Search

This article explores privilege in migration. Rather than focus on practices of privilege at micro-scales, the article examines how privilege in migration is ordered and disciplined through meso- and macro-level infrastructures (transnational organisations, higher education institutes, and governmental visa policies). The article questions where a pervasive discourse of mobility as achievement comes from and how it becomes materialised in the promotion and facilitation of forms of mobility. It argues that privilege in mobility becomes disciplined through neoliberal discourses of globalisation that idealise mobility as cosmopolitanism, whilst simultaneously producing this as an elite subject positioning.

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.

The international mobility of young people is often seen as a mechanism through which to develop intercultural skills. This chapter looks at the encounter with difference among British graduates who had undertaken an international work placement. It highlights that these young people framed difference both in terms of culture and lifecourse. The chapter shows that forming friendships was a priority for young people to mitigate against feelings of liminality, which in turn facilitated encounters and opportunities to develop intercultural skills.

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.

This Special Issue explores the directions through which we can take research on the migration industries. In this introduction, we review existing research on migration industries to look at how this explores questions on how migration industries foster, assist and constrain migration. In doing so, we argue that these questions have primarily been approached from three different perspectives: structuralist, labour market and mobilities, but these perspectives often speak past rather than to one another. In highlighting how these approaches can work together, the question that the Special Issue explores becomes how do the migration industries function and when/where/how do they intersect with other domains of migration. In highlighting the contributions that each paper in the special issue makes to answering this question, we show how an understanding of the migration industries is not just a research field in itself, but can strengthen our understanding of migration.

Research on skilled international migration has developed significantly in the last 25 years. This paper reviews progress in understanding the structuring power of transnational companies and international recruitment agencies in shaping global talent flows. It argues that four main strands in the research literature flow from this: work in international human resource management; analysis of the migration-development nexus; studies of city development associated with creative knowledge workers; and cultural geographies of expatriate identities. This paper interprets trends in research on these topics in relation to the wider issue of how some social scientists have become more reflexive about their engagement with research and thus have re-positioned the nature of what is considered to be the contemporary research agenda on skilled migration. This re-positioning is recognised to have strengths but also difficulties from a policy perspective.

This paper argues that we need to pay more attention to the spaces in which the (knowledge) economy operates and industry sectors are brought into being. Following research that examines the performative nature of the economy, the paper sees the trade show as not merely a reflection of an industry sector, but as a space that produces it into being. Looking at the Global Mobility Industry, an industry directed towards the management of expatriates, the paper uses narratives to uncover performance as a way to understand the practice of knowledge, specifically benchmarking about talent management, at the Expat Show. Keywords: trade shows, Global Mobility Industry, expatriate, talent management, performativity

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.