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Brain gain? High-skilled migrants, emotional citizenship, and multi-level engagement policies in South Asia and in Europe
Short Abstract:
This panel examines multi-level government policies in Europe and South Asia that seek to establish emotional engagement with South Asian skilled migrants. It assesses the impact of such policy efforts on migrants and questions to what extent these policies are successful.
Long Abstract:
The growing economic and political clout of the highly skilled South Asian diaspora has led central and local governments in South Asia and in Europe to develop policies that seek to establish emotional engagement with these migrants in order to bind them to either 'the motherland' or their European home through 'emotional citizenship'.
This panel seeks to examine to what extent these policies are successful in attenuating South Asia's elite brain drain or establishing lasting connections between migrants and their place of destination. This panel moves beyond methodological nationalism by examining efforts to (materially and emotionally) connect highly skilled migrants to a particular place at the central, sub-national and municipal level, both in South Asia and in Europe. Within a global/neoliberal framework, governments have been forced to compete globally for niche sectors of labor, encouraging the courting of specific segments of highly skilled migrants. Such efforts assume a link between migration and development, and represent an attempt to stem the brain drain and convert into ´brain gain´ or ´brain circulation´.
We invite contributions with an ethnographic focus on migrants´ experience(s) of migration policies (in South Asian and in Europe) as well as papers that discuss these policies and question the equation of migration with development.
Accepted papers:
Session 1
Bollywood and the consumption of Indian culture
Rosa Maria Perez
(ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute)
Paper short abstract:
Social scientists have recently replaced "Diaspora" by "cosmopolitanism", which came to fill the historical and sociological gaps between the postcolonial paradigm and the contemporary new conditions of political and cultural citizenship.
Paper long abstract:
In the case of the Indian diaspora, Bollywood cinema has contributed noticeably to these new conditions. It has gained currency over the past years within the global arena as never before and it has become a term with which Indian popular culture is identified all over the world as it heralds a new era for Hindi cinema that connect India and the diaspora in a loop that, in the whole, and along with IT and outsource, are emblematic of trademark India.
My paper aims at showing how Bollywood and more broadly the consumption of Indian culture is shedding a new light into the increasing Indian influence in the mainstream European culture, threatening the perceived pre-eminence of Western popular culture, and showing the complex dialectic of transnational emotions trough which the Indian Diaspora evolves and relates to the Indian homeland. Therefore creating a cosmopolitan web linking India and the world, through a common aesthetic and semiological language, a web that reformulates the notion of citizenship and national belonging.
Across the borders: international teams find their way between intellectual heritage and modernity
Johannes Bertsch-Joas
(University of Education Freiburg)
Gregor Falk
(University of Education)
Paper short abstract:
Mutual migration and cooperation of inter-contextual teams trigger both individual and institutional change. An empirical study contributes to a more endogenous development of education through international partnerships.
Paper long abstract:
Since post-colonial times the colleges and universities of South Asia play an important role in the establishing and development of their countries. But although these institutions are worldwide recognized and well connected, most of the universities in their education-methods still preserve their special heritage given by the specific history of their society.
Year by year a huge number of highly skilled young South Asians, when returning to their home-countries, carry new influences and knowledge from their particular academic diaspora all over the world. In many cases this new knowledge is strongly linked with the context across the homeland. But the apparent differences in understanding education touch the established self-image of the South Asian institutions. This leads to tensions and discussions between those who share new experiences and those who do not. To tensions between modernity and tradition.
The analysis of changing educational systems and international affairs needs a space- and context-dependent understanding of knowledge. This is why the contribution asks for the innovative potential for methodological and behavioral changes through global synthesis. Or more practical: How should we create and manage educational partnerships in order to support a more endogenous development?
A qualitative case study as part of the DAAD funded Teacher Training Procect of Freiburg (Germany) and Rajshahi (Bangladesh) analyzes the processes and negotiations of individual and local viewpoints and social practices. The interface of this interaction is a multi-contextual Community of Practice. Necessarily this type of partnership expands the established Actor-Network-Theory by the ethnographical perspective of Cultural Geography.
Becoming a professional "to give something back to the country": experiences of India's highly skilled diaspora
Hannelore Roos
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the views of India’s highly skilled diaspora on development and civic engagement. By studying their transnational career paths this paper presents how discourses on the development of the nation go hand in hand with notions of self-development.
Paper long abstract:
Research indicates that the notion of migration as a one-way and once-in-a-lifetime cross-border event is becoming highly problematic. By drawing on the "lived experiences of mobility" (Brown, 2002) of India's highly skilled diaspora, I move away from the brain drain perspective that is often used as a paradigmatic spatial lens in the governance of skilled migrations from developing countries (Raghuram, 2008). Interestingly, India's emerging professional classes comprising of India's transnational oriented youth become increasingly linked with discourses of international development, as Smitha Radhakrishnan (2007) points out. Therefore, this study based on ethnographic interviews conducted in Brussels (during 2007-2013) with Indian highly skilled professionals, including self-initiated and company-backed expatriates, investigates their views on development and civic engagement. How they make use of several policy changes within India as well as in European countries to shape their transnational livelihoods are at the centre stage of this analysis. From an agent-centric perspective this research addresses questions such as what career choices and the construction of transnational livelihoods imply in terms of feelings of citizenship and how existing policies and political mechanisms in the homeland as well as abroad shape their transnational biographic navigations and multiple belongings. Educational choices and professional career trajectories in the field of engineering and the ICT industry indicate the central role that the capability for mobility plays in contemporary Indian middle class subjectivity. It is argued that these are the results of risk-avoiding performances of identity through hegemonic choices that constitute and perpetuate regimes-of-mobility.
Are brain-gain and brain-drain contradictory or complementary processes? The case of Indian knowledge workers
Ratnakar Tripathy
(Asian Development Research Institute, Patna, Bihar, India)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focus on the perceptions of the brain-gain and brain-drain processes in India among the return migrants [knowledge workers]. The paper then tries to analyze the self-perception and relate it to the issues of emotional citizenship and engagement.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, based as it is on long conversations with the return migrants [knowledge workers] at a number of industrial hubs in India, will focus on a variety of perceptions on brain gain as well as brain-drain among the knowledge workers themselves. The paper will then analyze this self-perception through focus on the issues of emotional citizenship, sense of belonging and social engagement. The attempt will be to assess the contributions made by the return migrant in the broader context of growth and development in India.
The paper will try to demonstrate that the relation between migration and development follows complex pathways and the end results are often mixed even for the individual cases.This may have to do with the patterns seen in the developmental visions of the return migrants. The paper will try to capture the wide range of impact the return migrants have had on the Indian society, education and economy.
Divorcing citizenship from politics: to be a Dutch citizen and an overseas Indian citizen (OCI) simultaneously
Kate Kirk
(VU University Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Many high skilled Indian migrants take on Dutch citizenship while planning to move on to other migrant destinations or return to India as Overseas Indian Citizens (OCI) OCI status provides all the right of citizenship except political ones. What does all this mean for citizenship?
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore new forms of transnational citizenship made possible for high skilled Indian Migrants to the Netherlands. Many of the informants in our ethnographic research take on Dutch citizenship while planning to move on to other European or North American destinations or return to India as Overseas Indian Citizens (OCI). OCI status offers all the right of citizenship except political ones.
PUTTING ONE'S CAREER ON HOLD: an Investigation in the Non-Economic Activities of Spouses of Indian Knowledge Workers in the Netherlands
Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff
(Asian Development Research Institute, Patna, Bihar, India)
Paper short abstract:
Wives of high-skilled Indian migrants in the Netherlands often remain, for various reasons, unemployed. These women are however active in back-linking to India. This paper assesses the impact of this back-linking on family's decisions to return to India, move on, or stay put in the Netherlands.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past 10 years, the Netherlands has become increasingly interested in mounting its brain power within its borders. Instead of maximising stocks of gold and silver, the country now invites highly skilled workers and immigration policies have moved in that direction. High-skilled migrants from India are particularly welcomed with the hope that they contribute to national development goals by increasing productivity through enhancing the national pool of skilled people. Though most Indian migrants in the Netherlands are male and single, family migration has also taken place. Wives of these high-skilled men generally arrive as 'dependents' , alternatively defined as 'ex-pat wives', 'trailing spouses' or 'family relocation managers'. Most research has focussed on high-skilled Indian men in the Netherlands. This paper's focus is on gender regimes within Indian families in The Netherlands and analyzes the role Indian women play in connecting to family and friends left behind in India. Existing literature describes non-working female migrants as passive subjects of family reunification or involved in reproduction of ethnic boundaries and gender roles. Instead, this paper analyzes the transformative power of non-economic activities and assesses the impact of Indian women's 'back-linking' on family's decisions to return to India, move on, or stay put in the Netherlands.