CTA17: globalisation and migration Flashcards
Definition of globalisation
A process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions –assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact– generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power’ (McGrew 2000: 348).
The term globalisation does not mean that we are all becoming identical, but rather that we express our differences in new ways.
Is globalisation westernisation?
No: depends on cultures. In indonesia McDonalds is a upper class thing
‘the term ‘Western culture’ is notoriously inaccurate. […] the “West” exists just as much in a middle-class suburb of Nairobi as in Melbourne, and […] Buenos Aires may be seen as a more typical “European” city than Bradford, where a large proportion of the population are Muslims of South Asian origin’ (Eriksen 2023: 414).
More important thing: globalization doesn’t mean the things spread over the world are all western
Time space compression:
- In the past we needed time and space, but now we don’t: ‘Space can no longer be said to create a buffer between cultural worlds’ (Eriksen 2023: 403-404).
- Globalisaiton comprises the process that shrink distances, sometimes rendering them irrelevant, and established de-territorialised, disembedded connections between people and activities
- Space is no longer a buffer between cultural worlds.
- Television and media reduced limitations on cultural flow, influences ‘time’
- Affordable flights has made it possible to move rapidly all over the world, calling has connected the whole world. Influences the space dimension
Dimensions of globalisation
- Disembedding: distance and location is becoming irrelevant. Social life is lifted out of its local, spatially fixed context
- Acceleration: speed of transport and communication has increased and continues to accelerate.
- Standardisation: shared standards, like English, generic hotels
- Interconnectedness: the networks connecting people are becoming denser, faster and wider every year
- Mobility: travel has been growing steadily: migration, business, tourism
- Mixing: cultural crossroads are growing everyday in number, size and diversity
- Vulnerability: boundaries are weakened, migrants, AIDS, terrorism, climate change
- Re-embedding: widespread response to globalization is re-embedding initiatives, like nationalism, indigenous rights movements
Disembedding
- Things look the same everywhere, locality seems more irrelevant:
- ‘the meaning of locality is entirely irrelevant to tourists and business travellers; […] international business hotels are “the same” everywhere, […] a shared “business culture” exists […] could these cultural forms, evident in hotels, airports, boardrooms and beach clubs, profitably be seen as “third cultures” mediating between different local cultures?’ (Eriksen 2023: 413).
Shared commonalities of modernity
- State and citizenship are almost universal
- Wage work and capitalism
- Politics and economics are integrated in an abstract, anonymous and globally connected network of investments, exchange and migration
Central paradox of globalization:
it has made the world both larger and smaller at the same time. It has become smaller in the sense that it is possible to travel anywhere in less than 24 hours […] On the other hand, it has become larger in the sense that we thereby know more about remote and “exotic” places, and thus more easily recognise our mutual differences’ (Eriksen 2023: 420
The rise of the network society (Castells):
- The network society is a specific form of social structure tentatively identified by empirical research as being characteristic of the Information Age’ (Castells 2000: 5).
- The virtual world becomes hyperreal
- ‘a network […] works on a binary logic: inclusion/exclusion’ (Castells 2000: 15).
- ‘Nodes increase their importance by absorbing more information and processing it more efficiently. […] the main nodes are not centres, but switchers, following a networking logic rather than a command logic’ (Castells 2000: 16).
- Space of flows, space of places.
- Biological time, clock time, timeless time: time loses it’s importance
Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture of culture - another conceptualisation
- Five scapes, each of these scapes are flows. Different flows that start in different places, but not necessarily coincide. Disjuncted flows.
- ethnoscapes (flows of people)
- technoscapes (flows of technology)
- finanscapes (flows of capital)
- mediascapes (flows of images)
- ideoscapes (flows of ideologies)
- More scapes are possible? Pollutionscape?
Migration trajectories
- Push-pull model -> old fashioned way of thinking
Push is why they leave
Pull is why they go somewhere - Push-bridge-pull model -> more modern, but still old fashioned
Adds the bridge: knowledge about the destination, how to get there, network of support. - Migration trajectory
Migration is an ongoing process, never stops. Not like migration to the US
But also international students
Long-distance nationalism:
‘long-distance nationalism, whereby the political scene in a given territory may be partly shaped by the agency of migrants’ (Eriksen 2023: 419).
Nations unbound
- ‘In a world configured into nation-states, each claiming that its population maintains a unique history, culture and identity, those who must live their lives across borders may come to see themselves as perpetually unauthentic, feeling at home in neither their “home country” nor the United States’ (Basch, Glick-Schiller & Blanc 1994: 242).
- Overcommunicate identity from home country.
- ‘Cultural identity is a major issue among many migrant or diasporic populations’ (Eriksen 2023: 416).
- ‘Ethnic revitalisations among migrant groups may be understood within this perspective. Drawing on nostalgia and a sense of alienation’ (Eriksen 2023: 417).
- ‘There is, in other words, a movement towards integration into ever larger systems […] and, at the same time, a localising emphasis on cultural uniqueness. […] This […] frequently takes the form of “traditionalist” or nativist movements’ (Eriksen 2023: 421).
New mobility paradigm
- ‘All the world seems to be on the move. Asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forces –these and many others fill the world’s airports, buses, ships, and trains’ […] ‘And materials too are on the move, often carried by these moving bodies’ (Sheller & Urry 2006: 207).
- For a long time researcher looked at how things stayed the same, but leading factor is now change.
- ‘[T]he ways in which physical movement pertains to upward and downward social mobility is also central here. Moving between places physically or virtually can be a source of status and power […] or where movement is coerced it can […] generate deprivation and untold suffering’ (Sheller & Urry 2006: 213).
Travel can give a lot of status
Fast and slow lanes of mobility
- ‘[D]ifferent peoples and places […] are located in the fast and slow lanes across the globe. There are new place and technologies that enhance the mobility of some peoples and places and heighten the immobility of others, especially as they try to cross the borders’ (Sheller & Urry 2006: 207).
- Having a good passport already helps.
Flip-flop trail (Caroline Knowles)
About how to make flip flops: begins with oil in Kuwait, plastic in China, to Korea, to Ethiopia
Fragile globalization:
- ‘The analytic angle opened by the flip-flop trail teaches us that globalizations is more fragile than we think it is. It is more plural, more open and more motile than we hitherto understood it to be’ (Knowles 2015: 10).
- ‘Globalization is anything but robust and stable. It is instead an inchoate, ad hoc matrix of shifting, cross-cutting trails that are difficult to anticipate, even more difficult to live’ (Knowles 2015: 11).
Mainstream and backroads globalization
- Oil is as mainstream, as hegemonic, as central to globalization as any substance can be’ (Knowles 2015: 3)
- ‘backroads are not backroads because they are insignificant; they are backroads only in being overlooked in hegemonic accounts of globalization’ (Knowles 2015: 9)
‘Globalization is not what we think that it is. As the flip-flop trail has shown, it is a loose patchwork of human and object journeys. It is an unstable, shifting contingent mass of ad hoc-ery, with pockets of opportunities within overwhelming landscapes of precarity’ (Knowles 2015: 12).
