Transient Mobility and Middle Class Identity

K-pop flows and Indonesian student pop scenes: situating live Asian pop music in an ‘Asian’ Australia

“…Previous research undertaken over a period of more than 10 years into the music and pop culture activities of one group of international students in Melbourne, those from Indonesia, has identified various social and cultural features of this diaspora group (Scott-Maxwell, 2008, 2015: 196–201). These findings are nuanced by a growing body of more recently published literature about international students in Australia and elsewhere, including Gomes (2014, 2015, 2017), Martin and Rizvi (2014) and Anderson et al (2019). International students from Indonesia are vastly outranked numerically by students from some other Asian nations and their total number has declined since the global financial crisis.…”

“…Furthermore, Asian Australians construct their own, often hybrid identities which may include expression of their ‘Asianness’ through the consumption of pop culture that, as indicated above, is not necessarily specific to their ethnicity, for example, K-pop. For this article, however, and following Gomes (2017), Asian Australians refers to ‘Asians who were either born or raised in Australia’ (p. 169). 5 The population of school and university-age Asian Australians has grown dramatically over the last few decades following major and rapidly increasing migration from different parts of Asia.…”

Disjunctures of belonging and belief: Christian migrants and the bordering of identity in Singapore

“…Social fields demonstrate the ways in which migrants do not necessarily develop strong or lasting ties with their host societies, but construct and maintain ties with home‐country (or other cross‐border) communities instead. Gomes (, p. 185), for example, notes how “being transient” provides a “common experience” that can strengthen migrant communities whilst distancing them from the host society. Migrants have been shown to be implicated within various social fields, which coalesce in time and space to form and reinforce patterns of inclusion and exclusion, of identity and belonging.…”

“…For example, a Filipino accountant commented that, since moving to Singapore, she has been “more driven to do what I have to do, which in this case is work,” whereas an Indonesian male recalled his time at a junior college in Singapore, when the Singaporean students “kind of see us [migrant scholars] as their competitors.” An underlying sense of competition between Singaporeans and migrants causes disassociative attitudes to manifest, with Singaporeans constructing migrants in a negative light. A Singaporean woman in her 60s reflected that “the sad part about Singaporeans is … [they] think that they are above anybody else,” whereas a Filipino female claimed that “they [Singaporeans] really think that nationalities from my country are low, and they look down on you.” Attitudes like these would often drive disassociative behaviours , with the Indonesian male quoted above recalling how, at junior college, “when there is a discussion or a group work, we will end up with the [international] scholars being in one group, and Singaporeans in another group.” These examples show how attitudes can manifest as behaviours, which, through the bordering of identity, can result in the cleaving of communities and the creation of “parallel societies” (Gomes, ).…”

“…Specifically, the congregation‐based nature of Christian worship, coupled with the trans‐ethnic character of many churches— especially those in Singapore—means that churches and other spaces of Christian praxis provide opportunities for ethnonational divisions and exclusions to manifest (Gomes & Tan, ). Indeed, as much as Christianity strives to bring people together in ways that unify and align, so too can physical proximity cause differences to be highlighted, boundaries to be more clearly defined, and “parallel societies” (Gomes, ) to be formed.…”