Living Transnationally between Japan and Brazil: Routes Beyond Roots, Sarah Lebaron von Baeyer (2020)

Review of: Living Transnationally between Japan and Brazil: Routes Beyond Roots, Sarah Lebaron von Baeyer (2020)Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 256 pp.,ISBN 978-1-49858-036-6, h/bk, $100

Indian migrant workers and global city Singapore: What determines the preference for and (relative) cost of a migration destination?

Global city ambitions and associated cosmopolitan aspirations are principally oriented towards attracting highly skilled migrants who are offered the opportunity of permanent residency. In contrast, low-skilled migrants increasingly face issues of segregation and sanitation, being housed in dormitories far from the city centre, often explained as an attempt to ‘decongest’ the city. That these migrants are not considered part of the aspired cosmopolitan gloss that global cities like to associate themselves with is furthermore underscored by their status as permanently temporary with no option to stay-on beyond a maximum number of years. This article challenges the inherent assumption that low-skilled migrants’ choice for a particularly migration destination is only motivated by monetary reasons. It does so by drawing on two distinct research projects: the first among migration agents in Chennai (Tamil Nadu, India), the second among variously skilled migrants from India in Singapore. By doing so, the article explicates that not only the cost of formalities, agency fees and travel contribute to how expensive it is to migrate to a particular destination (e.g. the Gulf, Malaysia or Singapore) but also its brand value, mainly determined by its assumed quality of life outside work. This brand value speaks to both low- and highly skilled workers, although in different ways.

From imagined community to imagined social space: The case of three international students

Drawing on the concepts of imagined community and production of space, this article introduces the concept of imagined social space to understand hopes, dreams, worries, fears, sadness and happiness of three international students who have left their homelands to study in an unfamiliar academic social space. Data from qualitative in-depth interviews with three focal participants from an ethnographic study in a tertiary institution are presented to show that students’ desires, goals and future aspirations are determined by the interplay between social relationships and social conditions governing the social space. The findings of the study give insights into the development of an academic social space framework to capture the dynamic interactions of students’ investments, positionings and negotiations in their imagined space that can shape and reshape their identities.

Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-Nationalist Society, Gracia Liu-Farrer (2020)

Review of: Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-Nationalist Society, Gracia Liu-Farrer (2020)New York: Cornell University Press, pp. i‐xii and 1‐259,ISBN 978-1-50174-862-2, h/bk, €35.17

Permanent provisionality: The homes of mobile managerial professionals between temporariness and permanence

Nowadays, mobility and transience are no longer exclusively associated with the marginalized and socially excluded, such as homeless or displaced people. On the contrary, mobility and transience have become a constitutive pattern of the highly skilled postmodern workforce. Yet, how mobile professionals negotiate the meaning of their homes in ‘liquid times’ and what homemaking practices they use to deal with the temporal uncertainty of their homes are questions that still require further research. This article ‐ based on ethnographic research on German and American managers conducted in China, Germany and the United States between 2011 and 2014 ‐ contributes to this research question by examining how mobile professionals make sense of the transience of their current homes and how transience is reflected in their homemaking practices. The article argues that for mobile professionals the home becomes a critical place not only because of new multilocal spatialities but also because of new transient temporalities. Due to the corporate practice of giving successive temporary contracts, the mobile managers’ everyday life is characterized by a ‘permanent provisionality’, that is, an incongruence of the initially imagined and the actual time horizons of their mobility. This article shows how this ‘permanent provisionality’ is worked into the material and social textures of expatriate homes.

Unpacking ‘status migration’: The racialized status politics of ‘skill’ in French-Maghrebi expatriation to Dubai

This ethnographic article details the resettlement process of Mounir, a French citizen of Maghrebi background migrating from Paris to Dubai. In so doing, it examines how social status formation plays out in the context of skilled labour migration between France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing on semi-structured interviews and multi-sited participant observation, it questions human capital theory’s premise that ‘skills’ largely consist of a transposable set of objective technical qualifications. Instead, it finds that any effective validation of skill sets encompasses ‘claims-making’ processes that are co-dependent on social hierarchies of place, such as citizenship, class and race. The ‘expatriate’ portrait presented here demonstrates how tertiary-educated members of the Euro-Maghrebi minority engage in transcontinental migration not only as a way of dealing with hampered economic conversion yields of Bourdieusian capital forms in their home societies, but equally to renegotiate a more comprehensive transformation of social status. By describing Mounir’s hybrid repositioning at the interstices of more dominant status markers in Dubai, this article theorizes ‘status migration’, a transnational process of human mobility, characterized by the skilful propensity of acting-by-moving from the part of (racially) degraded citizens in dealing with the status deficiencies specific to them in their home societies.

At a Moment’s Notice: Indonesian Maids Write on Their Lives Abroad, Jafar Suryomenggolo (ed. and trans.) (2019)

Review of: At a Moment’s Notice: Indonesian Maids Write on Their Lives Abroad, Jafar Suryomenggolo (ed. and trans.) (2019) Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 219 pp., ISBN 978-8-77694-270-0, h/bk, £65.00; ISBN 978-8-77694-271-7, p/bk, £19.99

Here, There and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, Tahseen Shams (2020)

Review of: Here, There and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, Tahseen Shams (2020) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 264 pp., ISBN 978-1-50361-069-9, h/bk, $90; ISBN 978-1-50361-283-9, p/bk, $28