Social Mobility via academic mobility: reconfigurations in class and gender identities among Asian scholars in the global north

Abstract

Geographic mobility is increasingly perceived worldwide as a key to academic excellence, career advancement and upward social mobility. Drawing on long-term qualitative fieldwork data, this paper interrogates the impact of academic mobility in reconfiguring class and gender identities among students, early professionals and their families from Hong Kong and Indonesia who have studied or received further training in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. This analysis problematises the crude 'academic mobility → upward social mobility' formula and considers international academic mobility as a contextual, dynamic and multi-directional process. Through this process social positions and identities of the moving individuals and families are negotiated in an on-going manner as migrants insert into, depart from and re-insert into the various social milieus where their mobility trajectories touch ground. Narratives of interviewees illustrate the complexity and contradictions in class and gender configurations as students move across borders. They show how these individuals are inserted in contrasting social positionings, and experience how a particular social class or gender position carries different connotations. The paper concludes with a few conceptual and methodological reflections.

Highly skilled migration between the Global North and South: gender, life courses and institutions

“…However, this hardly does justice to the papers: all papers have clear links to one or both other themes. Leung (2017)'s main theme is gender and identity, but she also brings in how the migrants' life courses are linked to those of others, particularly mothers. Furthermore, she begins her paper with an autobiographical example of how work placement with a particular employer shapes a skilled migrant's experiences.…”

“…The reported experienced inequalities vary in these papers but the manner in which gender norms and power structures impact the experiences is common. The first paper by Leung (2017) addresses the impact of academic mobility in reconfiguring class and gender identities among highly skilled migrants from China, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Highly skilled migrants experience multiple social positioning in countries of origin and in host countries, which translates into different gender-and class-based privileges and discriminations.…”

“…It brings together seven papers that deal with skilled migration. The papers by Leung (2017), Föbker and Imani (2017), Grigoleit-Richter (2017) and Roohi (2017) are most closely related to the theme of gender, identity and social inequality. The papers by Kirk, Bal, and Janssen (2017) and Kõu, Mulder, and Bailey (2017) fit best under the theme of life courses and linked lives.…”

Internationalisation and migrant academics: the hidden narratives of mobility

“…They are mechanisms for driving the global knowledge economy and the fulfilment of personal aspirations (Hoffman 2009). Academic geographical mobility is often conflated with social mobility and career advancement (Leung 2017). However, Robertson (2010: 646) suggested that 'the romance of movement and mobility ought to be the first clue that this is something we ought to be particularly curious about'.…”

Domesticating ‘transnational cultural capital’: the Chinese state and diasporic technopreneur returnees

“…Based on the above theoretical discussions pertaining to the interaction between institutions and entrepreneurship and skilled migrants, this study focuses on institutional features and examines specifically how the Chinese state promotes the return of diasporic Chinese technopreneurs as an economic engine of innovation, and furthermore, how the government affects diaspora returnees' technopreneurship through a top-down manner by way of direct policy and regulatory initiatives. Moreover, the role of highskilled migrants in society is not considered only as an economic engine, but as social, cultural and political agents (Bailey and Mulder 2017;Grigoleit-Richter 2017;Leung 2017;Roohi 2017). In other studies, the latter aspects are usually neglected.…”