Elaine Ho

• Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore

New global multi-directional migration flows are decentering extant analyses of White expatriate migration. As migration becomes more diversified, new lines of intellectual inquiry are surfacing about the experiences of middle-class non-white expatriates. This paper uses the case study of China, which with the rise in immigration, has an increasing...

Understanding the interactions between older adults and their living spaces is an important research topic within the human dynamics of geographical scholarship because of their implications on the quality of aging. The prevailing theory of aging tends to stress aging in place which associates aging well with the home and community, thus inadverten...

We propose ‘ageing in networks’ as an optic that shows how the social networks of older adults extend beyond their residential neighbourhoods to extra-local and transnational settings. The paper brings together literature on ageing and social networks in mobilities and migration research to identify shared thematic framings between non-migrant and...

The emotions and the affective qualities of space (i.e. affective spatialities) have featured prominently in social geography research. This report discusses how recent studies have taken seriously earlier critiques of affect theory, foregrounding intersubjective relations, collectives and the socio-spatial hierarchies of power instead. The emotion...

Studies on care circulation have highlighted that the landscape of caregiving within transnational families is uneven and shaped by institutional contexts. The importance of marital status, however, remains underexplored. Drawing on interviews with middle-class, older single female migrants from Singapore who are living in China or commuting betwee...

Post-migration adaptation has been a major theme in migration studies. Yet extant research has typically focused on immigrants who will presumably settle in the host society and overlooked temporary migrants, especially those who move in later life. While the former is expected to assimilate into the host society over time, temporary migrants spend...

Studies of racism against migrants have recently attempted to move away from the presumed dichotomy between whites and “Others”, yet the focus is still on white people racialising others: whether Black, Asian or Muslim. Attending only to white versus Others homogenizes select groups of non-whites including Asians. Racialization and racism by Asians...

This special issue examines how older adults anticipate and manage their futures through migration. Although ageing is often associated with decline towards the end-of-life, it is still a life stage where (the lack of) planning for the future can profoundly impact the life outcomes of older adults and their caregivers. This collection illustrates d...

Dyadic interviewing is a research method that focuses on the interdependent relationship between two people (known as a dyad). Alongside the rise of relational approaches in geography, researchers have taken greater interest in understanding the shared lives of specifically paired individuals. Although paired interviewing presents a way to elicit t...

Studies of racism against migrants have recently attempted to move away from the presumed dichotomy between whites and “Others”, yet the focus is still on white people racialising others: whether Black, Asian or Muslim. Attending only to white versus Others homogenizes select groups of non-whites including Asians. Racialization and racism by Asians...

International migration has meant that many transnational families develop transnational circuits of care to maintain collective family welfare. Although the emotional toll of geographical separation on the family has been recognized, the perspectives of elderly family members have remained relatively under-explored. Our paper seeks to plug this ga...

As Singapore confronts escalating demands for eldercare labour in the face of rapid ageing, families are increasingly resorting to market-based, gender-normative options predicated on the care-chain migration of women to resolve familial care deficits. At the same time, given the prevalence of discourses of Asian familialism, the abdication of elde...

Conditions of precarity, irregularity and illegality are often associated with informality. Yet the functional and analytical value of informality as a condition and process underpinning the migration industry and infrastructure has yet to be fully investigated. This paper considers first, how is informality constructed within national space and ac...

While considerable attention has been given to the impact of migration on left-behind families, such research focuses on the children of migrants, rather than older members of the family who play crucial roles in maintaining familyhood in place and across borders. Through a multi-sited study of foreign domestic migration between Singapore and Myanm...

The connections between time and space have been studied considerably in quantitative and qualitative research on the geographies of care; however, researchers tend to prioritize one approach over the other. Our article integrates analyses of activity spaces and space–time paths with conceptualizations of care developed in qualitative studies to de...

In these difficult, pressing and uncertain times, migration and mobility in Asia have been incorporated into the projects of state institutions, media and a range of civil society actors. These agendas engender and shape debates that include belonging and exclusion; social mobility and inequality; conflict, violence and persecution; economic growth...

Transnational grandparenting examines the care that grandparents provide across borders, recreating familyhood. This paper investigates how Information Communication Technologies (ICT) mediate ageing in localised and transnational contexts. We focus on grandparenting migrants from the People's Republic of China who moved temporarily to Singapore an...

Studying interfaces directs attention to the processes through which an array of social actors and regimes come into a constellation of relations and create webs of connection that impact humanitarian intervention and the lives of displaced people. This article illuminates the politics of humanitarianism evinced during Kachin internal displacement...

This special issue introduction examines why and how food matters in Asian cities and foodscapes, thus providing a different lens from Western interpretations of urban space. As cities transform, the ways that people eat and procure food also change, along with the sociocultural meanings of food itself. The special issue brings together seven resea...

This paper considers how African student migrants negotiate life in China through gastronomic practices and cultures. African migration to Chinese cities such as Guangzhou and Wuhan is part of internationalization processes that are transforming cities. A thoroughfare in Guangzhou known as Xiaobei is associated with the visible urban presence of Af...

Textbooks are a repository for canonical material that serve as important guides for students as they embark on their journey of learning and discovery. In a discipline as varied as Geography, it is often challenging for authors to decide what to include. We negotiate these concerns as editors of a textbook for a course on Changing Landscapes of Si...

This article bridges diaspora studies and diplomacy studies by proposing the concept of ‘diaspora diplomacy’, which considers the components of diplomacy and the changing relationships that diasporas have with states and other diplomatic actors. First, we ask who are the key actors engaged in diaspora diplomacy? Second, how is diplomatic work enact...

This chapter focuses on integration debates concerning the recent immigration of mainland Chinese migrants to Singapore. While the Singaporean state emphasizes the importance of integrating new immigrants into the existing social fabric of the nation-state, Singaporeans have responded with skepticism about the willingness of new immigrants to integ...

There has been a recent surge of interest in “the future” as a subject and object of analysis in human geography, mostly centered on uncertainty and threats posed by terrorism, transspecies epidemics, and climate change. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to that ways in which humans engage futurity in their everyday lives and...

Diasporas are formed when people move from one part of the world to settle elsewhere but retain a deeply felt sense of belonging to their place of origin, often referred to as the homeland. But, over time, “diaspora” has also been used to describe other types of emigration. There are different opinions on how the study of diasporas should be approa...

This paper considers how webs of connection bridge people from different social worlds and engender affinity ties that can be mobilised to nurture caring relationships, despite the physical and cognitive borders that exist within and between societies. Territorial contestation between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army has precip...

Why at this particular historical moment has there emerged a rousing interest in the potential contribution of diasporas to the development of migrant sending states and why is this diaspora turn so pervasive throughout the global South? The central premise of this paper is that the rapid ascent of diaspora‐centred development cannot be understood...

In this introduction, we argue that paying attention to the heterogeneous and multi-directional characteristics of mobilities in the Asia-Pacific can generate new conceptual and empirical insights for research on migration and mobility, transnationalism, and intercultural encounters. We note that temporality and materiality are productive lenses fo...

We introduce the following set of essays on reformatting the relationship between area studies and geography and reflect on our individual and collective negotiation of this relationship. This leads us to revisit some key area studies’ controversies and agendas, notably strategies for comparison. Drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson and other c...

Recent scholarly interventions propose that the principle of jus nexi (effective connections) or jus domicile (domicile) should replace birthright or birthplace considerations when assigning citizenship status and political membership. Nonetheless, both views privilege notions of territorial presence and the ideal of political community. This paper...

This paper conceptualises the geosocial by examining the transnational connections of African student migrants and their educational experiences in Chinese cities. While there is now an established scholarship on Chinese migration to Africa, new research on the concurrent flow of African migration to China is emerging. Recent publications on Africa...

As Myanmar undergoes political and societal transition, observers are asking questions about citizenship and ethnic identity. How does one think about citizenship and people's negotiations with law in political-legal regimes that do not subscribe to liberal democratic norms? This paper investigates how law marginalizes the Burmese Chinese minority...

Diaspora strategizing is becoming an important field of public policy in countries that seek to advance development through migration. Diaspora strategies present a way of complicating interpretations of development, as countries that represent different levels of development seek to mobilize diaspora networks nonetheless. While Singapore's diaspor...

As more countries acknowledge the potential resources represented by their emigrant populations, the diaspora strategies of migrant sending countries are gaining policy and academic attention internationally. ‘Diaspora strategies’ describe initiatives aimed at mobilising emigrants for the purposes of economic development and/or nation building. Thi...

In focusing on the way emotional ideologies underpin migration regimes, this paper underlines how migrants manage their emotions in a quest towards wider economic and social integration. It compares the experiences of Mainland Chinese immigrants who are in Canada with those that returned to China temporarily but plan to remigrate to Canada eventual...

The diaspora-centred development agenda holds that migrants lead transnational lives and contribute to the material well being of their homelands both from afar and via circular migration. Concomitant with the ascendance of this agenda there has arisen a new field of public policy bearing the title ‘diaspora strategies’. Diaspora strategies refer t...

This article investigates the tensions that emerge when transnational identities are juxtaposed against claims of multiculturalism and de facto assimilation processes. The article focuses on the resettlement of co-ethnics who arrived in China through forced migration between 1949 and 1979 and the generational transitions of their descendants. The C...

To what extent are different parts of the world exceptional when it comes to the history of forced migration and refugee experiences? For instance, is forced migration in Asia distinct from developments elsewhere? Or is forced migration in Asia part of wider processes of displacement and emplacement so characteristic of the modern world? Over the p...

This paper investigates the conceptual overlaps between transnational return migration and immigration by drawing on a qualitative study of Mainland Chinese return migration from Canada. The paper argues that reframing return migration as a distinct type of immigration draws attention to the citizenship vulnerabilities experienced by “middling” ret...

The interrelationship between forced migration, return migration and ethnicity remains relatively unexplored in current scholarship. By using the case of China’s resettlement policy towards diasporic Chinese descendants expelled from Southeast Asia during 1949–1979 and examining their contemporary situation, this paper highlights the way scholarshi...

This paper addresses the scholarship on extraterritorial citizenship strategies implemented by sending states in order to mobilize elite emigrants and enhance global competitiveness. It argues that these strategies should be distinguished analytically from claims of ‘diaspora’. The paper further delineates a geographical agenda by reflecting on, fi...

In order to provide a framework for the four papers in this special issue, this editorial foregrounds the relevance of studying migration from the perspective of everyday matters. We examine the multiple and overlapping meanings associated with the idea of the everyday and what these conceptualisations offer to migration studies. In particular, we...

Issues about migrant rights and protection are raised in cases of return migration when the country that migrants return to prohibits dual citizenship although the migrant has naturalised elsewhere. This article explores the politics of membership and rights faced by former citizens returning to reside in the society they had left. Returning Mainla...

The politics of identity and difference are often intensely experienced and negotiated in everyday encounters. By examining the experiences of highly skilled Singaporean transmigrants in London and their projects of cosmopolitan self-fashioning, this paper highlights the way in which ‘race’ and nationality trouble claims to cosmopolitanism. In the...

The role played by the state in regulating population movements has been the subject of study in migration scholarship. Immigration regimes manage migration through visa restrictions stipulating the type of work migrants perform and their entitlement to rights. However, studying migration only in terms of visas or occupational categories limit a fu...

Drawing on a qualitative study of Singaporean transmigrants in London, this article examines the way that citizenship is constituted and contested through the emotions. I draw attention to, first, the emotional representations associated with citizenship, particularly the politics of belonging in relation to citizenship-making projects and with reg...

Easier travel and communication technologies, together with the global demand and supply labour market exchanges occurring under post‐Fordist capitalism, create the conditions that make transnational family formations more common than before. Geographically dispersed family members are governed by different citizenship regimes that affect familial...

This article reviews the extant literature on citizenship and transnationalism, paying particular attention to the impact of migration on citizenship models and practices. I further address three areas of inquiry that have lagged behind in this scholarship. First, I highlight the neglect of emotions in the study of citizenship and transnational mig...

Through a study of Singaporean citizenship in the context of Singaporean transnational migration, I consider the workings of self-censorship that I define as practices of omission arising from perceived or real sensitivities in politico-social contexts. I suggest that researchers should be attentive to self-censorship practices enacted by research...