A global sense of migrant places: towards a place perspective in the study of migrant transnationalism

Abstract

Contemporary transnational migrants have complex social lives in that they live in a number of different cross‐border social networks at the same time. Most transmigration scholars try to grasp this social complexity of migrant transnationalism by using a network lens. In this article, I argue in favour of adding a place lens to the analytical tool kit of transmigration scholars. Although a network lens works well for studying the internal complexity of cross‐border social networks, a place lens is more useful for gaining an understanding of their external complexity, in other words the ways these networks interrelate. By drawing on geographical and anthropological literature on open and relational understandings of place, and especially on the work of Doreen Massey and Arjun Appadurai, I shall show that interrelating migrant networks are visible in place in two ways. On the one hand, migrant places are meeting places of social networks, and on the other hand they are sites (translocalities) where transmigrants can reach out to people in other places.

Reframing the Favela, Remapping the City: Territorial Embeddedness and (Trans) Locality in ‘Framing Content’ on Brazilian Favela Blogs

“…At the same time, however, I will show that despite the territorial embeddedness it conveyed, the framing content constructed by the bloggers also made visible, and affirmed, the connections between Maré, other favelas, and the city as a whole, thereby drawing attention to the translocality (Appadurai 1996;Gielis 2009) of these locations and the identities tied to them. As I argue, this framing content can thus be understood as an exercise in resignifying and remapping the relationships between different empirical scales of locality (and associated identities)…”

Following People, Visiting Places, and Reconstructing Networks. Researching the Spanish Second Generation in Switzerland

“…An analysis of transnationalism as an everyday phenomenon needs, therefore, to take into account the localities where the social practice that constitutes these relations and communications across borders, takes place. Locality therefore represents, on the one hand, the social context in which migrants and other transnational actors are rooted, and it stands, on the other hand, for the nodes of the networks (Gielis 2009). Some authors have called such places translocal because they are meaningful owing to their connection across national borders (Brickell and Datta 2011;Smith 2011).…”

Place Belonging in a Mobile World. A Case Study of Migrant Professionals

“…This strand of research opposes de-emphasising the geographical dimension of the life of a migrant professional [Gielis 2009;Pries 2005]. Based on criticism of the idea of the hyper-and placeless mobility of the global elite, some scholars started to explore the relevance of identity and locality in the life of migrant professionals.…”