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- Convenors:
-
Sazana Jayadeva
(GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies)
Yasmine Ahmed (The American University in Cairo)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Vered Amit
(Concordia University)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B487
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel investigates the infrastructures which mediate the movement of highly-skilled migrants across international borders, and how they operate.
Long Abstract:
Despite recent increase in scholarship on migration infrastructures, there is limited ethnographic research examining the actors and networks that mediate the mobility of highly-skilled migrants, who go abroad for study or work.
This panel investigates the everyday processes and local-level mechanisms through which such mobilities are being crafted and maintained. It explores the infrastructures -- within sending countries, between sending and destination countries, and within destination countries -- which facilitate the movement of highly-skilled migrants across international borders, and how they operate. This includes employment and education brokers, language centres, visa consultancies, employers, educational institutions, state agencies, social media platforms, and family-, peer-, alumni-, and ethnicity-based networks. These and other actors and networks might be involved not just in arranging initial migration, but in ensuring a person's ability to remain abroad, for example through managing commitments of a migrant back home.
We invite papers addressing topics such as:
1) How do the actors and networks involved in the organisation of the transnational mobility of high-skilled migrants operate, and how do they mediate and impact upon such mobility?
2) What is the impact of social media platforms on how information about migration is transmitted, how migrant networks function, and how agents operate?
3) What impact does the presence (or absence) of robust migration infrastructure have on people's migration strategies and trajectories?
4) How has the infrastructure involved in arranging the mobility of a particular group changed over time, or in response to broader political or economic changes?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how informal social infrastructures based on not merely academic kinship but scientific "schools" and "traditions" formed by (post)Soviet researchers in maths and physics determine international mobility as a part of individual and collective strategies.
Paper long abstract:
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, several waves of emigration from the East Block come to mark the international research scene. On one hand, crises and rapid deterioration of the infrastructure were pushing scientists to chose between their career and their home country, and on another, some areas of studies were flourishing in the East making specialists highly demanded in the global research market. Post-soviet mathematicians and theoretical physicists fall under such a category.
Great research has been done on national-, "ethnic"-, language- and peer-based networks and mechanisms guiding high-skilled circulation across borders and socio-professional practices linking sending and receiving regions. As revealed by multi-sited enthnographic fieldwork, there are yet another categories that organise researchers' migration and trans-national networking in the case of post-soviet math-physicists.
Working under totalitarian control and serious restrictions (including discriminations based on ethnicity), by many means isolated from the western mainstream science, Soviet math-physicists formed a parallel, somewhat a-conformist community with its specific deontology, ethos, praxis, mode of sociability and exclusive competence.
This socio-cognitive infrastructure goes transnational with the first emigration waves of the 1980s-1990s when indigenous categories of "Russian scientific tradition" and "scientific schools" appear as opposed to "American" or "Western" deontology and collaboration practices.
These categories of affinity craft socio-professional networks and continue to aliment the international migration of young scholars of the following waves as it arranges both those who seek to reestablish habitual socio-cognitive environment overseas and those who struggle with brutal transformations of the S&T institutions in Russia.
Paper short abstract:
I will explore three different infrastructures that Brazilian jiu-jitsu (Bjj) teachers use to find employment abroad: the official Bjj immigration program of the United Arabic Emirates, being sent abroad as a representative of a Bjj team, and self-organized emigration through personal contacts.
Paper long abstract:
In my presentation, I will explore different types of infrastructure that enable professional Brazilian jiu-jitsu (Bjj) teachers to emigrate from Brazil to other countries. The martial art Bjj is one of the fastest expanding martial arts worldwide. Ever since Royce Gracie made Bjj known to a worldwide audience by winning the first Ultimate Fighting Championship, Brazilian Bjj black-belts have used their corporeal capital to emigrate to other countries, finding employment as experts in self-defense. On the basis of interviews conducted during my Ph.D. fieldwork with Brazilian Bjj teachers, I aim to investigate three different types of emigration strategies: a) becoming part of the professionally managed Bjj immigration program of the United Arabic Emirates, b) being sent abroad as a representative of a Brazilian Bjj-team, and c) self-organized emigration through personal contacts to sport gyms in another country. In my paper, I will explore these different types of infrastructure, explain the motivations of Brazilian Bjj teachers to seek employment abroad, and discuss some of the constraints that Brazilian Bjj black-belts encounter in using these infrastructures for their emigration.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on three fields of migration infrastructure which university students who are refugees or asylum seekers have to navigate: the educational institutions, government agencies, and the new NGOs and volunteer initiatives that have evolved since 2015.
Paper long abstract:
When thinking of highly skilled migrants usually migrants supported by companies or universities come to mind. However, there are of course also highly skilled people who come as refugees and who meet with a different set of migration infrastructures. This paper explores migration infrastructures for university students who are asylum seekers or refugees. These can be grouped into the field of educational institutions, the field of government agencies dealing with asylum policies, and NGO- and volunteer organizations, which have developed especially since 2015.
The paper is based on a research project in which interviews were conducted with representatives of these three fields in three towns in Germany, France and Switzerland. Further interviews were conducted with the students themselves in order to learn about their perspective and the possibilities and challenges they face when navigating these three fields and coming to terms with their new living situation.
In a comparison between the three towns, the paper will present the perspectives of these different sets of migration infrastructure, their ways of operating and also the ways in which they interact, percieve continuities and inconsistencies, and trace how this migration infrastructure has evolved and developed - in very different ways in the three cities since 2015.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the role of brokers in the London travel visa industry who organise travel documentation. These broker's offer a degree of expertise and an understanding of the types of formal and informal negotiations that skilled migrants encounter when dealing with border bureaucracies.
Paper long abstract:
My paper discusses the work of visa brokers in London who deal with and have long-standing professional relationships with skilled migrants from different parts of the globe. These visa agencies are concerned with negotiating complex border bureaucracies, turning their clients into bureaucratically suitable visa candidates. This process relies on negotiating the hidden rules and bureaucratic idiosyncrasies at each embassy. They provide advice and bureaucratic support such as knowing what is or is not acceptable for an applicant to reveal to the embassy, even if the information is seemingly innocuous such as job descriptions or ethnic origin. The difficulties in obtaining these visas in a timely manner creates a 'grey network'. In which the set of negotiations between different parties that go into making a person's identity 'fit' for a particular visa takes place. In this regard there is a level of informally organised co-operation that exists between visa agents and embassy employees that minimises the problems and bureaucratic complexities of visa procuration. Considering the increasing cost of visas and the rise of non-refundable consular fees, paying to use a visa agents can help migrants and their employers ameliorate many issues in advance. I would like to discuss several themes. The issues of cost and support in creating different classes of migrant. The degree to with which increasing bureaucratic complexity in the visa application process has changed regarding the 'commodification' of visas. How these changes have generated strategic and tactical relationships between skilled migrants and visa-agents over a long duration.
Paper short abstract:
Indians aspiring to study abroad have been turning to social media platforms to connect with others also working towards going abroad for study, leading to the creation of many online communities of aspirants. I show the key role such communities play in mediating student mobility from India.
Paper long abstract:
Indians aspiring to study abroad have been turning to platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp to connect with others also working towards going abroad for study, leading to the creation of numerous pan-Indian online communities of aspirants. My paper argues that these communities play a key role in mediating transnational student mobility from India. The paper builds on anthropological scholarship on migration infrastructures and theories of polymedia, as well as ethnographic research I conducted within Facebook and WhatsApp groups of Indians aspiring to study in Germany.
The paper illustrates how such online aspirant communities shape people's journeys towards going abroad for study in three important ways. First, my interlocutors stressed the sense of confidence they derived from being able to feel part of an imagined community of people applying to universities in Germany, a country that was still seen as new and relatively unknown, compared to the more 'traditional' destinations for Indian students. Second, these communities enable novel ways of knowledge collection and exchange, peer support, and collaboration in the many steps between considering studying abroad and arriving in a foreign country. Third, these communities are challenging the position of education agents - who, in India, have long been viewed as an established pathway to study abroad - and have led to the emergence of a new category of student brokers and influencers who promote themselves and acquire clients and/or followers through these communities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the gendered and class-based aspects of Egyptian health professionals' mobility to the EU countries. It argues that their mobility is highly circular thanks to the transnational nature of the infrastructures that they have created over the last forty years.
Paper long abstract:
A large majority of Egyptian health professionals have experienced mobility at some point of their career paths. This paper investigates the gendered and class-based aspects of their mobility to the EU countries, and argues that it is highly circular due to the transnational nature of the infrastrctures that they have created at the institutional and familial levels in both sending and recieving countries over the last forty years.
Based on in-depth interviews with health professionals, migration brokers and government officials at the Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population, I show that health professionals in Egypt retain their governmental or public sector positions while moving, as working in these institutions entitles them to short and long term benefits, professional credibility in their home country, and a sense of job security. Moreover, the flexibility of labour laws allows them to do so. Furthermore, Egyptian labour laws generally encourage external mobility in the form of migration as labour migration has been a solution for the Egyptian state to acquire foreign currency in order to recover financially from debts, through remittances, to solve unemployment / underemployment issues, and to deal with low-wage issues, particularly for highly-skilled professionals, such as health practitioners. Ultimately, this paper challenges the existing typology of health professionals' mobility, hence, contributing the understanding of the processes of medical globalization are shaped by the manifold mobilities of human and non-human actors.