Better Legal Or Illegal?: Transnationalism and Status Paradoxes at Migrants from Romania in Nuremberg and Milan (original) (raw)
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Focaal, 2008
This issue brings together the work of researchers who seek to illuminate the class configurations of contemporary global diasporas. Contributions proceed by problematizing the relationship between political mobilization and the class locations of women and men as they negotiate and renegotiate the social conditions under which they make a living as émigrés, people who are subject to and participants in the processes of global change. Although class and culture, as well as mobility and fixity, are often presented as oppositional lenses though which to view global transformations, articles in this issue explore the possibilities for translation of particularized local or cultural concerns into broader collective mobilizations of class activism, nationalist claims, or struggles for entitlement in the circumscribed political spaces migrants seek to create. The gender, ethnic, local, national, and other cultural components of identity and class formation are made explicit as contributor...
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Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2008
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Nordic journal of migration research, 2012
Transnational migration studies need to be framed within a contextual, dynamic and processual analysis that recognises the interconnectedness of different identities and hierarchical structures relating to, for example, gender, ethnicity, 'race' and class at different levels in society. This article looks at a range of problematic issues in migration studies while also engaging with migration as a gendered phenomenon. I propose a particular analytical sensitivity, which attends to the centrality of power and social hierarchy, building on the idea of intersectionality as a heuristic device. Finally, I consider the potential of using a translocational lens, which is also able to pay attention to the challenges posed by transnationalism.
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Much of the literature on migrant transnationalism focuses on the ways that specific sociocultural institutions have been modified in the course of being stretched across the globe. Yet migrant transnational practices are involved in more deep-seated patterns of change or structural transformation. Such modes of transformation concern: 1) an enhanced ‘bifocality’ of outlooks underpinning migrant lives lived here-and-there; such dual orientations have considerable influence on transnational family life and may continue to affect identities among subsequent post-migration generations; 2) heightened challenges to ‘identities-borders-orders’ stemming from migrants’ political affiliations in more than one nation-state; these particularly arise around questions of dual citizenship and nationality; and 3) potentially profound impacts on economic development by way of the sheer scale and evolving means of remittance sending; money transfer services, hometown associations and micro-finance i...