Search

This book brings an innovative study of marriage migration in Australia, offering new insights into issues of intimacy and authenticity online. In doing so, it delivers on five main objectives: exploring emotional attachment and personal life in global spaces; interrogating stereotypes and their pervasive influence on personal relations; analysing attitudes and social practice within the institution of marriage; investigating immigration policy, marriage, and citizens'rights; theorizing gender and class relations in the current global order. The analysis moves between ‘online'and ‘offline'social relations and processes, with comparative data enabling a critical framing of the data on marriage relationships developed online. This important contribution places contemporary forms of transcultural marriage and marriage brokering in a historical context of ‘marriage'in the ‘Anglosphere'tradition, and in particular historical forms of marriage migration in settler colonial and now multicultural Australia—including histories of colonial era ‘bride ships'and post WW2 ‘proxy brides'from southern Europe.

Social assessment for projects in China is an important emerging field. This collection of essays — from authors whose formative work has influenced the policies that shape practice in development-affected communities — locates recent Chinese experience of the development of social assessment practices (including in displacement and resettlement) in a historical and comparative perspective. Contributors — social scientists employed by international development banks, national government agencies, and sub-contracting groups — examine projects from a practitioner's perspective. Real-life experiences are presented as case-specific praxis, theoretically informed insight, and pragmatic lessons-learned, grounded in the history of this field of development practice. They reflect on work where economic determinism reigns supreme, yet project failure or success often hinges upon sociopolitical and cultural factors.