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Most previous research on sexual minority migrants focused on those who move from places where there are fewer legal rights for sexual minorities to where there are more. This paper distinctively fills a research gap through a focus on a subset of sexual minority migrants: sexual minority expatriates. It presents a five-year ethnographic case study of a judicial review in Hong Kong QT v Director of Immigration and other lesbian and gay couples who moved to Hong Kong, and business organisations that advocate for immigration equality. First, the analysis highlights that both subjective cultural assumptions and objective legal conditions play an important role in sexual minority expatriates' assessment of gay-friendliness of the work destination. Second, this paper uncovers the agency of gay and lesbian expatriates' impact on the local legal sexual landscape and illustrates how sexual citizenship could be reclaimed by relying on the homonormative logic that the same-sex couples are productive labour and beneficial to the economy. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of sexual minority migration by theorising how sexual minority migrants may not only be constrained by the legal and social environments in the migration destination, but they may also actively change and shape them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops theories of place in relation to migration to argue that the diasporic population of Chinese migrants in Prato, Italy, live not only 'out of place' due in no small part to marginalisation and racism, but also live 'in place' as they resist and make meaning from experiences and interactions with particular places. We argue that place-based dynamics occurring in urban spaces such as Prato can best be understood in the context of a globalised fashion industry and the hegemony of global supply chains. We develop and extend the meanings of 'out of place' to show that migrants are doubly marginalised. We suggest that their conceptions of place reveal unexpected ways in which they live at the margins of society and not only experience racism but resist it. This paper integrates three different types of ethnographic data: (1) unstructured, in the form of ethnographic noticing; (2) structured, in the form of free listing; and (3) semi-structured in the form of interviewing. Combining these methods strengthens our argument for the importance of place-based experiential knowledge. We offer a critical lens on a globalising Europe and expose particular modes of marginalisation, racism, and resistance. We end with possible applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the nexus between migration governance and higher education. While the intersections between these two societal/policy systems have received attention in existing literature, much has changed as a result of the recent COVID-19 crisis. The global pandemic has introduced spatial and temporal disjuncture that significantly impact how international students navigate these systems. We address this issue through the lens of international student mobility, taking postgraduate international students' perspectives as a vantage point. By drawing on a comparative qualitative study between Singapore and the UK (specifically, London), we focus on how international students experience, first, (mis)alignments between migration governance and pandemic-induced mobility regulation and, second, tensions between mobility regulations and institutional measures adopted by universities in Singapore and the UK. In both contexts, pandemic governance often compounded the complexities of migration policies, creating additional barriers for international students. In navigating these new challenges, international students adaptively draw on various resources while also imagining new possibilities presented by the otherwise challenging circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 'transnational turn' in welfare regime theory has disrupted methodologically nationalist analyses of care regimes generating analytical frameworks that capture the interdependencies between care and migration regimes. Those frameworks share a focus on migration for paid care labour as the vehicle connecting care and migration regimes transnationally. In this paper, we highlight familial care-labour mobility as an additional mechanism connecting care and migration regimes across borders. Drawing on the care circulation framework, we argue that a focus on these informal global care chains helps to bridge macro structural level approaches of the frameworks that focus on paid care labour with the more micro-level transnational family care approach. We focus on grandparent care-labour mobility, arguing that while it is 'familial', 'informal', 'private' and 'invisible', its dynamics and the lived experiences of those entwined within it, are mediated at the care-migration systems nexus. Through case-studies on grandparent care-labour mobility between China and Australia and India and the UK, we examine how the care-migration systems nexus is shaped by the prevailing logic of neoliberalism and ensuing patterns of stratification within care and migration systems. We conclude by highlighting the need for a transnational ethics of family care to govern the care-migration systems nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches the African-European migration industry as a complex web of relations in which different actors liaise, objectives oppose each other, and roles overlap. Starting from this notion, the question emerges: How do migrants navigate this fuzzy web of migration facilitation/control? To answer this question, this paper uses a ‘trajectory ethnography’ that follows the im/mobility processes of migrants from West – and Central Africa to, and inside, Europe. In so doing, it particularly focuses on two practices that are related to the concept of social navigation. First, it concernsdébrouillardise,a term that points to the power of improvisation, creativity and hustling. Second, it regards social negotiation, a term referring to the process ofhowmigrants ‘massage’ their relations with important actors in the field. The findings stress the relational dimension of the migration industry in the sense that the functioning of one actor depends so much on the intentions and efforts of others. I conclude that we could enhance our knowledge on migration industries with studies that constantly shift between the perspective of the migrant, the social network, the facilitator and controller. Such a dynamic approach unpacks further the multiple efforts that produce migrant im/mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the idea of migrant spatial integration through an approach focused on urban praxis. Joining other contributions concerned with the continuing significance of place and locality for the study of migrant settlement, this paper examines migrants’ urban apprenticeship and how it shapes their usage of city space. Departing from the idea that to ‘integrate’ urban space involves being able to navigate it and being aware of its resources, I introduce an exploratory tool, which brings together processes normally kept apart in social scientific research, namely urban experience and migrant integration. Drawing from ethnographic interviews carried with migrants in Lisbon, Portugal, I argue that looking at migrants as skilful agents in the practice of city life may capture how the mechanics of migrant emplacement work in the context of urban diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the war in Eastern Ukraine, 1.7 million internally displaced people (IDPs) from the Donbas region and returnees were required to maintain their IDP status to access state welfare provisions and freedom of movement. The policy regime of displacement enforced by the Ukrainian state and by the quasistate formations in the region created marginalising and discriminatory effects for the people struggling to understand their new position vis-a-vis the state. As a result, they designed and employed various strategies to escape the differentiation displacement produced and reinstate their citizenship and belonging. This article explores the Ukrainian case of protracted displacement in light of the current escalation with millions more displaced. The research is based on the qualitative material collected in 2020 and 2021 on both sides of the 'contact line' in Eastern Ukraine by means of qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations. The paper contributes to the debate on protracted displacement by showing how people relate to and negotiate the IDP status and reaffirm their citizenship in narratives and interactions with the state. The case of displacement in Ukraine shows the power of social citizenship for people to resist the marginalising processes from within the bounds of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the potential of short-term ethnography in a collaborative and participatory research project on experiences with and perceptions of migration from fieldwork with Roma groups in north-western Transylvania. We discuss particularly the challenges we encountered in engaging Roma women in terms of existing cultural and gender norms evident in some Roma communities. We argue that, in the context of working with women in patriarchal communities, short-term ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to (a) find and take advantage of safe spaces in which to talk to women and (b) manage sensitively access and rapport. In this study, ethnography gave insights into alternative ways of engagement in the research process based on categorisations that emphasise alternative aspects of social identity (Roma 'mothers' vs. Roma 'women') as an effective means of breaking down some of the barriers to participation. Finally, we argue that short-term ethnography can be used successfully in collaborative and participatory research projects alongside traditional ethnographic work to explore the perspectives of mobile and vulnerable or marginalised groups including, but not limited to, patriarchal group contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the concept of aesthetic formation to examine the practices through which diasporic imaginations become tangible and experienced as 'real'. The authors interpret sport as an embodied aesthetic practice through which diasporas materialise, with important implications for identification and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on a transnational community-based sports event, the Amsterdam Futsal Tournament, the paper discusses how articulations of Somali diasporism become tangible and embodied in subjects who participate in this event. The authors conclude that these materialisation practices can simultaneously elicit multiple forms and levels of belonging that also foster a sense of integration and belonging to the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'migration journey' has proven to be a fruitful lens to question the simplistic notion that the outcome of migration solely depends on a momentous go/no-go decision in the countries of origin. At the same time, we argue that the normative/sedentarist principles of migration studies produce the risk to approach the journey as an exceptional phase of mobility, in-between presumed place-based lives. This paper therefore aims to explore the conceptual limits of the migration journey literature. To challenge the notion that the migration journey is fundamentally different from pre- and post-migratory mobilities, we combine two empirical research projects that have followed the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans. The first project focuses on the trajectories of itinerant gold miners within West Africa, the second concentrates on the im/mobility of West Africans within Europe. By juxtaposing the empirical insights of these seemingly different contexts, we stress the need to embed migratory movements in a continuous field of mobility practices across spaces in Africa and Europe. This results in our plea for a research agenda that does not see 'migrancy' as a pre-given marker of difference, but as a normative artefact of mobility regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the significance that social media plays in the lives of transnational migrants. Building on data collected during a six-month online/offline ethnography conducted among the members of a Facebook group for Italian migrants in Toronto, it is argued here that diasporic online communities provide a privileged location to capture the complex process of identity transformation undergone by migrants. Data suggests that research into online communities allows for a dynamic and adaptive understanding of the migratory experience capable of recognising the lives of migrants not just as the results of single events, but as trajectories that could help reach a better understanding of the evolution of life courses, as well as changes in social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how diaspora youth is impacted by and deals with the legacies of the violent conflict in their parents' homeland of Bosnia. Based on the analysis of narrative-biographic interviews with second-generation Bosnians in Switzerland and ethnographic observations in diaspora spaces, this paper highlights the repercussions that Yugoslav disintegration wars and, particularly, the war in Bosnia (1992–1995) have for young people who were raised in Switzerland. First, it demonstrates that instead of a coherent picture about the past, young people receive fragments and pieces of personal memories and experiences that their families went through. Second, the history of conflict has repercussions for the ways young people establish and articulate their sense of attachment and belonging to the homeland of their parents. Third, while second-generation Bosnians rarely reproduce the conflict dynamic themselves, they move in spaces in which the legacies of conflict continue to be an important discursive and structural force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Santa Catalina is a Caribbean island in the Colombian archipelago of Providencia y San Andrés, which has been at the centre of a recent territorial dispute between Colombia and Nicaragua that has made the islands central to the geostrategic agenda of the Colombian state in its attempt to reaffirm political alliances with the United States. Within this context, our investigation explores recent processes of archaeological research, heritagisation and tourism promotion on Santa Catalina Island that triggered a conflict between the local raizal population (Afro-descendant, Caribbean, Puritan and English-speaking) and the State (white, Andean, Catholic and Spanish-speaking) around the meaning of two key sites of memory—Fuerte Libertad (Fort Warwick) and the Cabeza de Morgan (Morgan's Head). Drawing on long-term ethnography, this paper reveals how the neoliberal, multicultural state of Colombia has functioned as an investment facilitator and a key actor in transforming ethnic-racial differences into class inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the methodological challenges of doing research with transnational children. It outlines a range of strategies that researchers might employ, whilst also reflecting on the issues that such strategies raise. It argues that an ethnographic approach, combining interviews with participant observation, can enable a fuller understanding of the wider implications of the specific local context, at both the sender and the destination communities. Ethnographic research can lead to a more holistic exploration of children's everyday lives as transnational migrants, by exploring different arenas of their daily lives and not just concentrating on their work or education. This paper considers the methodological and practical aspects involved in seeking multiple perspectives of transnational migration. It is based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of Bolivian children's experiences of migration in Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Controversy exploded in 2005 over a paper at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers which claimed that ethnic segregation in Britain was increasing, ghettos had formed and some British cities were more segregated than Chicago. The paper asserted that indexes failed to measure segregation and should be abandoned in favour of a threshold schema of concentrations using raw data. These assertions were repeated by Trevor Phillips, Director the Commission for Racial Equality, in an inflammatory speech claiming that Britain was sleepwalking into American-style segregation. The argument of this paper is that the index approach is indeed necessary, that ethnic segregation in Britain is decreasing, that the threshold criteria for the claim that British ghettos exist has manufactured ghettos rather than discovered them. A Pakistani ghetto under the schema could be 40 per cent Pakistani, 30 per cent White, 20 per cent Indian and 10 per cent Caribbean. In 2000, 60 per cent of Chicago's Blacks lived in a true ghetto of tracts that were 90-100 per cent Black. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One decade after its introduction, the superdiversity concept introduced by Steven Vertovec has widely found echoes in migration research, but also in business studies, particularly those focusing on ethnic minority entrepreneurship (EME). In spite of conceptually embracing superdiversity in EME research, the multi-dimensionality of superdiversity in its original understanding appears to require further consideration. Dimensions currently overlooked in research at the nexus of superdiversity and ethnic minority entrepreneurship are: (1) ethnic but also religious and linguistic diversity of entrepreneurship, (2) entrepreneurial diversity regarding business-types and (3) incorporation of the characteristics of the city within its analytical unit. Based on an extensive site survey of ethnic businesses in Glasgow combining ethnographic assessment and available statistical data on the city districts, this paper reconceptualizes the entrepreneurial superdiversity to do justice to the on-going debates on superdiversity within migration research. In doing so, it proposes the Entrepreneurial Superdiversity Index (ESI), which is a viable method for approximating entrepreneurial superdiversity in cities. The ESI allows comparative analyses of entrepreneurial superdiversity within a specific city and potentially also between different cities internationally, which could be highly useful for policy-makers and planners alike. It also delivers grounds for developing a general index for superdiversity in further migration research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the increasing migration of western men into Thailand, focusing on men in transnational intimate relationships in the northeastern region (Isan). Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the lives of western men by focusing on their shifting social locations and experiences of gendered and economic mobility. While the men in this study could be considered 'lifestyle migrants', our findings complicate how lifestyle migration literatures commonly represent migrant subject positions and privilege, and we find that gender and intimate relations play a much larger role in this context than other studies of lifestyle migration suggest. We found class diversity among western men in Thailand and, over time, a complex set of constraints and immobilities that thwarted their ideals of greater control or self-reinvention. We argue that the broad pattern of economic precarity and uncertain futures among these men intertwines substantially with the gendered desires and transnational intimate relationships that originally motivated their migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Festivals are an increasingly more popular form of contemporary cultural activism. Countering prejudice through arts, using culture as a tool of communication, and creating an opportunity for marginalised groups to participate in public life, they represent a specific and novel means of civic activism. In this paper, I introduce a case study of the multicultural festival [fjúžn], aiming to enhance the public visibility of 'new minorities' and bring attention to the ethnic and cultural diversity in the city of Bratislava, Slovakia. Building on a festival ethnography and drawing on the perspective of boundary work [Jaworsky, B. Nadya. 2016. The Boundaries of Belonging: Online Work of Immigration-related Social Movement Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan], I show how the festival organisers work towards crossing and blurring symbolic boundaries in society. I offer a close interpretive reading of their attempts at capturing public places and cultivating a diverse language-scape, while showing how they simultaneously maintain, solidify, or even inscribe new boundaries. I conclude by raising critical points about the potential of activist cultural festivals to shift symbolic boundaries in the long run and serve as tools of social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of so-called indigenous 'Jumma' people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh are migrating to New York City (NYC) in search of a 'better life', an attempt to escape from a situation defined largely by deprivation and exclusion. This paper asks how these migrants navigate the new terrain, which often does not comply with their expectations but instead fuels a deep sense of disappointment. It will be shown that their transnational practices and belonging are not only extensions of the global 'Jumma' network, but also that the formation of a diaspora community and the maintenance of cultural boundaries simultaneously create attachment to NYC. Making NYC a home is shaped by their dreams and aspirations, and by the ambiguous ways in which they relate to both the CHT and NYC, places where they find themselves torn between feelings of longing and detachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the emotional coexistence of three groups of Polish migrants in the UK. In particular it focuses on how this coexistence is reflected in narratives-in-interaction produced by members of Polish communities. Methodologically the paper is anchored in a constructivist view of emotions, when they are seen as discursive practice, as way of speaking, rather than as some internal states associated with physiological conditions of our bodies. Consequently, discourse and narrative analysis is my chosen way to analyse emotions in a given research area of Polish migration. The data come from my current project on leisure activities as well as cultural consumption among Polish migrants and were collected in established Polish 'centres' in the UK. My informants belong to three different groups of immigrants: 1) post-World War Two immigration; 2) post-1989/pre-enlargement immigration; and 3) post-enlargement immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this special issue of JEMS is to explore the inherent contradictions and tensions of transnational engagement and reveal how these are played out at different levels, intersecting with other social markers based on gender, class, ethnicity, etc. While transnational engagements span territories and transcend spatial fixation, they might also provide stabilised identities for those involved, as diasporic imaginaries temporarily 'fix' subjectivities in a world of flux. This fundamental tension creates other concrete tensions at various levels, as struggles emerge over the right to draw new boundaries and to define and 'fix' transnational communities. Many of the individual migrants who defy borders are severely restricted with respect to other types of mobility, creating yet more tension between mobility and immobility. The stories in this collection of papers are about the ways in which these tensions are fought out and resolved in the creation of diaspora communities and transnational identities. They show, through concrete ethnographies, how these tensions materialise in a number of different ways, as conflicts are transnationalised and diasporas claimed, reclaimed and disclaimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is based on an auto-ethnographic study of transnational Tamils living in Singapore who retain strong links to their village in India. We explore the challenges posed by increasingly hybrid cultural practices and cross-cultural connections among the second-generation members of this translocal village which spans India, Singapore and Australia. Through a case study of a cross-cultural and 'out-marriage' which took place in the village in India, we explore how those charged with maintaining and reproducing the cultural boundaries of the village in transnational circumstances responded to this cultural 'rupture'. We analyse some of the factors that were pivotal in reproducing the continued viability of the moral economy of this translocal village and explore some of the means deployed to maintain the boundaries of this social field. We develop the concept of 'transnational affect' to describe the function of bodily emotions such as shame and pride that compel participation in and conformity to the transnational social field. We also discuss the deployment of strategies of creative improvisation such as the filling-in of ritual gaps in order to maintain ritual integrity. We show how this ensures that the role of ritual in reproducing membership and a sense of obligation to the community is not disrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological study of musical and dance forms in the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement allows us to understand some of the ways that material and aesthetic categories are employed to express and negotiate identity, social transformation and political upheaval in ways that are active dynamic and contribute to the creation of new social relations and norms. Song lyrics are found to deal with a range of issues of concern to the group, including the Sudanese conflict that led to displacement and insecurity in northern Uganda. Dancing is discussed in relation to a visual and behavioural aesthetic that provides insights into the changing roles and social relations of women in particular. Following on from this, the final section of the paper on discos suggests that these social events have become a contested domain, in which inter-generational conflict and concerns about inter-ethnic relations within the settlement are played out. The paper concludes that music and dance have been used by the residents of Kiryandongo to negotiate competing and overlapping identities. As such, they provide a forum in which both a specifically Acholi identity, as well as a more inclusive Sudanese identity, can be asserted and explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information to the contributors regarding the submission of material on race and ethnic relations, racial inequality, racism, ethnicity, migration and related subjects in Great Britain. Main focus of the journal's coverage; Style and presentation of the journal; Format for terminology, notes and acknowledgments.

The decolonisation of the Dutch East Indies put the native soldiers of the colonial army (KNIL) in a difficult position. After a long-dragging conflict over their status after the disbandment of the KNIL, the Dutch government saw no other way out than to bring the last soldiers together with their families to the Netherlands. The group consisted of about 12,500 persons, nearly all Ambonese, who were housed in barracks awaiting their repatriation to Indonesia in the near future. Geographically and socially isolated from Dutch society, the ex-soldiers organised themselves around the ideal of a free republic on the Moluccan islands. After a period of indecisiveness, the Dutch government finally gave up in 1970 the idea of a return to Indonesia and tried to convince the Moluccans that their future lay in the Netherlands. But policy measures aimed at integration were vehemently opposed by Moluccan leaders who feared integration would induce their followers to abandon the political ideal. This deadlock situation led to a decade of violent internal conflicts and terrorist acts against Dutch civilians. After 1980 there came an end to the period of violence. New leaders came to the fore. They had a broader frame of reference and were interested in enhancing the social position of the Moluccans in the Netherlands. So far the situation of the Moluccans in the Netherlands has been described as a singular historic case. In this paper the fate of the Moluccans is analysed in a broader sociological frame of reference as an example of a diaspora; in other words, a settled community, that considers itself to be 'from elsewhere' and whose common and most important goal is the realisation of a political ideal in what is seen as the homeland. By applying the diaspora concept an answer is sought to the question as to how it became possible that, after a decade of violence and terrorist actions, the Moluccans changed into an immigrant population, slowly integrating into Dutch society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores place attachment and well-being among Afghan refugees in a small Finnish town. The small town offers a unique perspective on newly arrived Afghan refugees' place attachment, as it only started receiving resettled Afghan refugees in 2012. Our analysis draws on the sociology of associations and the concept of assemblages, which provide a novel theoretical lens for integration studies. The data in this study were collected by utilising multi-sited ethnography from 2016 to 2018. The analysis reveals that there is a socio-material side to building place attachments. Different actor-assemblages can 'plug in' or attach themselves to a place in divergent ways, but neither the individual nor the place determines the outcome of the resettlement. Some of our research participants found it easy to connect with surrounding assemblages, while others could not connect at all. The third group had initial incompatibility issues but was able to reassemble attachments by using a variety of adapters. These adapters can be the 'keys to the city' for newly arrived refugees. Support in finding these adapters would be important for social service providers as well as policy makers to focus on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do rights education workshops have value when rights are difficult or impossible to claim? Drawing on three years of ethnographic field work of rights workshops for undocumented workers in the U.S., this article answers that question in the affirmative. Because of their legal status, these workers rarely, if ever, claimed rights. Yet for our subjects, these rights workshops played an important role. During in-depth interviews, attendees of the workshops described how they frequently experienced the law as an unpredictable and isolating force, which we trace to both their precarious legal status as well as their position as immigrants. Participants explained how rights education workshops shaped their experience of the law, introducing 1) a sense of predictability and control, alleviating fear and anxiety, 2) social support, reducing isolation and stigma, and 3) a sense of dignity and empowerment. We suggest that a right consciousness incorporating empowerment and dignity derives from rights' universalistic dimensions, while a rights consciousness culminating in mobilisation is dependent upon a group's status in local legal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the various forms of ethnic incorporation present in the daily lives of ethnic Koreans living in Beijing, including the conditions of their integration into Chinese society. On the basis of an ethnographic research (2014–2015) in Wangjing area, an alleged 'Koreatown' in Beijing, this study involves three ethnic categories, namely, South Koreans, Korean Chinese and Han Chinese. The study suggests that Koreatown in Beijing is not a full-fledged ethnic community but a patchwork of ethnic categories, networks and associations. Ethnic cohesion is implicitly disaggregated by the Chinese urban governance over the foreign population embedded in the unfolding trend of internationalisation in Chinese metropolises. As a consequence, Korean cultural elements are incorporated into the increasingly cosmopolitan culture in Chinese metropolises, with ethnic categories maintained. However, Korean integration into the Chinese circumstance still has a substantially long way to go. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the official idea of racial 'balance' in Singapore and its relationship to modern multiculturalism or (as the island's government refers to it) 'multiracialism'. The article explores the colonial origins of Singapore's contemporary ethnic population breakdown and the emergence of ethnic Chinese as the island's majority community. It examines how the Singapore government has come to officially depict the island's multicultural 'success story' since independence, and the official emphasis on the necessity of maintaining fixed ethnic ratios which ensure that Chinese remain roughly three-quarters of the island's settled population. At the same time, this article interrogates the official rationale behind such a policy, illuminating the colonial-era discursive assumptions that underpin it, and highlighting the way such assumptions have been contested. The article especially focuses on the role that immigration has played in the state's effort to ensure Singapore's racial 'balance', and argues that such an ethnically-determined immigration policy has frequently unsettled the Chinese majority it has been intended to bolster, while calling into question the multicultural idealism on which the Republic of Singapore was ostensibly founded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of Chinese Malaysian students' educational mobility, this article discusses the experiences, everyday practices and future aspirations of my queer informants who went to Taiwan for university and returned to Malaysia after graduation. Through examining their narratives, this article has three objectives. First, it demonstrates how tensions between my informants' ethnic and sexual identities are reconfigured and how new forms of queer relationality and subject positions have emerged via a distinctive process of student migration across the Chinese-speaking world. Second, it contributes to the theorisation of transnational queer Chinese cultures vis-à-vis an articulation of queer Sinophone Malaysia. Third, by way of conclusion, I present a case study of transnational queer activism and demonstrate how it is practised by returned migrants in everyday life settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Expatriate' is an unstable and contested term, as emphatically embraced by some, as rejected by others. The category 'migrant', on the other hand, can have all the veneer of a self-evident and technical category. Yet, their tense relationship suggests the usefulness of an examination of their co-production and combined effects. This article explores the everyday socio-cultural production of the category 'migrant' in its tense relationship with the category 'expatriate'. More specifically, it draws on 8 months of ethnographic research in Nairobi and The Hague to examine how participants deploy the category 'migrant' in the context of conversations about 'expatriates' or 'expatriate' lives. The article argues that the category 'migrant' emerges as polysemic and malleable as it is constructed with and against the 'expatriate'; both categories are joined by a constitutive but not straightforward relationship that is deeply politicised and specifically works to reproduce racialised power relations. The polysemy of these overlapping terms is thus reflective of and operative in racialised power relations in ways that demand more analytical attention. As such, the categories' relationship reflects the 'polyvalent mobility' of race as it works through ostensibly neutral migration categories and 'takes on the form of other things'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to the scholarly call to increase studies on migration from the perspective of postcolonial thought by exploring a novel ethnographic case; the migration of Tibetans who have migrated from Tibet via Nepal to India and who often aspire migrating onwards from India. It is argued that postcolonial thought gives a fuller understanding of migration via one place or several towards migrants' final destinations, often called transit migration in scholarly writings, by demonstrating how unequal power structures, such as unequal distribution of wealth or access to mobility and opportunities, increase migration (aspirations) of Tibetans both in China and in India, where they have a minority position. Despite this, their migration reveals an active subaltern agency taking advantage of the various opportunities during their migratory processes, such as the international networks in Dharamsala and the images of Tibetans as exotic 'Others'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores the ways unaccompanied refugee youth in and en route to Europe actively deal with the intensification of exclusionary practices towards migrants and refugees. In the Introduction we aim to set the scene for the individual articles by sketching the various political, historical and discursive levels at which the unaccompanied minor has come to be constructed as a crisis figure in Europe. We show how the sense of exceptionality attached to this figure translates into ambiguous and at times extremely contradictory social practices that have far-reaching effects on the lives of refugee youth. In paying attention to the conceptual flaws and dangers inherent in linking unaccompanied minors to ideas of crisis, we aim to demonstrate the importance of taking seriously the ways young people themselves make sense of the ascriptions, ideas and practices they are subject to. We suggest that ethnographically driven research that lays the focus on the ways young people actively navigate the ambiguous social landscapes they are confronted with can form an important means to move beyond the simplistic and ahistorical models of explanation put forward by frameworks of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of 2010s, the movement of unaccompanied minors from Eritrea has significantly increased and has become the object of international concern. This migration is often explained by media and humanitarian actors as the mechanical reaction to recent conscription campaigns by the Eritrean government. However, these explanations fail to consider that young people's mobilities emerge from a context of protracted crisis. Building on the literature on chronicity and crisis in the African context, this article examines what it means to be young in Eritrea and how it relates to the motivations for and the dynamics of youth migration from the country. Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, the article points to the active role of young migrants – even minors – escaping from contexts of protracted crisis. While analysing the structural constraints faced by Eritrean girls and boys, I first show how migration in this context is often seen as a crucial step to reaching adulthood that has significant gender differences. Then, I explore the interactions between family expectations and individual agency by analysing my informants' mobility patterns outside Eritrea and in secondary movements towards Europe. While most available literature tends to portray young migrants' trajectories as the result of structural circumstances or family projects, I illustrate how many of my informants often undertook their journeys without family consensus to pursue personal aspirations as well as communal values regarding moral worthiness and family well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the modes of (contested) control that are at play at the Mediterranean frontier for containing, dividing and discipling unruly mobility. Building on ethnographic research conducted on the island of Lesvos and of Lampedusa, it focuses on the implementation and the functioning of the Hotspot System in Greece and in Italy, analysing beyond the fences of detention centres and by looking at the broader logistics of channels, infrastructures and governmental measures deployed for regaining control over migration movements. The article argues that more than control in terms of surveillance and tracking, the Hotspot System contributes to enforce forms of containment through mobility that consists in controlling migration by obstructing, decelerating and troubling migrants’ geographies - more than in fully blocking them. The article takes into account migrants’ refusals of being fingerprinted, showing how migrants radically unsettle the association between seeking refuge and lack of choice, enacting their right to choose where to go and claim asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how two Middle Eastern Christian churches in Denmark are constructed as particular sensorial spaces that invite attendees to participate in and identify with specific times and spaces. As with other Christian groups, rituals of the Sunday mass constitute a highlight of the activities that confirm the congregations’ faith and community, but for members of a minority faith, these rituals also serve other functions related to identification and belonging. Inspired by a practice-oriented [Bell, Catherine. (1992). Ritual Practice, Ritual Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press] and phenomenological approach to place-making [Cresswell, Tim. (2002). “Introduction: Theorizing Place.” In Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World, edited by Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell, 11-32. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.] through sensory communication [Leistle, Bernard. (2006). “Ritual as Sensory Communication: A Theoretical and Analytical Perspective.” In Ritual and Identity: Performative Practices as Effective Transformations of Social Reality, edited by Klaus-Peter Köpping, Bernhard Leistle, and Michael Rudolph, 33-74. Berlin: LIT Verlag; Pink, Sarah. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage], the article examines constructions of religious identity and belonging through ritual practices. The findings stem from fieldwork carried out in 2014-2015 and are part of a larger cross-disciplinary study of Egyptian, Iraqi and Assyrian Christians in Denmark. We argue that in various ways, the ritual forms a performative space for memory and belonging which, through bodily practices and engagement with the materialities of the church rooms, creates a memory that reconnects the practitioners with places elsewhere. More specifically, we argue that the Sunday ritual facilitates the connection with God and the eternal, a place and time with fellow believers, and a relocation to remember and re-enter a pre-migration past and ‘homeland’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While states around the world have responded to mass mobility by increasing border policing, our knowledge of the daily reality of that form of policing remains limited. How migrant women are policed has been particularly neglected. The political and practical difficulty of examining the context, process and experience of border control practices appears often to be insurmountable. This article contributes to filling some of the gaps in our knowledge by drawing on ethnographic data collected over a 12-month period in Greek immigration detention centres from 2011 to 2012. In it we examine the experience of policing and irregular entry across the Greek Turkey border - an entry-point to Europe that is routinely regarded as being in crisis. As we will demonstrate, border policing at this site is capricious and unpredictable. It is also highly racialised and gendered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the activities of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Djibouti, and especially its capacity-building activities in the field of migration management. It ethnographically documents how these projects transform state sovereignty. It argues that this is done not only through the Djiboutian government's increased capacity to exclude undocumented migrants, but also through the renewed governance of the entry of national-citizens into the state territory. IOM's projects institutionalise a state of exception (Agamben) that produces both legitimate political authority and national citizenship in the receiving State. Such institutionalisation is finally embedded within an international mobility regime characterised by a 'sedentarist' narrative, targeting specifically African citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how corruption affects reintegration. The literature on return and reintegration shows that return migrants often struggle to adjust and adapt to life in their place of origin because that environment can be very different from what they grew accustomed to abroad. One stark difference is the prevalence and meaning of corruption. In many sending countries that migrants come from and then return to, corruption is endemic. By contrast, in many receiving countries that migrants go to and return from, it is incidental. Yet, we know little about how the discrepancy affects reintegration. This study examines how corruption affects the psychosocial and economic reintegration of Iraqi Kurds returning to Iraqi Kurdistan from Norway and the United Kingdom. Interviews with returnees reveal that they consider corruption a major challenge for their own reintegration. Psychosocially, it alienates them from the ideology of the Kurdish nation-building project, challenges their identities, undermines a sense of belonging and creates insecurity. Economically, it shapes economic behaviour and outcomes by obstructing entrepreneurship, producing relative deprivation and conditioning their employability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new field of deportation studies emerged at the intersection of immigration and security studies in the early 2000s. Focusing on deportation raises new questions about migration and enforcement tactics, but reproduces assumptions about the nature of movement and the centrality of the state in enforcement efforts. Through ethnographic work on deportation in various regions of the world, this volume questions these assumptions and emphasises important themes, including the role of emotions, the agency of migrants, the technicality of law and the variability of law. These themes also suggest several new and not-so-new directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This ethnographic essay considers how international non-governmental organisations are able to make claims to authoritative knowledge about development work by offering the transnational mobilities of their staff members as evidence. I examine how one professional's biography—his trajectory from Angola to Britain and back again—was differentially presented to external donors and internal staff members as befitting the institutional needs of an international good governance intervention in Angola. These presentations reflect a commoditisation of the cosmopolitanism of professionals' histories in the service of development as a regime of mobility. I argue that, in this development regime, a global hierarchy prevents some individual professionals, particularly those from developing nations, from realising the same benefits of their cosmopolitan mobility as professionals from industrialised nations. While one of mobility studies' many strengths is that it highlights global interconnectedness, social scientists should not read equality in these interconnections but examine how patterns of transnational mobility may produce and reproduce global structures of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This article andRegimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, the special issue ofJEMSit introduces, build on, as well as critique, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, this issue challenges conceptual orientations built on binaries of difference that have impeded analyses of the interrelationship between mobility and stasis. These include methodological nationalism, which counterpoises concepts of internal and international movement and native and foreigner, and consequently normalises stasis. Instead, the issue offers a regimes of mobility framework that addresses the relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and transnational connection, experiences and imaginaries of migration, and rootedness and cosmopolitan openness. The introduction highlights how, within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although the authors examine nation-state building processes, their analysis is not confined by national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, many immigrant-receiving countries have implemented increasingly restrictive policies that include tighter border controls, more temporary worker permits, an increased threat of deportation, and greater restrictions on the ability to acquire permanent residence and to petition for family members. Thus, family separation seems to be built into new immigration policies, and long-term and indefinite separations are not the exception. In this article, I examine the case of the largest Central American immigrant groups: Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans. Many of these immigrants are neither fully ‘undocumented’ nor ‘documented’, but often straddle both statuses as a result of having received a series of temporary permits over a period of more than a decade. This legal instability profoundly influences parenting across borders among these immigrants—both the relations between parents and children who are separated, and the links between these immigrant families and the different institutions in the host society. The experiences of Central Americans present a special opportunity to reflect on the effects of current immigration regimes on families separated across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Guangzhou municipality in south China organised the first Overseas Students Fair in 1998, large conventions aimed at recruiting overseas Chinese professionals (OCPs) have become a regular scene in major cities in China. These conventions constitute one of the most visible means of the Chinese government's engagement with the 800,000 OCPs who remain overseas after receiving tertiary education abroad. Characteristic of the conventions, and OCP policies in general, is a highly 'materialistic' thinking: it is argued that OCPs deserve generous financial rewards because they are economically and technologically beneficial to China, and that financial reward is the most feasible means to attract them back. My ethnographic data, however, reveal that the language of economism is communicated in a highly ritualistic manner and, conversely, political rituals serve as a crucial part of the conventions. The ritualised economic- and technological-determinist discourse appears apolitical, yet acquires strong mobilising and legitimating power, and is thus particularly effective in accommodating OCPs into the established political order. The concept 'ritual economy' denotes such deep intertwining between the economic, the ritualistic and the political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the 1980s, bars and dance clubs re-emerged as important zones of intercultural interaction within Shanghai, particularly for expatriates with otherwise little casual social contact with Chinese citizens. Based on interviews with bar- and clubowners and customers, and on field-notes from participant observation over the last 15 years, this historical ethnography describes the changing organisation of the ethnosexual contact zone of the nightlife. Nightlife is a context in which casual interactions among foreign travellers, sojourners and settlers and the increasingly mobile People's Republic of China (PRC) citizens are common and relatively spontaneous. Despite the complexities of these interactions, the ethnographic evidence here points to the continued relevance of postcolonial racial categories in which a struggle for gendered status within the nightscape is described as a competition between a dominant but declining Global Whiteness and a rising Global Chinese racial identity. This mapping of a fractious global nightscape challenges the idea of a seamless transnational capitalist class, and instead points to racial and gendered sexual competition as an important feature of the leisure culture of transnational mobile elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diaspora literature has tended to narrow itself to the marking out and placing of boundaries at the conceptual level. While still contributing to the elaboration of the concept of diaspora, this article seeks to answer two questions. What meanings do Zimbabweans in Britain give to their diasporic condition and experience? How do such meanings influence and shape attitudes towards return to the homeland or feelings of belonging to the hostland? The article is based on multi-sited ethnography, comprising 33 in-depth interviews and participant observation in four research sites, and draws upon concepts of diaspora and transnationalism as theoretical frameworks. It examines the process by which Zimbabweans in Britain negotiate boundaries, assert meanings, interpret their own pasts, and define themselves in relation to others in the hostland. The findings suggest that, whereas the concept of diaspora typically emphasises group cohesion, Zimbabweans in Britain describe their experience in complex ways. Some depict the diaspora as reverse colonisation; some see it in terms of Babylon and Egypt metaphors; and others talk of the diaspora as wenela, an acronym referring to a labour recruitment system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among transnational corporate employees—both expatriate and national—working in Jakarta, Indonesia, I examine the processes through which imagined markers of identity and difference, informed by Indonesia's colonial past, influenced corporate practices. In particular, I explore the persistence of colonial hierarchies within the corporate structure of a company (fictitiously) named TIMBER. I argue that TIMBER is not unique in the locating of Chinese-Indonesian employees in middlemen positions between Western expatriate executives and Indonesian national employees. Further, I examine the historical trajectories that led to the currently acceptable hierarchical orderings seen in Jakarta's transnational corporate offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the specific ways in which local institutions in inner-city neighbourhoods affect the formation of educational resources for immigrant children. Local institutions here refer to observable neighbourhood-based formal and informal organisations. Based on an ethnographic study of three Los Angeles immigrant neighbourhoods—Chinatown, Koreatown and Pico Union (Mexican/Central American neighbourhood)—I address two main questions. What types of institution exist at the local level, and how does ethnicity shape them? How do local institutions interact with one another to create tangible and intangible resources conducive to education, and how does ethnicity affect access to these resources? My findings suggest that the social structures of immigrant neighbourhoods vary due to group-specific modes of incorporation, immigration histories and the host society's reception; that community organising at the local level centres around certain common parameters in which co-ethnicity is a crucial component; and that neighbourhood-based educational resources are available but the access is unequal and ethnically exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politics that give a privileged migratory or citizenship status to individuals abroad because of presumed common origins with a granting state's people foster the expectation that ethnic affinity facilitates social and economic integration. However, a growing literature has documented a mismatch between the social and the economic expectations of people defined as co-ethnics by these policies. Relying on a study of Spanish-descent Argentines who have 'returned' to Spain, we argue that the effect of perceived ethnic affinities varies by social context. While ethnic similarity with natives may offer an advantage to migrants in search of housing or educational opportunities, it can hinder entry to the job market. From an employer's standpoint, what makes 'traditional' immigrants suited to these positions is their willingness to put up with low wages and poor working conditions in anticipation of future economic and status payoffs in the homeland. To the extent that ethnic-affinity migrants are oriented primarily to the local economic and status structure, their access to entry-level jobs may be impeded and/or they may be forced to compete with natives for skilled or professional jobs precisely because they are not different in the sense valued by employers. In a concluding section, we measure insights gleaned from the Spanish case against the experiences of ethnic Germans and Japanese-descent Brazilians and conclude that ethnic-affinity migrants' orientations are shaped by the terms on which policies allow access to destination countries and to citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the organisations of two groups of immigrants in Amsterdam—the Surinamese and the Turks. It documents the numbers of Surinamese and Turkish organisations and traces the process of organisational differentiation in each group. It then analyses the evolution of Surinamese and Turkish organisational patterns to see in what way they differ, and why this is the case. It shows that, contrary to expectation, it is not just group characteristics that explains the different organisational patterns of Surinamese and Turks in Amsterdam. Although we look at two groups in the same city, the local opportunity structure differs as well. Local policy reinforces the main driving forces behind the Surinamese and Turkish organising process. The development of the organisations of both groups should therefore be explained by a combination of three factors: the different (local) opportunity structure, different group characteristics and the organisational traditions in the country of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]