Globalization, Immigration, and Transnational Studies
Globalization, migration, and the
transnationalization of more and more geosocial spaces and life experiences
have generated a rich diversity of research questions and, in some instances,
entirely novel areas of investigation. A number of overarching, but pressing,
questions inform the research and teaching taking place in this area. What
kinds of tensions result from the contradictions between the increasingly
transnational conditions of life for most people and prevailing nation-state
and interstate systems of governance? What does a focus on the conditions,
impacts, and outcomes of (neoliberal) globalization in global South societies
tell us about the specificities involved in these locations? Should we replace
the old narratives of “uneven development,” “underdevelopment/development,”
“imperialism,” “dependency,” “center/periphery” – that highlighted relations of
inequality between the global South and the global North – with the more
flexible concepts of “transnationalism” and “globalization” that transcend the
old divides? Within this focal area, these kinds of questions inspire
research and teaching that examine both (1) discontinuities and continuities
with the past and (2) new social configurations of global/local interactions in
diverse societies around the world. Research and teaching interests by faculty
in this focal area range from investigations into contentious debates about the
political and economic origins of globalization or the continued viability of
nation-states to empirical studies about the impact of migration on domestic
societies and on migrants themselves.
Globalization (Green, Ackerman, Ma, Schewe, Kurien)
Members of our faculty study both
political/theoretical and empirical conditions of globalization including
questions such as the following: how do we reconcile the narrative of the
“disappearance of the nation-state” with the recent rise in anti-immigrant and
protectionist nationalisms and elected nationalist leaders in countries of the
global North? How does transnational corporate capitalism both push people out
of their local global South economies and incorporate them as cheap, exploited,
and marginalized labor into restructured global North economies? Courses
taught in this area inquire into debates about how to understand and
historicize globalization, examine the complexities of global political economy
and the politics of globalization, and analyze race in comparative perspective.
They also discuss a rich variety of empirical cases regarding the
transnationalization of social life. Recent
and ongoing research projects include examinations of the new Chinese immigrant
and state presences in the Caribbean, the framing and social construction of
the “illegal immigrant” within U.S. borders, the global agriculture and food
system, as well as a study of Chinese
and Western systems of education.
Immigration and Transnationalism (Lutz, Kurien,
Ma, Purser, Schewe, London)
Our faculty features major immigration scholars
who have made a name for themselves internationally. Some of the questions that
define the field of immigration and transnationalism include the following. To
what extent is migration driven by the structural imperatives of uneven
development and global inequality and, conversely, how should we account for
human agency and related phenomena such as “chain migration” and “cultures of
migration”? How does migration create “transnational social fields” of
cross-border communities and hybridized cultures and identities on both sides
of the border? How are immigrant communities structurally and culturally
incorporated into their new societies and what accounts for different forms of
incorporation identified by scholars, such as “segmented assimilation” and
“ethnic enclave economies”? Research undertaken by our faculty includes
scholarship on how race and religion shape the forms and claims of cultural
citizenship on the part of South Asian immigrants in the U.S. and Canada, the
activism of immigrants around homeland concerns, and an international team-led
study looking at the educational and early labor market outcomes among
children of immigrants in France and the United States. Other research projects
include studies of Vietnamese fishing communities in Louisiana, Mississippi,
and Alabama; predominantly undocumented immigrant dairy workers in upstate New
York, and international Chinese students in the U.S.