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Recent debates in migration studies have emphasized the importance of attending to the urban as part of an effort to respatialize the study of mobility and transnationalism. This paper critically expands on these interventions through a more detailed engagement with ideas of relationality and territoriality moving beyond permanent settlement to consider temporary migrants, and considering urban centres outside North America and Europe through discussion of cities in the Asia-Pacific. The paper discusses two potential avenues towards a more sophisticated conceptualization of transnational mobilities and urban spatialities: moving beyond rupture in analysis of migrant settlement, and interrogating transnational and urban mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic 'playing field' in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America's future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890-1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States' expansion in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article calls attention to the potential of ethnographic studies in furthering our understanding of migration and circulation systems. The dominant conceptualization of migration and migrant adjustment as a one-way journey is inadequate, as many individuals and groups forge connections and social fields across expanses of space and time. There has been insufficient attention directed toward understanding migrations as cultural events rich in meaning for individuals, families, social groups, communities and nations. Three recent ethnographic studies of disparate migrant groups in North America are presented as exemplars. A careful reading and interpretation of each brings to light key ideas in migration and culture, culminating in four overarching themes that serve as prolegomena for a research agenda in migration and postmodernity: dislodgement from place, entrainment in migrant cultures, the ambivalence of migration, and identity construction and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]