Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic research investigates the lived experiences of low-income teenage immigrant students coming to Hong Kong from less affluent places, predominantly rural mainland China and South Asia, as they adapt to life and education in Hong Kong.

Paper long abstract:

Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in four secondary schools, this research investigates the lived experiences of low-income teenage immigrant students coming to Hong Kong from less affluent places, predominantly rural mainland China and South Asia, as they adapt to life and education in Hong Kong. This paper discusses the migration trajectories and schooling experiences of these young immigrants to explore how they have internalized and shouldered the family expectations for their upward social mobility through access to the perceived better education in Hong Kong; how they navigate the unfamiliar education system and curriculum; and how they negotiate the disparities between idealized aspirations and constraints in reality. By looking at the institutional forces and the discursive and symbolic structures that circumscribe their lived experiences, I seek to illuminate the ideologies of boundary-crossing mobility and social mobility that are shaping the immigrant students.

Paper short abstract:

The experiences of Chinese migrants in Japan are constituted by conflicting desires and imaginaries that cannot necessarily be consolidated with one another. This shows how the experience of mobile subjects is often fractured and paradoxical. However, migrants also negotiate their subjectivities creating new cultural forms and life projects.

Paper long abstract:

Chinese migrants in Japan now constitute the largest group of registered "foreigners" with over 600,000 documented in 2009. This is the result of a government-sponsored drive for educational and economic success in China; Japan's flexible student visa system; and Japan's image as a culturally and linguistically proximal hub for global capital.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork amongst Chinese migrants in North-West Tokyo, this paper will demonstrate how the experiences of Chinese people in Japan are constituted by conflicting desires and imaginaries that cannot necessarily be consolidated with one another. They are torn between two national institutional frameworks, cosmopolitan and patriotic desires, and feel the tensions of individual success and personal familial sentiments. This shows how the experience of mobile subjects is often fractured and paradoxical. Finally, I will explore how people make sense of their divided subjectivities creating new cultural forms and life projects.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shows that Chinese migrants in Prato are forced to come to terms with two opposing ideologies of transnational mobility prevailing in the areas of origin and of settlement.

Paper long abstract:

While prevailing discourses of globalization dictate an ideology of transnational mobility as a highly desirable path toward success, Prato, Italy stands as an exception. In Prato, highly mobile Chinese migrants are perceived as those that have heavily contributed to the decline the previously thriving industrial district.

This paper shows that Chinese migrants in Prato are forced to come to terms with two opposing ideologies of transnational mobility prevailing in the areas of origin and of settlement. The Chinese ideology of the successful migrant developed in the PRC from the mid 1990s values positively transnational mobility (Pieke et alii 2004, Barabantseva 2005). The hegemonic discourse in Prato instead depicts Chinese migrants mobility and their access to trans-local external economies as a negative value that threatens the industrial district, its culture and social cohesion (Dei Ottati 2009).

This paper focuses on the actors that in Prato shape the local construction and spread of discourses that influence a symbolic representation of (Chinese migrants) transnational mobility and transnational networks. While the hegemonic discourse frames definitions of problems specific to the city uniqueness, it also reflects concerns that circulate nationwide.

The cultural scene in Italy and Prato is in fact dominated by cultural products- an acclaimed movie, a national literary prize winner book - that transmit anger, fears and gloomy expectations that Chinese migrants transnational mobility combined with Chinese competitive industry will overcome natives businesses and the nation's main industry.

Paper short abstract:

Building on fieldwork in a rural area of central Morocco where migration to Europe is pervasive, the paper explores how mobility and the native concept of 'the outside' engender specific subjectivities and relations in those who leave but also in those who, willingly or unwillingly, stay.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the fundamental role of mobility in the practical and imaginative unfolding of life in emigrant Central Morocco, engendering subjectivities and relations not only in those who leave, but also in those who, willingly or unwillingly, stay. Taking as my analytical guide, as well as my ethnographic point of departure, the experiences and effects of mobility on a peculiarly positioned group of informants - women married to migrants who are simultaneously mobile and immobile subjects - I trace how mobility has become a premise as much as a consequence of daily existence in my field-site, triggering specific forms of life and the emergence of specific kinds of subjects. I argue that the cultural and social power of mobility reveals itself in Moroccan daily life through a unique, and culturally specific, concept, that of 'l-barra' - literally 'the outside', a term referring mainly to 'Europe' or 'the West'. By tracing the ubiquitous presence of 'the outside' in the lives of migrants' wives, I trace how migration emerges in Central Morocco as a phenomenon that goes beyond the mobility of some, becoming a quality of the life of all.

Paper short abstract:

Outsiders often criticize lifestyle migration, especially when it involves children. The paper discusses Western parents' responses to such criticism in Goa as well as how children experience their mobile lifestyle. For the children, mobility is a state of normality.

Paper long abstract:

An increasing number of Western lifestyle migrant families live several months a year in Goa, India, and the rest of the year in some Western country(ies). The transnationally mobile lifestyle is based on the individual choice of the parents. Although mobility may be accepted as a path toward success, lifestyle migration - a search for a more relaxed life - is often criticized. Among outsiders, the lifestyle of the Westerners in Goa often seems to raise moral panic especially in regard to children who are believed to grow up rootless and miserable because of the mobility. This paper discusses those critical views as well as the Western parents' responses to them. Moreover, the paper focuses on lifestyle migration to Goa from the children's (3-12 years old) perspective. What does it mean to be born into a transnationally mobile lifestyle? How do the Western children in Goa experience their lifestyle and define their belonging? For them, mobility is a state of normality, not something extraordinary or liminal. This provides a fruitful base to approach the lifestyle as a mobile culture. In addition, the paper discusses the limitations that Indian visa regulations pose to such a lifestyle. The paper is based on ethnographic research in Goa.

Paper short abstract:

This paper critically reflects on the (dis)connections between mobility-related practices and the policy-informing ideologies that normalize them. Ethnographic findings help us to develop a critical anthropological perspective on mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Although the majority of the world's population never travels abroad, border-crossing mobilities are increasingly promoted as normality. This paper critically reflects on the (dis)connections between mobility-related practices and the policy-informing ideologies that normalize them. It is a widespread idea that much of what is experienced as 'freedom' nowadays lies in mobility. Transnational mobile practices have become one of the most salient grounds for delineating middle-class standing, which in itself is an important demarcation of belonging within the 'mainstream' of modern society. This association has been further heightened by discourses that trumpet the importance of 'international experience'. How are the meanings, values and impacts of transnational mobilities imagined and shaped by (supra)state institutions and (both mobile and immobile) people? Like much of the scholarly literature on mobility, EU policy tends to conflate different forms of mobility and promotes the use of the concept as a proxy for internationalization, excellence and competitiveness. Such unfettered neo-liberal notions of mobility are tempered by welfarist, community-based or other forms of socio-cultural closure when mobility threatens social reproduction, identity over time or stable long-term returns. Fuelled by right-wing populism and an increasing disappointment in the European project, the EU enlargement, for instance, has led to restricted rights of movement. Ethnographic findings from Belgium and the EU institutions in Brussels help us to develop a critical perspective on mobility, a social theory that simultaneously addresses the normalization of border-crossing movements and the relations of differential power that are generative of these mobilities as well as their contestation.