The Prospect of Elsewhere: Engaging the Future through Aspirations in Asia

Bunnell, Tim; Gillen, Jamie; Ho, Elaine Lynn‐Ee

doi:10.1080/24694452.2017.1336424

Cited by 43 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 59 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The ramifications of this in creating an elite, English-speaking class and its consequences on labor asymmetries in this particular local context are more than obvious. We encounter a similar manifestation of superdiversity in China where mobile African students in shifting trajectories toward new loci of aspirational geographies (Appadurai, 2016)—realized in the form of newly configured academic migratory channels—has led “African migrants eastward, especially to cities in China,” where in spite of being speakers of “fluent Mandarin,” they remain subject to the same damaging effects of “social prejudice” (Bunnell et al., 2018: 43), as their African counterparts fluent in other so-called big languages such as French for instance, in hub metropoles of better resourced nations of the global north (Vigouroux, 2017a). In this instance, we once again witness nationality rationalizations serving as linguistic proxy for ethnicized exclusion.…”

Section: Market Economics Superdiversity and Peripheral Ethnicitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, in low-paying jobs such as the service industries, he noted the following pertinent statistics namely, that “60% of London’s immigrants worked in the ‘hotel and restaurant sector’; that, ‘nurses from sixty-eight different countries could be found in a single London Trust,’ and furthermore that, a combined total of ‘42,000 foreign nurses (were reported to be) working in the National Health Service” (19). Decades later, this job scenario is slowly changing as new visa restrictions now grant entry only to the highly skilled (Bunnell et al., 2018; Fernando and Cohen, 2016; Kim, 2017; Meissner, 2018; Warriner, 2013).…”

Section: Snapshots From American Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

“Authorized to work in the US”: Examining the myth of porous borders in the era of populism for practicing linguists

Pandey

2019

Ethnicities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper explores top-down, enacted, institutional pushbacks to supermobility and superdiversity in the under-examined arena of academia using emerging frameworks in political economy and the geography of mobility. Zooming in on the discoursal framings of a recent year of job advertisements on a popular, open-source forum for linguists supplemented with qualitatively and quantitatively sourced data from international, national, and local institutional contexts, the paper examines how macrocontextual pushes toward political populism combined with a synchronous tightening of job markets in academia have enacted a plethora of labels for temporary work in lieu of permanent academic positions—now, increasingly the only option for job seekers in a hypercompetitive academic market. In this manufacturing of euphemization discourse, we witness the invention of novel, microlinguistically rendered lexicalizations of semiotic redundancy in academic capitalism’s own obfuscation of profit margins, and a concomitant manufacturing of a new discourse of rationality in which floating semiotic signifiers at multiple scales deploy nationality-criteria to justify ethnic exclusion and/or entry into academic space. More crucially, in these commonsensical framings, we encounter both causation and consequence of newly enacted barriers to transnational mobility. In challenging the myth of porous borders for mobile professionals in the post-global moment, these emerging linguistic signifiers point to the ascendancy of a new public affectivity on display in intellectual spheres and a saturation of sentiment toward illiberality.

show abstract

Section: Market Economics Superdiversity and Peripheral Ethnicitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Snapshots From American Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Authorized to work in the US”: Examining the myth of porous borders in the era of populism for practicing linguists

Pandey

2019

Ethnicities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…When ethnographic field material featured in our papers, the vignette was predominant. We found instances of researchers reflecting on public reactions to them breastfeeding (Mathews, 2018), Turkish officials boarding buses to examine the documents of those inside (Isleyen, 2018), students responding to assessments in North Korea (Wainwright et al, 2018), an activist railing against the treatment of suspected poachers in India (Baroba, 2017), and a Javanese procession that might initially appear straightforwardly traditional but could also represent the enactment of a more hopeful future for those who live with flood risk (Bunnell et al, 2018). This is just a selection of examples – more than half of our ethnographic papers featured vignettes.…”

Section: Magical Moments and How To Get Themmentioning

confidence: 99%

Qualitative methods II: On the presentation of ‘geographical ethnography’

Hitchings

Latham

2019

Progress in Human Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This review examines how ethnographic methods currently feature in the work of human geographers. The ethnographic approach continues to be a popular choice amongst those hoping to learn from how social life unfolds in particular places and settings. But what visions of ethnography do geographers draw on to attain authorial authority? What are the implications of how they present their field experiences? How, linking back to our last review, is their ethnographic work connected to the interview? And what are some of the downsides to how the term is deployed in the discipline?

show abstract

“…Part of the problem in finding a vocabulary to articulate how people aspire to live their urban lives lies within what Bunnell et al. call the “realms of expert calculation” (, p. 48), wherein possible futures are prescribed to cities based on risk assessments and resilience scenarios, rather than reflecting the heterogeneity of present‐day urban experience from the perspective of urban residents. Zeiderman aptly remarks that “government planners, engineers, architects and social workers do not always share the timescales and temporal framings of those they are responsible for governing” (, p. 191).…”

Section: Aspirations and The Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Aspirations in grey space: Neighbourhood governance in Nepal and Jordan

Ruszczyk

Price

2019

Area

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The discipline of geography struggles to engage with urban futures on terms that are meaningful to the world's urban majority. This paper reflects the need to open up empirically grounded dialogue on aspirations and their complex connections to perceptions of possibility and temporality. Drawing on research carried out in two medium‐sized cities overlooked by research (Bharatpur, Nepal; Zarqa, Jordan), this paper speaks back to contemporary discourse surrounding urban life and futurity. These two projects explore aspirations located within people's everyday attempts to secure urban presents and carve out spaces for the immediate future within the realm of their control. Urban futures, it is argued, need to be imagined from the perspective of the communities experiencing the complexities and uncertainties of the urban present first‐hand, and who tailor their aspirations and expectations accordingly. In both Bharatpur and Zarqa, “grey space” proves successful in framing the roles of influence, control, and management of power in determining possibility. In Bharatpur, residents learned that only by working together in neighbourhood groups could they begin to influence the local authority to provide certain aspects of physical infrastructure – the paved roads that residents had particularly hoped for. In Zarqa, residents turn to a variety of formal channels – political and developmental – in their attempts to reverse locally manifesting urban decay and provide much‐needed green spaces for the local community. In both contexts, these local, collectively‐held aspirations are deeply linked to local perceptions of possibility, which in turn are a direct result of governance structures seeking to maintain particular urban relations and to control the pace and space of urban development.

show abstract

The Prospect of Elsewhere: Engaging the Future through Aspirations in Asia

Cited by 43 publications

References 59 publications

“Authorized to work in the US”: Examining the myth of porous borders in the era of populism for practicing linguists

“Authorized to work in the US”: Examining the myth of porous borders in the era of populism for practicing linguists

Qualitative methods II: On the presentation of ‘geographical ethnography’

Aspirations in grey space: Neighbourhood governance in Nepal and Jordan

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About