Making Sense of One's Feelings

Canadian universities’ sharpened focus on international students starting in the early 2000s coincided with the growing interest by students from China to study abroad. Various actors, including states, have shaped and benefited from this increase in student migration. I examine how student migrants deal with the feeling rules transmitted to them, as an under-explored site where the migration experience is shaped and justified. In light of the work of Sara Ahmed and Arlie Russell Hochschild, I explore how students feel and are asked to feel about their studies abroad, and how emotions work in framing and maintaining the migration narrative. Through Ahmed’s concept of skin of the collective, I argue that Chinese student migrants are affected by and contribute to an affective atmosphere regarding their years of study in Canada as specific feeling rules help them make sense of similar experiences of confusion, frustration, self-reliance, and responsibility. Based on interviews with students and university staffers, I discuss the links between this type of migration, the actors involved, and the emotional landscapes students navigate in order to highlight how they interpret their own experiences and how these interpretations contribute to maintaining a general narrative about being Chinese international students in Canada.

Does it matter where they come from? This is the duty of humanity

The author describes his personal experience as a young refugee from a revolution in Europe, through his later intimate contact with three refugee communities in the course of decades of work in Asia, and reflects upon the greater context of the numerous issues impacting on decision-making and enveloping the sphere of refugees. Especially in the current tide of millions displaced, it is not possible in times of crises to simply segue in an attempt to harmonize the exceedingly complex situation. All components of the inter-related issues and results, namely causes of flight, reception outside their home countries, plans for resettlement and actual resettlement, as well as retaining some level of communication with those left behind need to be understood through improved, proactive planning and preparation.

An arts-based, peer-mediated Story Board Narrative Method in research on identity, belonging and future aspirations of forced migrant youth

An innovative, arts-based, peer-mediated Story Board Narrative method of data collection in an ongoing, multi-sited Youth Migration Project is described. The research explores negotiated identity, belonging and future aspirations of forced migrants aged 11 to 17 years old living temporarily in Thailand and Malaysia. The unique data collection method centres meaning making by youth about their forced migration and adaptation in often hostile and precarious conditions. Primary data are youths’ narrative accounts of an arts-based Story Board that each youth creates over a four week period and then presents to a small group of migrant peers. Follow-up sessions invite youth to revise their Story-Board and their narrative, with inquiry led by peers rather than research facilitators. The method positions youth as experts and in control of their own stories. Story Board Narratives are audio-taped, transcribed, and content analyzed by a team of investigators who also have migration experiences. Unlike other visual methods that prescribe drawings and focus on the visual production, this method allows youth to direct their own visual representations and the narrative associated with them. The method enables a developmental process whereby youths’ introspection, discussions, and representations of the impacts of forced migration evolve over time. This emergent, participatory, arts-based method as the centerpiece in a mixed method research design yields richly nuanced and often unexpected findings that may not have been generated through methods that are more prescriptive, structured, investigator-centered, and deductive.

Migrants, Refugees, and the Politics of Immigrant Categorization

The 1951 Refugee Convention was established after WWII to protect those escaping persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group membership. Although roughly three-quarters of all states are signatories and most states purport to defend the rights of refugees, in practice many who have been displaced due to persecution or fear are labeled as migrants rather than refugees and are consequently denied asylum. Using the cases of Haitians and Central American unaccompanied children, this paper argues that U.S. policies toward these two populations demonstrate the limitations of the Convention and the role of foreign policy in refugee policy.

Bordering Through ‘Crisis’

This article engages with the development and expansion of border industries in the global North. Recently, the state-led industries have grown in response to the rising number of irregular migrants contesting the borders of the global North. Situated within the constructed narrative of ‘crisis’, border industries are both materially and discursively produced as a direct response to the perceived threat of irregular migrant populations. The article interrogates the development of border industries from both the state and migrant perspectives. The purpose of the article is to examine not only the emergence of these border industries but to highlight the detrimental and deadly impact they continue to have on migrant journeys, ensuring the continuation of the structural and direct violence of borders. The development of these industries, particularly from the state-led perspective, is indicative of the violent, exclusionary practice and enactment of borders. The paper adds to the calls for rethinking bordering practices while simultaneously challenging the perpetuation and continuation of a hegemonic global apartheid regime constructed through state bordering practices in the global North.

Facebook, Polymedia, Social Capital, and a Digital Family of Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers: A Case Study of The Voice of Singapore’s Invisible Hands

Rarely do female migrant domestic workers (MDWs) get a chance to narrate their own migration experience. Voice of Singapore’s Invisible Hands (or The Voice), which started as a literary community on Facebook, aims to reshape the dominant—negative—discourse on migrant workers, especially Indonesian MDWs, by providing access to their literary work. In a transnational migration setting, Facebook has been used as a tool to maintain people’s relations with their families and friends back home, as well as for making new friends. Connections gained between individuals become a form of social capital where people build social networks and establish norms of reciprocity and a sense of trustworthiness. In the early establishment of The Voice, Facebook helped its initiator gain social capital. Ultimately, this social capital benefts the community and its members. Over the course of The Voice’s development, other social media platforms, namely WhatsApp, Skype, and email, have been used in addition to Facebook because they offer a different set of features and affordances of privacy and frequency. This practice of switching from one media to another is an illustration of polymedia, in which all media operate as an integrated structure and each is defned in relation to other media. This study, which focused on the relation of Facebook, polymedia, and social capital in the context of The Voice, used integrated online and offine qualitative data-gathering methodologies. The study found that Facebook initially helped both the community, which began as a learning space for Indonesian MDWs who wanted to narrate their stories about their home and family, and its members in their efforts to reshape the negative dominant discourse on migrant workers. It was the affordances of polymedia, however, that paved the way for the formation later on of a digital family in which the members provide emotional support for each other, similar to what family and close friends do.

Singaporean Societies: Multimedia Communities of Student Migration

As young Singaporeans are evaluating their obligations towards their parents at home, the state of Singapore is implementing policies to entrench long-term connection between overseas Singaporean students and their families by using nancial support to guide over- seas Singaporean student societies. These methods reach far beyond Singapore’s borders and involve a combination of online and of ine communities of practice that bring young overseas Singaporeans closer together by setting social boundaries across multiple media. Young Singaporeans learn about studying overseas through online communities, and Sin- gaporean societies seek to control that form of communication. In this paper, the author describes the worldwide state-funded and student-run Singaporean societies and how they seek to govern overseas students’ relationships with family at home using methods such as social media, nances, and parties. Drawing from ethnographic and online methods of inquiry over three months in 2015, this article explores how students experienced Singa- porean societies as a tool to access social and nancial resources, which set boundaries for them when reevaluating their responsibilities at home while they live abroad. The author looks at the critical language that is present in an online community of young Singaporeans and shows how Singaporean societies limit opportunities for criticism.

Photo Essay: “Vietnamese Here Contemporary Art and Refections” Art Exhibition, Melbourne, Australia, May 2017

Anh Nguyen was co-curator, with Nadia Rhook, of the “Vietnamese Here Contemporary Art and Refections” exhibition about Vietnamese migrants in Melbourne, Australia, May 4–26, 2017. Phuong Ngo’s work, the basis of this photo essay, was part of the exhibition, which featured visual art, performance art, and readings refecting on Vietnamese heritage, history, and memory in the diaspora. The exhibition was sponsored by the Australian Research Council’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellowship, of which Anh Nguyen is a researcher.

Digital Family Ethnography: Lessons from Fieldwork in Australia

This article discusses the opportunities and constraints in using a digital family ethnography for qualitative studies amongst Indonesians in Australia. The frst half of the article highlights the opportunities that online and offine participant observation can provide in terms of understanding family transnational networks. Going beyond an ego-based narrative approach in interviews, digital family ethnography shows how social network analysis and refexivity can bring depth to a study on family by including the researcher’s position vis-à-vis the research participants. The second half of the article discusses challenges in using these combined online and offine methods and how these challenges might be mitigated in future studies. In particular, the article look at problems faced with interviews, multimedia usage, and social media analysis related to the researcher’s background and in working with different age groups. In the transnational family context, social media and electronic communication are critical parts of contemporary ethnographic methodologies, and the discussion thus centres on including online personhood in the research. The study concludes that although digital family ethnography methodologies have limitations, they can be used to account for the transforming relationships that make up family mobility.

Singaporean Societies: Multimedia Communities of Student Migration

Studies of home language use tend to focus on macro-level language changes and verbal communication rather than on micro-level analyses of family communication. This makes it diffcult to form a nuanced picture of the relations among diverse resources deployed in transnational family communication. In this paper, we address this issue by reporting results from a preliminary study of the micro-level communicative interactions of a frst-generation transnational Australian Vietnamese family who have settled in Melbourne, Australia. Through an in-depth analysis of a 20-minute video clip, we capture intersections in the rich, diverse communicative resources used by the family as they watched a favourite English television program while simultaneously keeping in contact with family members overseas. Our analysis shows that transnational family communication patterns involve complex displays of language use, silence, touch, movement, and spatial orientation, which together enable the family to communicate in the here and now with individuals near and far. We use the multiplicity framework to interpret the fuidity of multimodal communication, intimacy, and continuity across space.