Among the West African women living in New York with whom I work, the trope of trust/mistrust repeatedly emerges as a means to interpret life experiences in New York and in their home countries. I argue here that these women assert agency and influence by granting and withholding trust among other West African women in an increasingly anti-immigrant and Islamophobic public sphere shaped by declining city services and intensifying unemployment. My interlocutors report that "you cannot trust Africans. They don't want anything good for other people." At the same time, the transnational experience fosters opportunities for building trust among other West African women, such as a shared rotating money exchange. I explore the construction of trust in the transnational context in settings where it is both granted and withheld to understand the ways that these affective responses to migration emerge from and influence the milieu in which they are situated.

This paper explores hope and success among Mexican and Central American women in Los Angeles. It analyzes their notions of personal accomplishment and social value, and how these produce a particular version 'America' and the 'American Dream.' The Dream promises success for anyone willing to work hard, and despite inhabiting the social and economic margins, the immigrant women I met in LA uniformly expressed admiration for and desire to belong to this country. I ask: how could they continue to trust in a Dream that remained elusive and constantly deferred? To get at this, I take success as a multitemporal and collective process, one that is always constituted through engagement with the lived future. Centering immigrant experiences of hope, I examine scholarly assumptions about personal and social value, its relationship to re/productive labor, and the time frames in which these operate.

A major concern among most of the worlds labor migrants is to follow the welfare of family members, kin, friends, and paisanos back home. This paper examines diverse experiences with long-distance communication among Peruvian migrants in the US and their family members in Peru and provides a gendered perspective of the emotional terrain of transnationality. Most migrants have left dependent children, husbands, wives, boyfriends or girlfriends, and elderly parents in Peru and a good chunk of their everyday lives in the U.S. evolves around the desire and the social and moral obligation to maintain such relationships. They do so by using a variety of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Based on ethnographic fieldwork with migrants in Washington DC and their family members in Lima and the rural Andean community of Urcumarca, I argue that while ICTs enable the production and maintenance of long-distance affective ties, cross-border communication is far from always warm, fuzzy, and unconditional. The time and space constraints that structure migrants' everyday lives in the U.S. also shape their transnational communicative practices in very important ways making long-distance communication an emotional terrain fraught with uncertainties, unfulfilled expectations, enduring tensions, and silences.

This paper seeks to identify the forces that push the migrant as well as Briton Bangladeshi women towards high fertility. It also examines the factors playing immense roles in preventing them from reaping the benefit of technological imperatives in the health sectors in their `own home' in Britain.It also reveals the paradoxes of these women's lives relating to changing strategies for family formation, survival or disruption of marriages and response towards contraceptives. The paper is based on subsequent intensive fieldwork conducted over a period of twenty years involving first, second and third generation Bangladeshi women in Manchester. The paper explores the fact that migrants' nostalgia, habitus and their emotion relating to back home as well as host society create boundaries among them and, despite their reluctance, pull them back to high fertility. Migrants'cultural agencies, emotion concerning racism and Islamphobia, identity crisis etc. also contribute to influence their fertility behaviour.

In the long history of China, Chinese fosters its own pattern with pluralistic integration with strong identification to Chinese. In the domestic Chinese migrants, 96% of them are from majority group, Han people. The difference of social-economic status between urban residents and migrant labor is profound. In fact, this difference can also be considered as the tension between agriculture civilization and urban civilization, rather than ethnic group culture conflict.

I have led my graduate student team to conduct ethnography study in a migrant children school since 2011 and it should continue till 2013. From this series of participatory observation, I argue that on one hand the division of labor based integration of the domestic migrants' urban lives can be observed, on the other hand, the conflict between their aboriginal culture from their hometown and the urban civilization exits. These integration and exclusion projects patterns on these domestic parents' and their children's education desire: on one hand they dream to change their destiny through education in bureaucracy in modern society, on the other hand, with limited resource and lift style changed in the transition, their education behavior rooted from agrarian discipline put the desire to a vulnerable margin. Both sides can be traced back to the cultivation tradition of people in China, while it is adopted in the movement of China today in modernity.

As a long migrant community of farmers and landlords, Jat Sikhs across cities in India and around the globe share a nostalgic memory construction that I term the rural imaginary. This memorative construction negotiates the emotions of displacement and reterritorialization, celebrating community identity even as it laments the alienating modern aspects of the postcolonial condition. In the case of this agricultural community, the notion of diaspora sits uncomfortably at this nexus. Are Jats in diaspora only in transnational circumstances (as much of the diaspora literature would have us believe), or, are they in diaspora merely having left their villages? This paper, via an interrogation of the emotional responses to the experience of migration among Jats as presented in ethnographic and popular film evidence, questions whether a common nostalgic trope, the rural imaginary, is inspired by both rural-urban migration in India and transnational migration abroad. I demonstrate that the affective contours of Punjabi landscapes and homescapes are shared across multiple diaspora locations. This argument problematizes the conventional meaning of diaspora as organized around nation-state boundaries, and considers whether the exilic traumas and reconstructions of identity inherent to diaspora may be more appropriately understood as aspects of regional modernity in the Jat case.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Filipino immigrants in Boston and the development organization they support in Manila, this paper seeks to analyze "long-distance care" for the home country as expressed by taking part in a development project. The template for "caring for the home country" is being created in Manila, and then reworked by the immigrants in the US, as the organization exists in a transnational space. Caring for the Philippines is thus expressed not only by giving money for the project, but also through changing one's life to live according to the "mission", giving testimonies at fundraising events, raising awareness among other compatriots, and also spending vacation at home doing work for the development organization.

I look both at the practices of immigrants, and the narratives they tell about their engagement to see what role emotions play in them. The display of emotions seems to be crucial, as the narratives told by the immigrants about their work for the organization often speak about "the change of heart", "the Filipino compassionate heart", "being your brother's keeper", "caring and sharing", "a debt towards the home country" etc.

Migrant parents are often judged for "having abandoned their children" or "giving them only material things", opinions that highlight their supposed incapacity to meet "real" needs. For instance, common advices for migrant parents can look like this: "Sending money doesn't solve the lack of affection". I argue however that this is not a "migrant problem", but rather that it constitutes a point of departure for a more in-depth analysis of the relationship between capital and emotions, as well as of how individuals in general try to create a balance between intimate lives, the market and working place. Family relationships are discussed here through ethnographic information provided by Ecuadorian migrant women in Barcelona, and their children and relatives in Ecuador. This analysis places the topic of family relationships in the global context where flexibility is currently the mode of organizing finances and labour markets, and consequently, intimate family life.

My research with elite migrants in the Metropolitan DC area explores their multi-dimensional realities (physical, perceptual, emotional). I interview elites from Buenos Aires and Beijing who move between multiple job markets and who often become connected to United States' society for longer stays than anticipated. However, because the more "settled citizen" often perceives them as being transient, they are not fully recognized as influencing or challenging U.S. identity as the consensual knowledge of conventional immigrants does. I explore this difference by asking elites to narrate their movement over the life course to understand 1) how they make sense of their realities through cultural exchanges in which some form of knowledge, practices, beliefs, etc. are imparted, shared, and often synthesized into new forms and 2) how they construct a sense of place and identity in a society that does not always recognize their realities but is interconnected with them nonetheless.

Between 1971 and 1990, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews immigrated to the U.S. through Vienna and Rome. During this unavoidable transmigration of two months to two years, families anxiously awaited visas in a radically different cultural and material setting. Though émigrés explored their temporary host countries on their meager finances, most vowed to come back "as first rate people," rather than as stateless refugees. Using the concept of emplacement to explore why émigrés formed intense attachments to the temporary places of transmigration, this paper focuses on the return trips to Italy and Austria, which many Soviet Jewish Americans did make ten or twenty years later. I argue that return trips were essential in redeeming the hardships of their immigration, fortifying notions of their "immigrant success"—a widespread self-image within the community. I interrogate this self-conception to reveal that émigrés' memories of transmigration reveal far more ambivalent evaluations of their migration experiences.

The paper is based on ethnographic research of transnational migrants from Ukraine who live and work in the Czech Republic. Although we do not have a universal definition of what constitutes "good motherhood", trasnational mothers has to defend their "choice" as maidsand nannies in households participating in private reproductive activities, but they themselves are reproducing in a different culture and society. In my presentation I will focus on which forms are these identities negotiated in a transnational space, and what role in that gender conduct plays commodities- precisely objects and remmitences, which the Ukrainian mothers usually send and transport in the form of gifts to their children in Ukraine.

I will argue that material objects , commodities and remittancies, are not only additional items that flows in transnational space. I will show that these "objects of love" play an important evocative, emotional and instrumental role in the experience of transnational motherhood. Subjects in the form of gifts plays an important compensating role in the physical absence of mothers in their 'reproductive' role, symbolically reconstruct and maintain relationships. But it also highlights a new productive role of the female economic breadwinner of their families, and defend the fact that they have "abandoned" their children. On the one hand, the transmission gain from migration in the form of remittances or gifts proves to be an effective way to extend the newly acquired gender power (Mahler, Pessar 1999).

The defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka in May 2009 was a watershed in Tamil recognition struggles. In Canada, the Diaspora assembled as it did worldwide to protest and mourn the death of family members and the demise of its nationalist claims. This paper examines transformations in the social suffering of Diasporic actors in Canada. It considers whether Canadian multicultural discourses frame and contain the emotive terrain of Tamil identity making. Multiculturalism arguably governs 'affect' in the Diaspora post-war to constitute the conduct of diasporic actors and cultivate their identities through emotionally laden registers of belonging that supports nation building ties. The nation building imperative privatizes suffering so that Tamil bodies - asylum seekers and citizens alike, are contained by an "economy of fear" (Ahmed, 2004) that marks the Canadian 'mainstream'. Yet, multiculturalism is a contested site which ethno-cultural groups, including Canadian-Tamils, mobilize and re-interpret. This ethnographically situated account foregrounds the gendered and generationally situated ways in which suffering, fear and the realities of care were produced, shared and eased within diasporic space, before and after the civil war. Affective ties that circulate within and beyond the Diaspora are filtered through a dynamic and transnational diasporic imaginary that complicates and disrupts the circulation of affective ties towards Canadian nation building.

This paper explores spatial attachment and affect among Omani-Arabs who

have crossed the North-Western Indian Ocean. In both historical and

contemporary accounts, exoduses from Arabia to East Africa and from

Zanzibar to Oman emerge as points of departure in a particular and gendered

narratology of progress. In our conversations during my fieldwork from 2003

to 2005 collective traumas of forced movement seemed to transform

seamlessly into longer life story chapters of economic and social success.

What is the experiential basis of such narratives, and how is progress

through flight to be understood socially and emotionally? In an attempt at

finding answers to such larger questions of my PhD project I pay special

attention in this paper to ways in which religiosity and gender influence

and retrospectively construct experiences of migration.