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limits between snow and sky is exchanged for the sublime – but strikingly reassuring – juxtaposition of sea and mountains, pointing to similar evocations in other migration narratives, such as those of Romeo Gill and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen, which I will address below. However, as a highly affective and symbolic mobilisation of stereotypes of Northernness, Amelie's description is surprisingly atypical. Most migration narratives like hers published in Norwegian, dealing with first- or so-called 1.5-generation migrants (born abroad but growing up in Norway), tend to avoid
What does expatriate mean? Who gets described as an expatriate rather than a migrant? And why do such distinctions matter? Following the expatriate explores these questions by tracing the postcolonial genealogy of the category expatriate from mid-twentieth-century decolonisation to current debates about migration, and examining the current stakes of debates about expatriates. As the book shows, the question of who is an expatriate was as hotly debated in 1961 as it is today. Back then, as now, it was entangled in the racialised, classed and gendered politics of migration and mobility. Combining ethnographic and historical research, the book discusses uses of the expatriate across academic literature, corporate management and international development practice, personal memory projects, and urban diaspora spaces in The Hague and Nairobi. It tells situated stories about the category’s making and remaking, its contestation and the lived experience of those labelled expatriate. By attending to racialised, gendered and classed struggles over who is an expatriate, the book shows that migration categories are at the heart of how intersecting material and symbolic social inequalities are enacted today. Any project for social justice thus needs to dissect and dismantle categories like the expatriate, and the book offers innovative analytical and methodological strategies to advance this project.
This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and representation in different borderscapes. It provides fresh insight into the ways in which borders, borderscapes and migration are imagined and narrated by offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border. The case studies in the volume contribute to the methodological renewal of border studies and present ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. The case studies address the role of borders in narrative and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, video art and survivor testimonies in a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from northern Europe, via Mediterranean and Mexican–US borderlands to Chinese borderlands. The disciplinary approaches include critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies and political geography. The volume argues that borderlands and border-crossings (such as those by migrants) are present in public discourse and more private, everyday experience. This volume addresses their mediation through various stories, photographs, films and other forms. It suggests that narratives and images are part of the borderscapes in which border-crossings and bordering processes take place, contributing to the negotiation of borders in the public sphere. As the case studies show, narratives and images enable identifying various top-down and bottom-up discourses to be heard and make visible different minority groups and constituencies.
The current conjuncture is marked by increasingly bifurcated mobility regimes. Some movements are demonised while others are glorified. Some border crossers are greeted with violence, while others are impelled to mobilise. Especially in the rich countries of the Global North migration has become one of the most hotly debated topics and a key site for the development of new forms of governance and profit generation. States are devising new and intensifying old technologies of control and surveillance and increasingly, yet always selectively
finds that in its rush to serve multinational business, IHRM literature still helps normalise asymmetrical corporate power relations and geographies. A few years before IHRM began noting the new international work, migration studies discovered expatriates – and at least initially followed IHRM's lead by studying expatriates as corporate assignees from the Global North. Chapter 1 critically examined this focus and the equation of the expatriate with the ‘highly skilled migrant’. This chapter follows on from that discussion by focusing on the fact
From studying expatriates to studying the category expatriate Expatriates are primarily researched in international human resource management (IHRM) literature and migration studies, two well-established and diverse yet largely separate academic fields. IHRM literature has studied organisational migrants under the rubric of the expatriate since at least the 1960s. Given this historical depth and its volume of publications, IHRM can be seen as the main academic field producing knowledge on expatriates. The principal focus is
In 2020 the convergence of Brexit, COVID-19 and the ‘migrant crisis’ put Kent in the headlines as never before: images of refugees on beaches, lorries queued on the county’s motorways and the white cliffs of Dover crumbling into the sea were all used to support claims that severing ties with the EU was the best – or worst – thing the UK had ever done. In this coastal driftwork, Phil Hubbard considers the past, present and future of this corner of England, alighting on the key sites which symbolise the changing relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours. Moving from the geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel to the cultivation of oysters at Whitstable, from Derek Jarman’s celebrated garden at Dungeness to the art-fuelled gentrification of Margate, Borderland bridges geography, history and cultural studies to show how ideas of national identity and belonging take shape at the coast. In doing so, the author argues that the ongoing crises of global displacement, climate change and ecological disaster require an expansive geographical imagination, with the current fixation on the sovereignty of our national borders appearing increasingly futile at a time of rapid global change.
In twenty-first-century Chinese cities there are hundreds of millions of rural migrants who are living temporary lives, suspended between urban and rural China. They are the unsung heroes of the country’s ‘economic miracle’, yet are regarded as second-class citizens in both a cultural, material and legal sense. China’s citizenship challenge tells the story of how civic organisations set up by some of these rural migrants challenge this citizenship marginalisation. The book argues that in order to effectively address the problems faced by migrant workers, these NGOs must undertake ‘citizenship challenge’: the transformation of migrant workers’ social and political participation in public life, the broadening of their access to labour and other rights, and the reinvention of their relationship to the city. By framing the NGOs’ activism in terms of citizenship rather than class struggle, this book offers a valuable contribution to the field of labour movement studies in China. The monograph also proves exceptionally timely in the context of the state’s repression of these organisations in recent years, which, as the book explores, was largely driven by their citizenship-altering activism.
and geopolitical influence – struggles fought also on the grounds of migration and mobility. This book is about the category ‘expatriate’. Who are expatriates? What does expatriate mean? (How) do they differ from other categories of migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? This book engages such questions as it follows the expatriate through three sites to tell situated stories of the category's history and politics, its making and remaking, contestation and lived experience. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, the
’. The chapter also explores the broader stakes of this expatriate by interrogating its interaction with the migration politics of The Hague and the Netherlands. The EAC website welcomes visitors with an enticing image of pale blue archival folders amidst scattered old papers. Clicking through to the page ‘Collection’, the visitor reads that ‘We collect material from expatriates and their families during and after their stay abroad. Our definition of “expatriate” is anyone who lives temporarily in a country other than their “home” country’ (EAC