Transnational Ways Research Articles

Redefining Home: Adaptive Transnationalism in the Migration of Tatar Women from Russia to Kazakhstan

This study explores the experiences of Tatar women who migrated to Almaty, Kazakhstan following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Employing theoretical frameworks of transnationalism and intersectionality, we analyze these women's migration experiences, religious practices, and identity formation processes. Based on in-depth interviews with ten Tatar women migrants, the research reveals how they navigate multiple identities, maintain and transform transnational connections, and construct new forms of belonging in their host society. Our findings demonstrate that these women are not merely navigating between two worlds, but actively creating new, transnational ways of being. Their stories highlight how migrants creatively adapt to new environments, negotiate multiple identities, and form communities that transcend traditional national and ethnic boundaries. Drawing on these insights, we propose a new conceptual framework of "Adaptive Transnationalism," which captures the dynamic process through which migrants actively reshape their identities, practices, and social connections in response to new cultural contexts, while maintaining and transforming ties to their places of origin. This framework offers a fresh perspective on how migrants actively shape their experiences and identities across borders, providing a valuable tool for navigating the complexities of modern migration and fostering more inclusive and adaptive societies.

Diasporic scholarship: racialization, coloniality and de‐territorializing knowledge

In considering how knowledge reproduces the dynamics of coloniality in Geography, scholars have looked beyond the Global North and Global South as cartographical sites, instead seeing them as conceptual frameworks and epistemic positions. Building on this rich work, we draw attention to specific issues obscured within it. Whilst geographical scholarship has moved to recognizing how the Global North and South bleed into each other, it frequently continues to locate scholars themselves within specific territories, labelling them of the Global North or of the Global South, thereby re‐territorializing scholars and their work and reflecting and revealing processes of racialization within the academy.We ask how those who do not fit into neat geographical imaginations of North and South represent ways to understand and know the world? Specifically, how can we centre the idea of diaspora as part of wider geo‐ and body political projects that aim to decentre knowledge production? We bring diaspora back into debates on knowledge production to explore how their understanding of the world, rooted in hybrid and transnational ways, can enrich engagements around postcoloniality and decoloniality. We detail how such voices illuminate how racialization, coloniality and difference continue to mark how we know and teach the world. Our argument makes imperative the case for de‐territorializing scholars and scholarship.

Antifascist geopoetics, anticolonial dissidence and feminism: engaging with Joyce Lussu’s transnational stories

ABSTRACT This paper addresses matters of anticolonialist, anti-fascist and feminist geopoetics, analysing a case that is virtually unknown to Anglophone geographical readerships, namely the transnational trajectories and literary works of Italian activist, writer and translator Joyce Lussu (1912–1998). Drawing upon recent literature on geopoetics and literary geographies that commit to produce and analyse ‘hybrid texts’, I extend and put in communication for the first time scholarship on antifascist transnational geographies and literature on decolonial and feminist geopoetics, by discussing Lussu’s exceptional biographical and literary experience, one that first shows the importance of coherence between life and texts. Lussu practiced plural, multilingual and transnational ways to construct (feminist and radical) non-elitist knowledge by taking part in anti-fascist exile and resistance in the 1930s and 1940s. Later, she supported ‘Third World’ anticolonial and revolutionary movements by translating and internationally circulating poems from politically committed authors, especially from Western Asia and Lusophone Africa. Finally, I contend that Lussu’s nonconformist feminism, that she understood as an inclusive antiauthoritarian notion for the construction of a renewed society by deconstructing masculine institutions such as the State, the Church and the Army, can speak powerfully to current debates on scholarly and political dissidences.

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.

Large Class Size: Its Implications on Students and Teachers of Higher Institutions in Nigeria

Emergence of COVID-19 across the world is more than enough for us to start pondering on how to address the issue of large class size in Nigerian tertiary institutions. Large class size is a common phenomenon in our higher institutions especially for core courses which every student in the department or faculty must offers. Over 1,000 students usually converge in a small lecture hall with capacity of 300 students and this inadequacy has been giving lecturers tough time during their lectures. Lecturers who are not that audible find it very much difficult to pass messages effectively to the students and this has been contributing to falling standard of education in Nigeria. More so, students who are supposed to get the best out of brilliant lecturers are denied of this opportunity, why? Because the classroom size is not bigger enough to accommodate students, therefore, discouraging them from attending classes on a regular basis and also making lecturers inactive in the lectures’ halls. The researchers who have been working assiduously to ensure that the problems encountered by students as a result of class size have not done enough to provide lasting solutions to these problems, making the problems persist. Paradigm shift is one of the ways suggested by the researcher to tackle the problems of large class size in our tertiary institutions. The transnational ways of team teaching, group discussion are no longer effective for large class size as the population of Nigeria keeps increasing and the researcher believes it has become paramount importance to devise ways of overcoming difficulties encountered by the students and lecturers in a large class size. Division of large class size into half to encourage group work among the students and introduction of a blend of learning instructional methods are inevitable at this junction. Introduction of these two things in our tertiary institutions will go a very long way in addressing the issues of large class size. The researcher recommends that, government should employ more lecturers to increase performance of lecturers teaching core courses in our tertiary institutions after the division of large class size into small groups, government should build more lectures’ halls to encourage blend of learning methods for overcrowded classes.

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

Reunifying or leaving a child behind: how official and unofficial state selection shape family immigration in France

ABSTRACT This paper aims to analyse how State policies, on the book and in practice, shape family reunification. It focuses on child migration under constraint in France, by analysing the timing and factors of (non-)reunification among foreign immigrants, whose legal conditions for family reunification are much more restrictive than for those who obtained the French citizenship. Using a quantitative approach with a nationally representative survey, the article analyses to what extent and in what circumstances migrants took one or the other of three paths during the 1973–2009 period: bringing their children in France through the administrative channel of family reunification (de jure reunification), turning to an alternative channel of child migration (de facto reunification), or leaving their child behind in their birth country. Results show that de jure reunification is not the predominant option and strongly suggest that this pathway is impaired both by an official state selection based on socioeconomic criteria enshrined in law, and by an unofficial state selection in policy implementation due to discriminatory treatments and regional inequalities in administration resources. In response to these restrictions, families adapt either by turning to de facto reunification or by maintaining transnational ways of life.

Challenging the national border system through love in César Mba A. Abogo’s “The Thickness of the Night” and Lien Carrazana’s “An Expatriate Waitress, Anywhere in the World”

The short stories “En la espesura de la noche” (2010) and “Una camarera (expatriada a cualquier lugar del mundo)” (2011) depict the feeling of imprisonment that first-person narrators experience within the rigid borders of Equatorial Guinea and Cuba, respectively, and how they overcome this territorial oppression by loving a woman who dwells beyond the national borders they are unable to trespass. Bearing in mind that the love towards nation-states constitutes a way of perpetuating a nationalist ideology and the reinforcement of national borders over individual free agency (Morrison et al., 2021: 514), this article examines how, in both narratives, the exaltation of a transnational love over that of the nation challenges these nation-state’s “unique discourse,” based on the binary border thinking of inside/outside and us/them, in favor of individual agency and a more transnational way of understanding the world.

Religious Fields and Subfields: Transnational Connections, Identities, and Reactive Transnationalism

The relationship between religion and transnationalism has only recently gained scholarly attention to document the influence religious organizations have on mediating transnational ties. While scholarship on second-generation transnationalism has gained interest, second-generation Arab Americans remain understudied. Yet, Arab Americans, especially Muslim Arab Americans, have been progressively encountering overt anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiments for two decades, since 11 September. These experiences of discrimination are bound to affect their transnationalism. Based on 32 semi-structured interviews with children of Arab immigrants from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, this study finds that religious organizations are important transnational social fields for the second generation, especially those who experienced discrimination. This study finds that for Muslim Arab Americans, mosques are important transnational social fields in which they engage in transnational ways of being and belonging that connect them to their parental homeland and transnational identity. Consistent with reactive transnationalism, when experiencing discrimination Muslim Arab Americans increased their participation within their mosques in two ways. First, mosques are places Muslim Arab Americans draw on the support of other Arab Americans who have experienced discrimination. Second, the social networks of Muslim Arabs provide important historical and cultural knowledge about their parental homeland; knowledge that Muslim Arab Americans would later use to advocate and educate others when/if they reencountered discrimination.

The Independence of Justice in the Cauldron of International Relations

AbstractThis article analysesa series of judicial crises involving the investigation, arrest and prosecution of prominent foreign nationals. Such crises have in common that they imperil the independence of justice in novel, transnational ways. They are the product of cultural misunderstandings, including the incredulity of foreign authoritarian States that the judiciary of the forum State is indeed independent. They raise dilemmas for States in seeking to both respect the independence of their own courts and minimise the consequences to the national interest. The article explores some of the ways in which this tension has been mediated in practice, and the challenges raised. It concludes with some thoughts on the changing nature of the independence of the judiciary in an era of foreign governmental assertiveness.

Exploring transcultural competence in the internationalised university classroom: the role of intercultural friendships and plurilingualism in the construction of a transcultural identity

ABSTRACT This mixed-methods study explores whether undergraduates in a multilingual, multicultural university – and more specifically in a multi-dimensionally internationalised classroom – manifest transcultural competence when starting university studies. The article precisely focuses on the role of intercultural friendships and personal and family plurilingualism in the construction of an identity that reveals such competence, namely, a transcultural identity. Data include profile and transcultural competence questionnaires as well as interviews and classroom observations. Descriptive statistics and regression analyses show that first-year undergraduates in such a university display transcultural competence at the start of their studies, but more so students with intercultural friendships, personal or family plurilingualism, or belonging to a multi-dimensionally internationalised classroom. Qualitative data document that this educational context may trigger affordances for diversified plurilingual intercultural interactions in which transcultural competence may manifest in the form of a complex transcultural ‘twenty-first-century youth identity’ that is linked to sensitivities and attitudes valuing heritage as well as a transnational way of life.

Commemorating Abraham Lincoln and the Transnational Way: Lincoln Monuments in Great Britain. By Liv Birte Buchmann (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020), 311pp.

.Joshua Parker reviews Liv Birte Buchmann's Commemorating Abraham Lincoln and the Transnational Way.

“I had the best of both worlds”: transnational sense of belonging-Second-generation Korean Americans’ heritage language learning journey

This study explores how a transnational sense of belonging is constructed within and through heritage language (HL) learning among second-generation Korean American adults throughout their life trajectories. Drawing from eight semi-structured interviews, I show how engaging in HL learning has situated these individuals within transnational social fields, where they, as children of immigrants, were consistently invited through the learning and use of HL to revisit an imagined Koreanness. From being forced speakers of an HL to being willing and inclined to speak it, my participants started to pursue a transnational sense of belonging as a response to the impossibility of being a full American. Their response to transnationalism took place in a less preferable space in which to live, a space where a transnational way of being and living became an alternative or the second-best. Findings from this study suggest that their HL learning trajectories, characterized by care and support from the wider immigrant communities, enabled them to become attuned to the broader transnational community while rearticulating belonging from both worlds.

Conceptualizing virtual transnational diaspora: Returning to the ‘return’ of Chinese transnational academics

Transnational migration brings to the fore the various social and professional connections migrants maintain with their home and sojourn countries. Drawing on a qualitative case study with 12 Chinese transnational academics in the field of the social sciences and humanities in three higher education institutions in Beijing, China, this article explores their transnational ways of being and belonging. Informed by the theoretical lens of transnational diaspora, our study indicates that the concept of “returnee” is too restricted to capture the transnational work and learning practices and the self-identification of Chinese transnational academics. Our analysis reveals that the study-abroad experience as a PhD student shapes the multiple and simultaneous ways of being and ways of belonging of the transnational academics in relation to China, the host countries where they pursued doctoral studies and, increasingly, de-territorialized transnational academic communities. Mobilizing digital communication technologies, they create spaces to negotiate their identities as researchers, ethnic Chinese and members of transnational academic communities. Their work and learning in transnational spaces have contributed to the formation of virtual transnational diaspora characterized by the inter-dependence of academics across borders.

Farming across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West ed. by Sterling Evans

Reviewed by: Farming across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West ed. by Sterling Evans David D. Vail Farming across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West. Edited by Sterling Evans. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017. xi + 460 pp. Illustrations, maps, table, afterword, contributors, index. $35.00 cloth. Farming across Borders argues for a transnational agricultural history of the North American West. This insightful collection of essays edited by Sterling Evans (University of Oklahoma) offers a detailed blueprint for thinking and writing about agriculture in global, transnational ways, exploring how “the presence of political boundaries, environments, agro-ecosystems, people and migrations and commodity development interact here in . . . the North American West” (xv). Sterling Evans, Kristin Hoganson, and Laura Hooton begin by surveying the agricultural connections across the American West. Evans explores how American and Canadian prairies have long been farming borderlands of dependency: “Great Plains farmers depended upon Yucatecan fibers for binder twine, and Yucatecan henequen and sisal growers depended almost entirely on the North American grain industry’s market for their fiber” (1). Beyond twine, Hoganson addresses the converging socioeconomic and environmental “middle ground” of cattle production in the twentieth century. She also argues that cattle, one of the strongest and most persistent historical strands to uncover the American West’s “transborder webs,” represent the tensions: “when mid-western farmers looked to the north, they saw few threats to their security . . . [but] to the south . . . lay a gulf—in economic competitive-ness, in human relationship, and in the quality of stock” (53). Hooton concludes with an exploration of race, migration, and social change in the early twentieth century with the African American agricultural colony “Little Liberia” in Baja California. All three contributors establish a strong transnational framework for sub-sequent chapters to explore these complexities. In parts 2 and 3, Joshua MacFadyen, Tim Bowman, Todd Meyers, and Sterling Evans each profile how commodity histories connected, remade, and undercut North American settlement in all its forms. Each essay offers an important ways for scholars to take a transnational view that includes environments, technologies, and cultural boosterism through their commodity histories, not just the economic chains. Contributors Peter Morris, Andrew Dunlop, and Alicia Dewy all examine the different ways that transnational agriculture made and remade western places. Through numerous primary sources and innovative digital history approaches such as geographic information system (GIS) research, the authors show how western borderlands (North and South) became viewed as ideal ranchlands and croplands, but also how ranching and farming across boundaries “was a complex endeavor entailing many economic, environmental, technological, political, and cultural changes” (168). Parts 4, 5, and 6 include case-study essays. Contributors John Weber, Sonia Hernández, Tisa M. Anders, Rosa Elia Cobos, and Matt Caire-Pérez all explore the United States–Mexico relationship of transnational agricultural industrialization—labor, environment, migration, and farmer organizations in places such as Texas, California, and Nebraska. Paige Raibmon and Jason McCollom reveal how these forces emerged and remade labor in the US-Canadian borderlands. Thomas Isern and Suzzanne Kelley offer an intriguing look at how the history of migrant labor connected to customized [End Page 94] harvesting in the post–World War II era, underscoring how small-grain agriculture “is both regional and cosmopolitan” (371). The final section discusses perhaps the most fraught natural resource in the North American West: water. Anthony Carlson’s and Stephen Mumme’s essays investigate tense, sometimes violent histories around water in the transnational West and the long push for sustainable solutions. Evans concludes with how the history of this porous agricultural border-lands helps illuminate contemporary political tensions and free trade debates. The new, transnational markets of the twentieth century offers an economic development that “knits Mexico and the United States together and carry them as progressive partners into a modern future” in remarkably similar ways to relationships a century before, but it also creates a dependency between North American neighbors on “the performance of the US economy, and on an export-dependent scenario, in place of focusing on local or regional trade with long-term economic development . . . [and] a dependency on imported grain and food” (437). Farming without Borders is a...

Bangladeshi migrant associations in Italy: transnational engagement, community formation and regional unity

ABSTRACT Referring to the case studies of two cities in Northern Italy, this article seeks to understand how Bangladeshi migrants use associations to seek transnational “ways of belonging” and “ways of being”. It analyses how this transnational attachment to their home country has played an important role in building their own “community”. The findings reveal that Bangladeshi migrant organizations work to maintain “transnational ways of belonging” by enabling migrants to retain their cultural roots; this is reflected in their observation of festivals, national days, and other practices and rituals. Although, as a relatively new migrant community, they do not share as many economic links through these associations as many other “diasporic” organizations, migrants widely express a sense that these economic connections are with their country of origin. However, there is competition within the community based on regional origin, as well as have many ambivalences and contradictions.

Transnational ways of belonging and queer ways of being. Exploring transnationalism through the trajectories of the rainbow flag

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the trajectories of the rainbow flag through the concept of transnationalism and sets up a theoretical exchange between transnational migration research, critical sexuality studies, and queer scholarship. By engaging with the analytical differentiation between transnational ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging’ this article reads these concepts through a queer lens, while also challenging some of their underlying assumptions. We are asking if, and in that case how, the rainbow flag can be regarded as a visible manifestation of transnational ways of queer being, and as a floating signifier filled with different meanings through quotidian acts and diverse and unequal queer ways of being – interlinked as it is with global hegemonies and colonial genealogies besides signifying local specificities – but nevertheless somehow indicating transnational ways of queer belonging to an imagined queer community.

Transnationalism and intra‐European mobility among Europe's second generation: review and research agenda

AbstractMost studies on second‐generation transnationalism focus on transnational practices that connect the country of residence to the ancestral home. The second generation, however, is likely to develop other forms of mobility and different destination countries. Particularly in Europe, where citizens have a right to free movement, connecting research on migrant transnationalism to that on intra‐European mobility and the emergence of collective identities allows us more fully to capture second‐generation transnationalism and alternative forms of mobility, including their determinants and consequences. By way of a literature review and a research agenda, I point out the merits of connecting the two research traditions by focusing on the link between transnational ways of being and belonging, national and local contexts that act as push and pull factors for transnationalism and mobilities, and the potential for methodological innovation.

<i>Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā</i>: Postmodernizing the Postcolony: <i>Nedjma</i> and beyond

This essay tackles the way the postcolony is refigured in Waciny Laredj’s Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā (2012). It makes use of a number of theoretical insights to uncover the interplay between the representation of the colony during the colonial period through a brief examination of the fly metaphor in Nedjma, first published in 1956, and that of the postcolony. Relying on intertextuality, the essay attempts to highlight how the metaphor of the femme fatale, a key trope in Nedjma, is relocated in the interstices between national and transnational ways of constructing Arab identity that continues to be both here and there. The intertextual nature of Aṣābiʿ complicates the postcolony as it rewrites it. This rewriting seems to highlight the tragic position of Arab characters that continue to vacillate between a traditional past and a postmodern present. Thus, Waciny Laredj subverts the femme fatale trope by making it literal and ends up shaking the very basis of the postcolonial state.

횡단적 삶의 방식인 이주 그리고 재독 한인의 삶

횡단적 삶의 방식인 이주 그리고 재독 한인의 삶