Paper short abstract:

China's turn toward the global market has displaced hundreds of millions of rural migrants while keeping them administratively tied to rural localities. The gendered and generational dimensions of the transformation of grassroots rural society is examined with field data from 2003 to 2011.

Paper long abstract:

China's decisive turn toward the global marketplace has drawn enormous populations—as many as 200 million at present alone--to urban and coastal centres since Deng Xiaoping's Tour of the South in 1992. Despite working and living in urban centres, often for extended periods of time, these economic migrants remain defined as rural within China's bifurcate household registration system that separates all citizens into rural and urban categories and ties their permanent residence and entitlements to specified locations. The complex results of this administrative mechanism include the challenges of creating and sustaining translocal families, systemic economic disparity between rural and urban populations (as administratively defined), restricted channels of attractive exit from the countryside, substantive exclusion from urban entitlements for most rural migrants, and steep socioeconomic barriers between rural migrants and their urban neighbours. This study departs from a political economy of care and caregiving viewpoint to examine how rural residents--both those remaining in place in the countryside and those in motion to and from the metropoles--work to fashion lives and futures for themselves and their families. The focus is upon the rural end of the continuum and to the gendered and generational distinctions in play as China's rural and national societies are transformed at the grassroots. The research reported is derived from field research in two west China provinces and two metropoles (one interior and one coastal) from 2003 to 2011.

Paper short abstract:

The process of micro urbanization in the rural region of northwestern Guatemala is examined. The principal driving force in this process is migrant workers' remittances from the United States and the consequences tend to be unfavorable for the local society in spite of seeming development.

Paper long abstract:

Guatemala is a state with a population of 15.4 million, and apart from the mega capital and a few other cities, there are islands of small and miniscule urban cores in the sea of predominantly rural country. A notable change in northwestern region is increasing semi-urbanization of rural communities. Even typical "vacant towns," hollow settlements with few people at the center, have become remarkably concentrated and permanent urban features started to appear. The degree of urbanization in each location seems to constitute a polar continuum of the type Robert Redfield conceptualized long time ago. But this folk-urban continuum is not organized geographically in space but chronologically in time. Based on this case material, three issues are discussed: (1) those elements that have changed and constitute "urbanization," (2) causes and driving forces in this process, and (3) the consequences of this transformation. The first issue involves changing settlement pattern, increasing commercialization, formation of dense transportation network and social diversification. The second issue refers to the process of circular migration of undocumented workers between this region and the United States through which a tremendous amount of cash was funneled into traditionalized and immobilized local economy. The third issue is concerned with urban problems of which the most serious is the growth of informal economy and informal sector empowered by illicit human trafficking and drug trading, making the future of this society precarious in spite of its seeming development.

Paper short abstract:

The historical displacement of Aboriginal people to missions and reserves is linked to ethnographic trade in museum artefacts. I argue that a political economy of displacement, circulation and emplacement of Aboriginal people and their material objects continues to produce inequalities today.

Paper long abstract:

The history of displacement of Indigenous Australians as a result of various government policies has been well documented. Going beyond this established literature, this paper explores connections between the removal of Djabugay and other Aboriginal people of the Wet Tropics of North Queensland to missions and reserves and a concurrent ethnographic trade in museum artefacts. I provide an analysis of how Aboriginal people and some of their material products were historically sent along different trajectories and the political agency informing various practices of re-connection and re-emplacement. The paper sheds new light on debates about the political and economic aspects of a history of displacement, circulation and emplacement that continues to produce inequalities today.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the cooperation and contradictions among working class residents and incoming cultural workers in preserving affordable housing, and the urban commons in the face of displacement processes precipitated by globally oriented municipal and national schemes in the United States.

Paper long abstract:

New York City, which has a long history of commitment to public investment in higher education, public housing, rent control, municipal hospitals, and mass transit has become one of the most unequal cities of the 21st century. My long term research in a Brooklyn neighborhood has shown that for working class and middle income New Yorkers it is more difficult to raise a family and enjoy the benefits of the city than it was a generation ago. While New York City spent about $1billion on economic development programs in 2007, they were focused on tax cuts for luxury condominiums. Over the decades, social movements have been calling for municipal funds to be redirected to the development of a broader public welfare, on living wage work, on affordable housing and on the strengthening of all urban neighborhoods in terms of education, health care and a green environment. In my research I have found that cultural workers in poor working class neighborhoods in New York City have contributed to the social mobilization to protect local residents from environmental pollution, as well as massive urban redevelopment and residential displacement. This paper explores the cooperation and contradictions among working class residents and incoming cultural workers in preserving affordable housing, and the urban commons in the face of displacement processes precipitated by globally oriented municipal and national schemes in the United States.

Paper short abstract:

The paper is based on the materials gathered during three years of ethnographic study on immigrants in the city Poznan, Poland. While not presenting a large immigrant population as compared to other EU countries, several phenomena characteristic of migration in the modern era were observed.

Paper long abstract:

The paper is based on the materials gathered during three years of ethnographic study on immigrants in the city Poznan, Poland (2010-2012). Neither the country, nor the city can be regarded as having a significant immigrant population, at least in comparison to many other EU countries (official data say that immigrants comprise less than 1% of the total population, and some experts estimate their number reaches 2%). However, several phenomena characteristic of migration in the modern world can be observed in this case. The number of people on the move is constantly growing. Various categories of migrants can be distinguished, for instance, highly qualified professionals, freelancers, workers desiring to improve their standards of living, people working in services, and those engaging in practices classified by the authorities as illegal. The question is, how all these phenomena reflect wider migration processes in the region or even the world, and to what extent they are locally specific. The question of tolerance towards the Others, implied social inequalities, and emerging new social relations are addressed. At the moment, it is still a work in progress, and the results of it should be ready by next year.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes unsettlement as an existential and social condition both, among the Roma population of Belgrade living in the most degraded "cardboard settlements" dismantled owing to large municipal infrastructure projects, as well as among the receiving communities.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2009 the Roma population living in some of the most degraded "cardboard settlements" in Belgrade had to be resettled owing to the infrastructure projects related to the repairs and construction of the two largest city bridges. This paper will describe and analyze two specific situations which the Roma families, the municipal authorities, as well as the communities designated to receive the displaced families faced under these strained conditions. In the case of the repairs undertaken at the bridge "Gazelle", the drama occurred when the European investment banks, backed by Amnesty International and local NGOs, pressed the Belgrade authorities to adequately resolve the housing and employment problem of the Roma living under the bridge, threatening to freeze the next installment of credit. In the case of dismantling the Roma settlement located next to the Belleville elite housing complex, due to the completion of an auxiliary road to the new "Ada Bridge", the whole city rose to their feet during the public protest of one of the Belgrade communities designated to receive the displaced Roma. The protest involved clashes with the police, peaceful marches, petitions, and an informal visit to the "new neighbors" with the aim of informing them about inadequate living conditions awaiting them at the new location. The discussion of the Belgrade cases within the panel should lead to the comparison of the varieties and scales of unsettlement produced by neo-liberal capitalism world-wide.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will critically examine how middle class residents and their everyday securitization practices produce and reinforce displacement and differential mobility in the built environment.

Paper long abstract:

The processes of displacement and immobility that create inequality and access to urban resources are produced by a number of securitization processes. By securitization I am referring to a nexus of individuals searching for safety within an insecure state, state militarization and production of fearful citizens, and financial securitization of mortgages and other monetary instruments that are attempts at reducing risk at multiple scales. These processes, however, contribute and in some cases even determine the physical, moral, and legal environments that enable displacement and immobility and that differentially impact people. I am particularly interested in how the middle class participates in inscribing and governing the displacement of the poor, the marginal, and more generally the "other." To illustrate the role middle class New Yorkers play in the social segregation and exclusion of others, this paper will examine five of these securitization processes—spatial enclosure; surveillance/policing; legal rules and regulations; private governance; and financialization of everyday life—based on data collected from the ethnographic study of public spaces, cooperative housing, and gated communities in New York City and Long Island, New York. The objective will be to critically examine how middle class residents and their everyday practices produce and reinforce displacement and differential mobility in the built environment.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at Brazilian football players who live or have lived abroad, especially in countries of the "South" (Africa, Asia, Australia or Latin America) and the BRIC countries (Russia, India and China) based on their professional careers and trajectories of mobility.

Paper long abstract:

The dissemination of Brazilian football players abroad, even if not recent, has heightened in the 21st century, presenting a large symbolic impact given its strong presence in the global media and the colonization of masculine imaginations exercised by football. In addition to the player-celebrities at global clubs in Europe, there is also a numerically significant flow of non-famous players who look for work in countries that are unlikely destinations for other Brazilian emigrants such as China, India, Korea, Morocco or Uruguay.

Based on multi-site ethnographic research conducted since 2003 about the careers and lifestyles of Brazilian players living in more than 10 countries, the paper tries to understand the transformations in their daily lives caused by the emigration experience. It also compares them to celebrity players who work at global clubs in Europe. It addresses cultural, political and economic implications of this form of circulation.

I argue that categories such as frontier, migration, immigrant/emigrant and transnationalism should be questioned, given that they are redefined in the flow of specialist laborers - like these athletes - who travel between countries in constant movement.

In the same way that in other professional trajectories, such as those of diplomats or intellectuals, these displacements are constituted in circulations beyond state borders, with periodic returns to the country of origin and that in recent years there has been a more accentuated return. I show that life abroad takes place in protected bubbles, where the relations of the protagonists are more translocal than transnational.