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Young people are facing uncertain futures. Neoliberal states place an onus on the individual to secure employment in order to provide for their own needs. In navigating their pathways to adulthood in the context of individualisation, an increasing number of young people are embarking on undergraduate degrees in order to secure advantage in the labour market. However, the proliferation of higher education means some students engage with activities which set them apart from others, securing positional advantage. Geographical interest in modes of distinction have explored volunteering and studying overseas as strategies for individuals to acquire capital. This paper provides a novel view of international student mobility to consider the International Work Placement (IWP), an institutionally sanctioned extended period during undergraduate study where students gain overseas work experience. We argue that IWPs are framed by the students who undertake them within a hierarchy of experience which enables the bearer an advantage over others. The IWP is perceived to inscribe upon the CV not only a formalised record of professional level work, but also intercultural skills and personality traits, conveying confidence, adventure and self-reliance. As outward mobility is linked to employability in a global labour market, international experience is framed as an ‘aspiration’ for all (UUK, 2017). Yet this paper draws attention to the inequalities which can be perpetuated by such initiatives, as some individuals are able to secure advantage through IWPs which others are unable to access.

This paper develops geographical work that is attentive to, and critical of, how safety is lived and narrated. In contrast to previous work on safety that focuses on fear, the paper looks at safety as something more than aspiration for women. To do so, the paper utilises the metaphor of the ‘expatriate bubble’ to explore how safety is constructed and experienced by privileged migrants within Singapore. Utilising research from two projects, we argue that we need to think about how gender and Othering intersect to construct safety. In doing so, we think about how we can use conceptualisations of privileged migrants to research how safety can be understood and therefore practised more widely.

In this paper, I argue for a need to expand our understanding of the role that self-help plays in the constitution of identities. Using the example of the Third Culture Kid (TCK) industry, I argue that self-help acts as a space of biopower through its role in managing the emotional experience of having been globally mobile as a child. To do this, the paper looks at how the TCK, as a subject, is surfaced as comfort in relation to the ascribed grief and insecurity of identity that is associated with childhood global mobility. Data are derived from a multi-sited ethnography, including a narrative analysis of TCK literature, reader discussions, participant observation at a TCK event and an online survey. The argument contributes to scholarly critiques of self-help by examining processes of production and consumption of TCK subjectivity enacted through the TCK industry. Thereby, the paper contends that in researching self-help we need a wider understanding of its production and consumption, how people are persuaded to use it, and how they respond to ideas presented within it.

Culture shock is when the experience of difference is seen to emotionally overwhelm a migrant. In this paper, I look at how the Global Mobility Industry, an industry that acts as an outsourcer for international human resource management processes, seeks to treat culture shock in the corporate expatriate. Through arguing that different cultures become medicalised as a risk to the expatriate, the paper makes two key points. First, there is a need to understand the way in which migration industries play a role in producing how migrants experience migration, with the paper illustrating a way through which we can conceptually engage with how the Global Mobility Industry manages encounter. Second, through this I argue that there are spaces out with the ‘contact zone’ through which encounter is learnt, highlighting a need and providing a theoretical basis for how research on migrant identities can explore different sites through which migrant subjectivities are produced as part of their journey’s abroad.

In this paper, I explore how British migrants in Singapore utilise the term ‘expatriate’ to denote themselves as being a different kind of migrant. The way in which a migrant is distinguished from an expatriate is the question of return—the migrant is expected to stay, while an expatriate is expected to return to their home country. Yet the term ‘expatriate’ often becomes one that is axiomatically applied to Western migrants living abroad. This paper argues that we should not see the term ‘expatriate’ as axiomatic in describing this type of mobility, as we need to pay attention to the political context in which the term is enmeshed. The paper therefore argues that we need to understand how expatriation is not only understood as an identity in relation to the place of stay abroad, but in comparison to migration as a whole. First, the paper looks at how British migrants in Singapore draw upon racialised understandings of immigration debates to portray expatriates as being ‘good’ migrants. Second, it considers how the term expatriate is deployed in social sciences literature itself.

In this paper, I advance debates that argue that we need to reconceptualise global work from a mobilities perspective by looking how the representation of movement connects with the experience of movement. By looking at the imaginative geographies of Singapore for the British corporate expatriate, I explore how the qualitative representation of place is changing within managerial discourses from a hardship to an opportunity. In doing so, the paper argues that we need to combine understandings of the global economic flows that move some transnational migrants with their everyday lived experiences in order to explore what qualitatively makes work global. This allows us to highlight the multiplicity of ways in which transnational migrants can be understood rather than trying to impose singularity.