hiding in plain sight as it were, the international and relational aspect of national literatures are profound and unavoidable.

Transnational Comparative Study on Building Grassroots Emergency Response Capacity: Managerial Economics Perspectives on COVID-19 in China and Singapore

This study aims to explore how China and Singapore can effectively respond to COVID-19 through emergency capacity building at the grass-roots and societal levels, and analyze the similarities and differences in response strategies of the two countries. First, the experience and lessons of China and Singapore in emergency management of public health incidents are analyzed. Secondly, it describes the model of analyzing the emergency response capacity of the grassroots and society, and explains the application measures of the theory. Thirdly, in the comparison of coping strategies, this paper analyzes the strategies of China and Singapore in social mobilization, information dissemination, resource allocation, social participation and technology application, and evaluates their effects and limitations. Finally, recommendations are made for future research on the economics of outbreak response and management, and the importance of building grassroots and social emergency response capacity is emphasized.

Retaining Healing Hands: A Transnational Study on Job Retention Interventions for the Healthcare Workforce

Healthcare organizations worldwide face challenges in retaining their healthcare workforce, with individual and organizational factors influencing their intentions to leave. This study conducted eight online co-creation workshops and four Delphi sessions to gain qualitative and in-depth insights into job retention interventions, involving healthcare workers, hospital managers, and policymakers. A thematic analysis was conducted, resulting in multiple interventions that were clustered in four pre-defined themes: professional and personal support, education, financial incentives, and regulatory measures. Professional and personal support interventions included regular interprofessional team meetings, leadership training programs, self-scheduling and sabbaticals, support for administrative and non-clinical work, and the provision of psychological counselling. Educational interventions encompassed facilitating development opportunities, periodic evaluations, onboarding, mentorship programs, and peer support groups. Financial incentives included the provision of competitive salaries, adequate infrastructure, extra benefits, transport possibilities, and permanent employment contracts. Regulatory measures addressed the need for complementary legislation across various levels, fixed healthcare worker-to-patient ratio, and instruments to monitor workload. To optimize retention strategies, healthcare organizations should tailor these interventions to address the unique factors influencing their workforce’s intentions to leave within their specific context. The study concludes that combining personal and professional support, educational opportunities, financial incentives, and regulatory measures is necessary because there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

What can we learn from low-THC cannabis growers in Europe? A comparative transnational study of small-scale cannabis growers from Italy and Switzerland

BackgroundA market for cannabis with low levels (LT) of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) has recently emerged in Europe alongside an ongoing trend of domestic cannabis cultivation with high-THC content (HT). This phenomenon may have diversified the growers’ profile. This study investigates LT growers’ (LTG) characteristics (demographics, consumption patterns, growing experience) and growing motivations with a subsequent comparison with HT growers (HTG). MethodsData from 11,479 small-scale growers was collected through an online survey (ICCQ 2) conducted by the Global Cannabis Cultivation Research Consortium (GCCRC) from 2020 to 2021. This exploratory study analyses a subsample of the 1618 respondents residing in Italy and Switzerland. A quantitative approach was used, performing comparative bivariate and multivariate analyses between participants who have only grown HT plants in the previous year (HTG; n = 1303) and those who have either grown LT only or alongside HT (LTG; n = 315). ResultsLTGs differ significantly from HTGs. LTGs are older than HTGs. Growing medical cannabis for oneself and others is more likely among them than HTGs. Compared to HTGs, LTGs have lesser odds to grow for recreational use and to have problematic cannabis use. Growing for legality, pleasure and accessing milder cannabis is more likely for LTGs than HTGs. HTGs have greater experience than HTGs, growing for longer, more extensively and better meeting their consumption needs. There is a wider production of by-products, such as oils and extracts, among LTGs than HTGs. Having been in contact with the police for growing is also more likely among them than HTGs. ConclusionLTGs reported significantly more growing experience when compared to HTGs and should be considered a distinct group of growers. The results suggest that the emergence of the legal LT market has more likely drawn previous HTGs into growing LT, mainly medically, rather than attracting new individuals toward cannabis cultivation.

The “Other” Pro-Israel Lobby: The AFL-CIO and Israel (1952–1960)

Abstract As the American Left finds itself increasingly alienated from Israel, this article supplements the rich historical narrative regarding U.S.–Israel relations by highlighting the important—albeit mostly forgotten—contribution of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to forging the so-called “special relationship” from the onset. This transnational study transcends prevailing focus on Jewish-American and Christian-Zionist lobbying operations by weaving together the history of U.S.–Israel relations with that of organized labor in the United States and demonstrating how they mutually reinforced each other. The article makes a two-part argument: first, that the AFL-CIO's embrace of Israel and Histadrut, Israel's general federation of labor, proved instrumental in establishing American popular support for Israel in the 1950s and cementing it as a leading liberal cause; second, that such support was not merely rooted in Cold War exigencies, but also served domestic purposes by offering American labor officials an inspiring—yet romanticized—model for social democracy onto which they could project their own aspirations and grievances.

Governing Corporations in National and Transnational Spaces: Cross‐Level Governmental Orchestration of Corporate Social Responsibility in South Korea

AbstractThe loose spatial and temporal coordination of national and transnational governmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies enables multinational corporations (MNCs) to externalize irresponsible behaviours. Political CSR (PCSR) and ‘government and CSR’ studies show how governmental authority shapes CSR at the domestic and transnational levels but provide only limited insights into how to govern MNCs across levels and over time. Combining the concept of orchestration with insights from power transition theory, we theorize cross‐level governmental orchestration as power‐imbued, dynamic, and involving multiple modes of orchestration. Through an analysis of how the South Korean state has deployed CSR domestic and transnational strategies over 30 years, we induce three configurations of cross‐level governmental orchestration, blending coercive, directive, delegative and facilitative modes of orchestration, and identify the mechanisms behind Korea's transition from one configuration to another. Our results: (1) contribute to PCSR and ‘government and CSR’ studies by conceptualizing a systemic and dynamic view of cross‐level orchestration of governmental CSR strategies; (2) advance transnational governance studies by consolidating orchestration theories and considering coercive power, and (3) add to power transition theory by explaining how regulatory capacity‐building enables shifts of cross‐level orchestration configurations.