Global Networks-A Journal of Transnational Affairs最新文献

The global Covid-19 pandemic has strongly impacted social practices, relocating communications and social networks into the digital space. Contextualized in such impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the local LGBT* activism in Japan achieved a special momentum: both the acceleration of the socio-spatial relocation of LGBT* activism to the digital space and the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics 2020 by 1 year enabled activists to mobilize people domestically and globally. The pandemic was not the actual cause or driver of the local LGBT* activism, yet it has been an important catalyst for the transnationalization of the local movement in Japan, pushing evidently the spatial boundaries to achieve broader public outreach but in turn also receiving stronger support from the global community through transnational networks. This study explores novel dynamics of spatiality and temporality of social transformations through the Covid-19-induced increase in global digital connectedness as well as transnationalization of local actions.

This article offers the concept of ‘work as affective care’ to explore the entanglement between financial and affective in transnational life. This is discussed in relation to practices of paid work by nonmigrant older parents during visits to their adult children abroad, an understudied dimension in the visiting friends and relatives, transnational family, and ageing scholarship. Drawing on ethnographic research with Brazilian transnational families, the article makes two distinct contributions. First, it emphasizes the broader repertoire of activities performed during visits, namely paid work outside the family household. Second, it underscores a temporal dimension to visits, namely prolonged stays. The discussion reveals a financial dimension to care where paid work acts as a form of affective care across places and generations. While often described positively, the intersections between financial and affective goals are not always harmonious, and material and affective needs can prove difficult to reconcile.

For transnational families, visits represent an opportunity to temporarily punctuate the geographical distance that separates them from significant others in everyday life. Drawing on data from mapping-interviews conducted with older skilled migrants in Abu Dhabi, the UAE, this paper is concerned with how transnational visiting is harnessed to sustain a sense of family togetherness at a later stage of the life course. The discussion contributes to migration scholarship on return visits and visits by relatives to the migration destination but also draws attention to a third dimension of visiting; family meet-ups in a third space—a location that is neither the country of origin nor the migration destination. Hence, I propose an explicitly spatial, relational conceptualization of transnational family visits, arranged around a multi-local framework: the return visit (‘there’); the receiving of visits in the migration destination (‘here’); and visits in an in-between geographical space (‘somewhere’). In so doing, this paper places the spotlight on the geographies of visiting, drawing attention to the dynamic way in which the practice of transnational family visiting in enacted in later life.

The current article contributes to the debates on immobility in migration studies. More specifically, it aims to show and challenge mobility bias in transnational entrepreneurship; the relevant scholarship appears to overconcentrate on immigrants as major driving forces of cross-border business relations while ignoring the contributions of nonmigrant populations. Based on the qualitative data collected from Central Asian migrant entrepreneurs in Russia, this research dispels the myth about the inertness of nonmigrants by demonstrating their utmost importance in establishing and sustaining transnational enterprises. Therefore, transnational entrepreneurship should be regarded as the result of joint efforts of both mobile and sedentary actors. The presented evidence suggests that mobility and immobility are integrally intertwined and mutually constitutive. This study calls for a more balanced and nuanced vision of how transnationalism occurs.

In migration research, the voice is usually given to those who move, but in this article, those who stay are at the centre of attention. The study aims to present the stayers’ practices of everyday life in transnational families in an attempt to highlight the experience of staying and understand the stayers’ role in the migration project. The study is based on semi-structured life story interviews conducted in 2020 with people who in the 1980s stayed in the northeastern part of Poland when their relatives migrated internationally. In the almost four-decade perspective, staying appears as a powerful condition and an active process, closely interrelated with migration. Also, the migration project does not appear dependent so much on the range and availability of communication technologies – limited in the 1980s – but on transnational families’ engagement in that project and desire to accomplish it.

Corporate interlocking at the national and transnational scale has received substantive scholarly attention. Less is known about companies’ ties to the cities and regions in which they have their seats. In this paper, we conduct a long-term analysis of the multilevel ties that companies maintain with the local and the national context they are embedded in. To do so, we adopt a positional approach and identify the directors of the major companies in the three largest Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) and study company directors’ ties to local and national organizations in seven benchmark years between 1890 and 2020. Our analysis documents the rise and fall of company directors’ ties to national organizations over the course of the 20th century, and it highlights the continued persistence of companies’ ties to the local level and their region until the new millennium, when companies’ ties with national and local organizations vanish, coinciding with the transnationalization of company boards.

In the title to this paper, Maya, a British-Bangladeshi woman, expresses her frustration at the refusal of the Home Office to grant her father in Sylhet a visa to come and fulfil his role as family head at the wedding of his son, Maya's brother, in London. The case illustrates well the intersection of gender and generation that fundamentally shapes the pattern of visits, in both directions, across this long-distance transnational social and family space. Bangladesh is a patriarchal society, with marked gender divisions layered across generations, which are largely reproduced among the migrant community in London and are manifested, in various ways, in the phenomenon of transnational visiting. Based on 61 in-depth interviews in London and Sylhet, supplemented by participant observation, we delineate the gendered and generational structures framing the visits, both of migrants to the homeland and of non-migrants to their relatives in London.

Recent trends in international migration reveal increasing migration outflows from Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries. This development is accompanied by a massive rise in youth unemployment and a major increase in the young population in this region. This paper provides a quantitative assessment of migration patterns and analyses the interacting effect of the unfavourable combination of youth unemployment and demographic pressure on migration decisions. Based on an assessment of bilateral migration flows from 19 MENA to 34 OECD countries between 1995 and 2020, we find that youth unemployment plays a significant role in explaining emigration flows from MENA countries. We also find that the migration-generating effect of youth unemployment is contingent upon demographic pressure in the youth cohorts and increases with an increasing number of youths.

Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and Ghana, this paper combines ‘return’ mobilities literature and youth studies to analyse the role of leisure practices during ‘homeland’ visits in transnational youth's way of relating to Ghana when they are entering into adulthood. Using the notion of mobility trajectories, the paper shows that leisure practices facilitate young people's ability to establish and renew intimate transnational relationships with diasporic friends, and Ghana-based same-generation relatives and romantic partners. Differing from earlier stays in Ghana, young people expressed their emerging sense of independence by exploring alternative sides of the country with these peers, based on common interests and belonging to the same life-cycle cohort. The findings add complexity to the notion of the ‘homeland’ as a monolithic place of reconnecting with family and roots by drawing attention to the intersection between young people's pathways to adulthood and transnational mobility.

This article explores the performance of a transnational network of Wangye practices, spirits, technologies, vessels, and Sinophone communities. The Wangye belief, a Fujianese popular religion performed in mainland China, Southeast Asia and Taiwan, remains widely performed. The article begins with an account of watching a YouTube recording of the live stream video of the Donggang Ying Wang religious festival in 2018. Culminating in the deity's sending off at the seaside and the burning of the NT$7 million Wangye's Boat, the video of the burning vessel remains archived online. Similarly in Malaysia, Yong Chuan Tian Temple performed the ‘Wangkang Ceremony’ in 2020, which also featured an elaborate construction of a vessel and its eventual burning. Streamed and recorded online, viewers can now witness the revelation of spirits through the conversion of material vessels into ash,smoke, and digital video. These digital enactments of religious vessels articulate a new religious re-composition that includes religious and non-religious social actors, machines, and gods, bringing old frontiers of nation and diaspora into contact.