Paper long abstract:

While the bulk of globalisation studies follow people away from home and address migration aspirations as migration issues, this paper focuses on pre-migration dynamics as a relatively separate study field. The paper focuses on the imaginations of futures away from home among young urban and rural youths in Bangladesh. It is evident that emigration is the ambition of ever more Bangladeshis, from all segments of society, although any estimation of the number of emigrants would be a wild guess since many migrants have adopted illegal channels of emigration. Newspapers are full of advertisements for international scholarships, jobs, and visa brokers, and with stories about the dark sides of migration endeavours. This paper tries to analyse the formation of migration aspirations in the context of wider interconnections between global and local transformations and examines how such - culturally embedded - imaginations link up to local (re-)evaluations of human security and risk.