Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series 2022

Tangled Mobilities:

Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration

Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot and Gracia Liu-Farrer

Nov 14, 2022

06:30 PM Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo

Hybrid Format

Zoom Meeting https://sophia-ac-jp.zoom.us/j/92898295599
Meeting ID: 928 9829 5599
Passcode: ICC-Nov7

Venue: Room 301, 3F, Building 10, Sophia University Yotsuya Campus

Why do people move across borders? How do people decide on where and when to move, and where and when to settle down? These are some of the central questions in international migration studies. Recent theoretical development in migration and mobility research has moved away from the simple push-pull analytical framework, and has increasingly focused on the process of mobility, bringing attention to the materiality of movement and the different power dynamics that affect individuals' unequal experiences of mobility. In particular, studies highlight the interlinked nature of various forms of movements when people migrate because movements take place simultaneously across spaces and temporalities. Moreover, when people cross national borders, they also traverse social classes, cultural realms, ethnic boundaries, fields of intimacy, and different (im)mobility regimes. These movements operate according to different logics and are either interdependent or entail others' movements toward different and sometimes even contradictory directions. In this talk, we will first introduce the conceptual framework "tangled mobilities" and how different empirical studies inform the development of this analytical lens. We then use one empirical study on the mobility trajectories among highly skilled migrants in Japan and Germany to illustrate the intertwined rationales in mobility decision making. We base this talk on Tangled Mobilities: Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration (Berghahn, 2022), an edited volume that examines the different crisscrossing and intersecting mobilities in the lives of Asian migrants, their family members across Asia and Europe, and the social spaces connecting these regions.

Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot holds a PhD in Sociology from the Paris Diderot University in France. She is tenured research associate (chercheure qualifiée) of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and senior lecturer (maîtresse d'enseignement) at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Her  publications deal with transnational family dynamics, conjugal mixedness, and intergenerational transmission, as well as marriage and divorce involving Filipino and Thai migrants. Her ongoing research focuses on the contextual mobility of Belgian-Asian couples within their cross-border social spaces.

Gracia Liu-Farrer (Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago), is Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migration at Waseda University, Japan. Her research examines the economic, social and political practices of immigrants and evacuees in Japan, and the global mobility of students and professional migrants. She is the author of books Labor Migration from China to Japan: International Students, Transnational Migrants (Routledge, 2011) and Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society (Cornell University Press, 2020). She co-edited Handbook of Asian Migrations (with Brenda Yeoh, Routledge, 2018), and most recently Tangled Mobilities: Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration (with Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot, Berghahn, 2022). She has written widely on migration and mobility topics.

This talk is organized by James Farrer (Professor of Sociology, FLA, Sophia University)