The past two decades have witnessed a sea change in migration scholarship. Most scholars now recognize that many contemporary migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands at the same time that they are incorporated into the countries that receive them. Increasingly, social life takes place across borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state boundaries remains strong. Transnational migration studies has emerged as an inherently interdisciplinary field, made up of scholars around the world, seeking to describe and analyze these dynamics and invent new methodological tools with which to do so. In this review, we offer a short history of theoretical developments, outlining the different ways in which scholars have defined and approached transnational migration. We then summarize what is known about migrant transnationalism in different arenas—economics, politics, the social, the cultural, and the religious. Finally, we discuss methodological...

/pdf/transnational-migration-studies-past-developments-and-future-416caz7gdz.pdf

Transnational Migration Studies: Past Developments and Future Trends

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

Strange parallels : Southeast Asia in global context, c 800-1830

This article provides a review of the contributions that the discipline of geography is making to gender and migration research. In geographic analyses of migration, gender differences are examined most centrally in relation to specific spatialities of power. In particular, feminist geographers have developed insight into the gender dimensions of the social construction of scale, the politics of interlinkages between place and identity, and the socio-spatial production of borders. Supplementing recent reviews of the gender and migration literature in geography, this article examines the potential for continued cross-fertilization between feminist geography and migration research in other disciplines. The advances made by feminist geographers to migration studies are illustrated through analysis of the findings and debates tied to the subfield's central recent conceptual interventions.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27645579.pdf

Geographies of Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference†

Building upon recent work on higher education mobility, this paper contends that social networks of friendship and kinship are critical determinants for students deciding to study overseas, not just, as has hitherto been suggested, a complementary factor. It uses original data collected through interviews and focus groups with thirty-eight higher education international students studying at three UK universities and argues that students who choose to study overseas do not operate within a vacuum but rather draw upon extended networks of individuals who have chosen to do so themselves or advocate studying abroad. While this encouragement may be of an explicit and unequivocal nature – telling students that they ought to study overseas – for the majority it is rather more implicit. The students interviewed invariably related that higher education overseas or mobility more generally was an accepted practice among their peers, thereby leading to a normalisation of the mobility process. The paper concludes that...

/pdf/international-student-mobility-the-role-of-social-networks-1tpiu4qgdm.pdf

International student mobility: the role of social networks

In this article, I explore the ways in which ‘middling’ migrant New Zealanders living in London and New Zealand discuss and identify with home. For these multi-local individuals, the discursive and material aspects of New Zealand as home form a framework for their everyday life as migrants living in London. Interpretation of the interviews using thematic and narrative analyses works through a conceptualization of home, migration, and identity as interdependent, through three interrelated themes: the symbolic or political nature of home; the importance of family and familiarity for a sense of home; and the role of physical material objects and places. Participants in this study see New Zealand as their home, yet by being away from home they gain new perspectives on home. In London, they engage with or resist a collective imaginary of New Zealand as home that is both self-perpetuated and externally imposed, and which both reveals and conceals ideas about individual and group identity and community. On returning from London, the idealistic and sometimes simplistic visions of New Zealand as home that structure their lives in London are often disrupted by the more complex yet more mundane version of home and self with which they are confronted.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2008.00188.x

Sense of home in a transnational social space: New Zealanders in London

“The ‘Living’ Bibliography of Burma Studies: The Secondary Literature” was first published in 2001, with the last update dated 26 April 2003. The SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research has been expanded to include a special bibliographic supplement this year, and every other year hereafter, into which additions and corrections to the bibliography will be incorporated. In the interim, each issue of the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research will include a supplemental list, arranged by topic and subtopic. Readers are encouraged to contact the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research with information about their publications, hopefully with a reference to a topic and sub-topic number for each entry, so that new information can be inserted into the bibliography correctly. References should be submitted in the form followed by the bibliography, using any of the entries as an example. Please note that any particular entry will only be included once, regardless of wider relevance. Eventually, all entries will be cross-listed to indicate other areas where a particular piece of research might be of use. This list has been compiled chiefly from direct surveys of the literature with additional information supplied by the bibliographies of numerous and various sources listed in the present bibliography. Additional sources include submissions from members of the BurmaResearch (including the former Earlyburma) and SEAHTP egroups, as well as public domain listings of personal publications on the internet. Please also note that newspaper and newsletter articles, encyclopedia articles, conference papers, and papers in progress will not be included in this list, as most are short pieces or extracts from already, or eventually to be, published works.

https://burmalibrary.org/docs3/Bibliography_of_secondary_literature--2004.pdf

The Bibliography of Burma (Myanmar) Research: The Secondary Literature

Introduction 1. Burma under colonial rule 2. The colonial centre 3. Self-government without independence 4. The democratic experiment 5. Dress rehearsals 6. The revolutionary council 7. The BSPP years 8. Towards democracy, 1988-1990 9. Perpetual delay Conclusion.

/pdf/a-history-of-modern-burma-48uaiwcsx6.pdf

A History of Modern Burma

This study of warfare in Southeast Asia between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries examines the chief aspects of warfare in the region. It begins with an examination of the cultural features that made warfare in the region unique, followed by a discussion of the main weapons used, and the two major sites of fighting, sieges and naval contests. Three chapters examine the role played by animals such as elephants and horses. The final two chapters examine the shift from mercenary armies and masses of levies to smaller standing armies. The study closes with an examination of the tumultuous nineteenth century, in which European naval power won the coast and rivers, while Southeast Asians held the advantage further inland.

Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900

Powerful Learning is the first intellectual history of one of the great Buddhist empires of Southeast Asia, Konbaung Burma, before the British conquest The book challenges the notion of the court and the monastic order as static institutions by examining how competition within and between them prompted major rethinking about the intellectual foundations of indigenous society and culture The catalyst for this reformation of indigenous thought was the rise of a small clique of Buddhist monks and lay people from the frontier to commanding positions in the state and monastic order over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries This clique had a major influence on the creation of state myths, the ways in which the throne ruled and presented itself, and, ultimately, the relationship between the throne and the state The new state and monastic orthodoxy, however, was challenged by other Burmese literati, who, over the course of the nineteenth century, sought in Western science, technology, and political theory other ways in which to shape Burmese perspectives on state and society In the process, the Burmese underwent a difficult transition from premodern to modern intellectual thought, one that helped usher in British rule

Michael W. Charney

Papers

The Bibliography of Burma (Myanmar) Research: The Secondary Literature

A History of Modern Burma

Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900

Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati And the Throne in Burma's Last Dynasty, 1752-1885

Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma's Last Dynasty