You are cordially invited to the next DIJ Gender and Sexuality Lecture Series' online talk on

*September 7th, 2021, 6:30pm (JST)/11.30am (CEST)*
**

*Mobile professionals and their families: The making of transnational spaces in Tokyo from a male perspective *(dij.tokyo/mobile)
**

*Sakura Yamamura, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity*

Conceiving mobile corporate professionals as part of the growing transnational migrant population is a rather novel turn in migration research. Likewise, research on their families - including their trailing spouses and third culture kids - is an emerging field. Based on interviews with 43 male transnational corporate professionals in Tokyo, this lecture paper presents their take on the effects that their marrying and starting a family had on their socio-spatial patterns within the urban space. Whereas transnational professionals have been mostly researched in their functions and practices as economic actors, this study gives a new insight into their social and socio-spatial lives from a personal and thus individual migrant's perspective. Though relatively uncommon to take the masculine view on family and gender issues, the narratives of the working fathers and husbands still constitute a non-negligible piece of the overall picture of transnational families. Touching also upon issues of different patterns of binational/-cultural marriages, I will discuss how the extent and quality of transnational spaces transform over the life course.

*Sakura Yamamura* (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Building on her PhD research on transnational professionals' socio-spatial patterns within the global city network but also within Tokyo, she is specialized in the spatiality of social and economic activities in migrant-led diversification of society or super-diversity in the urban context. She is the author of /Spatial Diversity in the Global City - Transnational Tokyo/ (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming) and articles in the /Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies/ and the /Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity/.

The DIJ Gender and Sexuality in East Asia-Lecture Series is part of the DIJ's Social Science and Humanities Study Groups.The events are open to all. Further information can be found here <https://www.dijtokyo.org/event-series/gender-and-sexuality-in-east-asia/>. Registration for this online event is required via email to kottmann@dijtokyo.org <mailto:kottmann@dijtokyo.org> until September 6, 2021 (JST). Log in data will be provided after registration.