Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa

This timely text explores the lives, histories and identities of white British-born immigrants in South Africa, twenty years after the post-apartheid Government took office. Drawing on over sixty in depth biographical interviews and ethnographic work in Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town, Daniel Conway and Pauline Leonard analyse how British immigrants' relate to, participate in and embody South Africa's complex racial and political history. Through their everyday lives, political and social attitudes, relationships with the places and spaces of South Africa, as well as their expectations of the future, the complexities of their transnational, raced and classed identities and senses of belonging are revealed. Migration, Space and Transnational Identities makes an important contribution to sociological, geographical, political and anthropological debates on transnational migration, whiteness, Britishness and lifestyle, tourism and labour migration.

The Olympics, transnational law and legal transplants: the International Olympic Committee, ambush marketing and ticket touting

This paper concerns the origination, development and emergence of what might be termed ‘Olympic law’. This has an impact across borders and with transnational effect. It examines the unique process of creation of these laws, laws created by a national legislature to satisfy the commercial demands of a private body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC). It begins by critically locating the IOC and Olympic law and examining Olympic law as a transnational force. Using two case studies, those of ambush marketing and ticket touting, it demonstrates how private entities can be the drivers of specific, self-interested legislation when operating as a transnational organisation from within the global administrative space and notes the potential dangers of such legal transplants.

Durkheim, ethnography and suicide: researching young male suicide in the transnational London Alevi-Kurdish community

This study of the unusually high incidence of young male suicides in the transnational Alevi-Kurdish community in London, demonstrates the benefits of combining a Durkheimian structural approach with a qualitatively driven ethnographic methodology. Examination of the life experiences of those who committed suicide is located within the underlying social organization of the transnational community in which the suicides occurred, enabling us to explore unanticipated events that render certain groups more at risk of committing suicide. Interviews with significant others facilitated a deeper understanding of the personal life paths of those who committed suicide. The suicide cases followed a particular assimilation trajectory that gradually positioned them in a “rainbow underclass”, an anomic social position leading to suicide. Despite the sensitivity of the subject, participants appreciated the opportunity to discuss their experience frankly and contribute towards a better understanding of the underlying causes in a desperate attempt to prevent further suicides.

Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context

An edited collection based on the successful conference at Cornerhouse in 2009 on Polish cinema in a transnational context, examining co-productions, exile directors, Polish actors in foreign films and the shifting international recpetion of Polish cinema

Book review: Chinese transnational networks

Review of Chinese transnational networks, edited by Tan Chee-Beng (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)

Spacing abstraction: capitalism, law and the metropolis

In considering contemporary accounts of the interrelations of economic, legal and urban forms of social relations in the emergence of a global capitalist modernity, this paper argues that politico-juridical imaginaries of new forms of transnational universality have tended to be limited by virtue of both an anachronistic recourse to spatial models of the polis and a failure to confront the ineliminability of abstraction to any idea of global social interconnectivity. In such terms, it argues, Lefebvre’s famous call for a ‘right to the city’ needs to be reinscribed as a properly modern right to the metropolis; one that would allow us to conceive of the possibility of new kinds of relation between individual and collective subjectivity and the development of abstract social forms.

How does a house remember? heritage-ising return migration in an Indonesian-Chinese house museum in Guangdong, PRC

This paper is an attempt to integrate heritage and museum studies through exploring the complex relationship between the materiality of architecture and social memories with a house museum of return migration in Guangdong, PRC as a case study. It unveils that the ongoing process of memory is intrinsically intertwined with spatial and temporal dimensions of the physical dwelling and built environment and the wider social-historical context and power relations shaping them. I argue that it is the house as ‘object of exhibit’ just as much as the exhibits inside the house that materialises the turbulent and traumatic migratory experience of Returned Overseas Chinese, embodies their memories and exposes the contested nature of museumification. By looking at the socially and geographically marginalised dwelling of return migrants, the house draws people’s attention to the often neglected importance of conceptual periphery in re-theorising what is often assumed to be the core of heritage value. It points to the necessity to integrate displaced, diasporic, transnational subjects to heritage and museum studies that have been traditionally framed within national and territorial boundaries.

Theorising and analysing digital labour: from global value chains to modes of production

This paper considers the following question—where do computers, laptops and mobile phones come from and who produced them? Specific cases of digital labour are examined—the extraction of minerals in African mines under slave-like conditions; ICT manufacturing and assemblage in China (Foxconn); software engineering in India; call centre service work; software engineering at Google within Silicon Valley; and the digital labour of internet prosumers/users. Empirical data and empirical studies concerning these cases are systematically analysed and theoretically interpreted. The theoretical interpretations are grounded in Marxist political economy. The term ‘global value chain’ is criticised in favour of a complex and multidimensional understanding of Marx’s ‘mode of production’ for the purposes of conceptualizing digital labour. This kind of labour is transnational and involves various modes of production, relations of production and organisational forms (in the context of the productive forces). There is a complex global division of digital labour that connects and articulates various forms of productive forces, exploitation, modes of production, and variations within the dominant capitalist mode of production.

Defining the nation, defining public television: discourses of publics on public service television in post-communist Latvia

Institutional and political economy approaches have long dominated the study of post-Communist public broadcasting, as well as the entire body of post-Communist media transformations research, and the enquiry into publics of public broadcasting has traditionally been neglected. Though media scholars like to talk about a deep crisis in the relationship between public broadcasters and their publics in former Communist bloc countries across Central and Eastern Europe, little has been done to understand the relationship between public broadcasters and their publics in these societies drawing on qualitative audience research tradition. Building on Hirschman’s influential theory of ‘exit, voice and loyalty’, which made it possible to see viewing choices audiences make as an act of agency, in combination with theoretical tools developed within the framework of social constructionist approaches to national imagination and broadcasting, my study focuses on the investigation of responses publics of the Latvian public television LTV have developed vis-à-vis its role as contributing to the nation-building project in this ex-Soviet Baltic country. With the help of focus groups methodology and family ethnography, the thesis aims to explore the relationship between the way members of the ethno-linguistic majority of Latvian-speakers and the sizeable ethno-linguistic minority of Russian-speakers conceptualize the public broadcaster LTV, as well as understand the concept of public broadcasting more generally, and the way they define the national ‘we’. The study concludes that what I call publics of LTV employ Hirschman’s described exit mechanism as a voice-type response. Through their rejection of public television which, for a number of complex reasons they consider to be a state broadcaster serving the interests of those in power they voice their protest against the country’s political establishment and in the case of its Russian-speaking publics also against the government’s ethno-nationalistic conception of the national ‘we’. I also find that though having exited from the public broadcaster LTV, its publics have not abandoned the idea of public broadcasting as such. At least at a normative level the public broadcasting ideals are recognized, accepted and valued, though they are not necessarily associated with the country’s de jure institutional embodiment of public broadcasting LTV. Rejection of the public television has also not made its non-loyal publics ‘less citizens’. The commercial rivals of LTV, be they national or, in the case of Russian-speaking audiences, localized transnational Russian television, have allowed their viewers to exercise citizenship and be loyal nationals day in day out in a way that is more liberal and flexible than the hegemonic form of citizenship and national imagination of the public television LTV can offer.

Does more cycling mean more diversity in cycling?

In low-cycling countries, cycling is not evenly distributed across genders and age groups. In the UK, men are twice as likely as women to cycle to work and cycling tends to be dominated by younger adults. By contrast, in higher cycling countries and cities, gender differences are low, absent, or in the opposite direction. Such places also lack the UK's steady decline in cycling among those aged over 35 years. Over the past fifteen years some UK local areas have seen increases in cycling. This paper analyses data from the English and Welsh Census 2001 and 2011 to examine whether such increases are associated with greater diversity among cyclists. We find that in areas where cycling has increased, there has been no increase in the representation of females, and a decrease in the representation of older adults. We discuss potential causes and policy implications. Importantly, simply increasing cycling modal share has not proved sufficient to create an inclusive cycling culture. The UK's culturally specific factors limiting female take-up of cycling seem to remain in place, even where cycling has gone up. Creating a mass cycling culture may require deliberately targeting infrastructure and policies towards currently under-represented groups.

Media ‘Globalization’ as Survival Strategy for Authoritarian Regimes In the Arab Middle East

Sakr challenges the notion that transnational media technologies have forced states in the Arab Middle East to cede ever more control to non-state players since the 1990s. Taking account of a long history of foreign political engineering in Arab countries, she probes the realities of Arab broadcasting privatization, intra-regional harmonization of government communication policies, and external financial support for media freedom and reform, to show how Arab governments were large successfully in harnessing forces implicated in media globalization in a way that entrenched authoritarian elements of the status quo. The findings validate an alternative to globalization theory that places a dual focus on the agency of national ruling elites and the international structures that underpin the power of those elites today, as in the past.

Cosmopolitanism and the relevance of ‘zombie concepts’: the case of anomic suicide amongst Alevi Kurd youth

Against Beck’s claims that conventional sociological concepts and categories are zombie categories, this paper argues that Durkheim’s theoretical framework in which suicide is a symptom of an anomic state of society can help us understand the diversity of trajectories that transnational migrants follow and that shape their suicide rates within a cosmopolitan society. Drawing on ethnographic data collected on eight suicides and three attempted suicide cases of second-generation male Alevi Kurdish migrants living in London, this article explains the impact of segmented assimilation/adaptation trajectories on the incidence of suicide and how their membership of a ‘new rainbow underclass’, as a manifestation of cosmopolitan society, is itself an anomic social position with a lack of integration and regulation.