Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015

With more than 140,000 ‘Mozzies’ (Ma-ori Aussies) living in Australia, people of Ma-ori ancestry constitute Australia’s largest Polynesian ethnic group. One in six of all Ma-ori leave New Zealand (Aotearoa) indefinitely to live and work in Australia. Ma-ori who make this journey encounter difficulties in maintaining cultural traditions, missing extended family (whanau), feelings of difference with both the general population of Australia and Ma-ori back at home, and a variation of expectations of returning home. Many of these issues are expressed in the New Zealand television series The GC (2012) – a Jersey-shore type docu-drama covering the lives of several young Ma-ori based on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. A closer analysis of the members of The GC highlights the diversity of life experiences and cultural understanding amongst them, with agreement not even reached on their self-definition as Mozzies. Similarly, the social media language of young Ma-ori in Australia, when deconstructed, provides a veritable melting-pot of ‘flavours’ and influences. I argue that young Ma-ori Australians provide an important view into the Mozzie experience as they are a large part of the Mozzie population in Australia. Furthermore, they are more likely to experience and question elements of belonging and identity in relation to their Ma-oritanga/culture in the context of an Australian upbringing. Based on a survey of twelve Mozzie participants, I found that Ma-ori language use in social media among them incorporated a mix of English, Ma-ori te reo/Ma-ori language), text-speak and slang, which reflected a similar hybridization of language to that adopted by the young Ma-ori Australian actors on The GC. The aim of this article is to examine this social media language and explore the cultural, generational, technological and social factors influencing its organic growth amongst users. I suggest that this social media language is revealing of the range of experiences of young Ma-ori in Australia – expressing their attempts to maintain close links with Ma-ori culture (Ma-oritanga) and whanau from home, while also establishing a hybridized identity in Australia.

Based on research amongst Brazilian and Moroccan temporary residents of the cities of Brussels and Antwerp (Belgium), this article engages with the changes in and current methodological approaches to migration studies. By demonstrating how the trajectories of many contemporary migrants are marked by ongoing mobility, it further complicates previous linear and unidirectional models of migration to move beyond a classical and potentially deterministic model of studying migrant trajectories. The authors illustrate how many contemporary migrants come and go, not always being sure how long they will stay in the different stopovers on their trajectories, when they will stop migrating or where they will eventually settle. Because of the temporality of their residence, many of these so-called ‘transmigrants’ are not only faced with the same problems and challenges as other migrants, arriving newly in another country and rebuilding social networks, but are additionally confronted with a number of risks that are related to their mobile lifestyle. Although globalization and the porosity of nation state borders facilitate transmigration, they result in juridical and practical complexities, reflected in transmigrants’ everyday struggles. The authors explore these struggles and the difficulties and opportunities transmigrants encounter when they turn to their (transnational) networks to ask for support. Transmigrants’ social life is not only oriented towards their country of residence, but consists of complex networks beyond boundaries. Through visits, telephone calls and the use of social media, many transmigrants create, sustain and (re)discover transnational as well as local social networks. While many address their transnational networks to partly alleviate their needs, the development of local networks still appears as indispensable.

Work on the sociocultural aspects of international students tends to largely focus on their experiences within the host country. Research points to the desire of these transient migrants to stay in the host nation through permanent residency rather than return immediately to the homeland once they graduate. While studies in Australia on the sociocultural experiences of international students are necessarily localized and accurate in their assessment of the intentional trajectory of these students post-graduation, my study suggests that a new pattern is emerging that shifts beyond home-host nation connections. Although international students desire Australian permanent residence, they do not necessarily want to remain in Australia. Likewise, neither do they seek to immediately return to their home nations. Through interviews with 60 international students in Melbourne, my research reveals that these students hold aspirations for transnational mobility with ambitions to live and work in the big cities of Europe, North America and Asia, and with plans to return to the home nation eventually or possibly in the future. Their aspirational mobility is encouraged by their experiences in Australia in terms of their ability to form friendship networks with fellow international students rather than with locals, and their sense of belonging to the home nation through rapid developments in communication and media technologies.

This article is about resettled Afghan Hazaras in Australia, many of whom are currently undergoing a complex process of transition (from transience into a more stable position) for the first time in their lives. Despite their permanent residency status, we show how resettlement can be a challenging transitional experience. For these new migrants, we argue that developing a sense of belonging during the transition period is a critical rite of passage in the context of their political and cultural identity. A study of forced migrants such as these, moving out of one transient experience into another transitional period (albeit one that holds greater promise and permanence) poses a unique intellectual challenge. New understandings about the ongoing, unpredictable consequences of ‘transience’ for refugee communities is crucial as we discover what might be necessary, as social support structures, to facilitate the process of transition into a distinctly new environment. The article is based on a doctoral ethnographic study of 30 resettled Afghan Hazara living in the region of Dandenong in Melbourne, Australia. Here, we include four of these participants’ reflections of transition during different phases of their resettlement. These reflections were particularly revealing of the ways in which some migrants deal with change and acquire a sense of belonging to the community. Taking a historical view, and drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic social capital to highlight themes in individual experiences of belonging, we show how some new migrants adjust and learn to ‘embody’ their place in the new country. Symbolic social capital illuminates how people access and use resources such as social networks as tools of empowerment, reflecting how Hazara post-arrival experiences are tied to complex power relations in their everyday social interactions and in their life trajectories as people in transition. We learned that such tools can facilitate the formation of Hazara migrant identities and are closely tied to their civic community participation, English language development, and orientation in, as well as comprehension of local cultural knowledge and place. This kind of theorization allows refugee, post-refugee and recent migrant narratives to be viewed not merely as static expressions of loss, trauma or damage, but rather as individual experiences of survival, adaptation and upward mobility.

This article explores the ways in which Saudi female international students (SFIS) in Australia use social networking sites (SNS) to help them form social networks and present their online identity. Based on themes derived from five in-depth interviews, findings suggest that SFIS use SNS in a way that helps them foster a sense of belonging and connectivity regardless of their location. Currently SFIS use Facebook mainly to keep in touch with friends and family that are both local and international; gain knowledge of the various social and political events happening around them; and have ‘fun’. Similar to findings in the literature on social media use by students, SFIS form distinct virtual social networks made up not only of their conational Saudi friends, but also international Saudi as well as Australian and international friends whom they have face to face contact within Australia. As their main purpose of using SNS was to keep in touch with friends, SFIS reported using their real and accurate identity to make it easy for friends to find them. However, when it comes to the online sharing of personal photos SFIS showed a negative attitude towards posting their personal photos due to cultural considerations. Overall, findings of the study align with the literature in which SNS such as Facebook are instrumental for SFIS in maintaining a strong sense of connectivity and bonding while they are temporarily out of their home country.

The objective of this article is to flesh out the theoretical framework of franchise nation first broached in 2009 as a means of understanding the three intersecting relationships between home nation and diaspora, host nation and diaspora, and home and host nations that surround the migrant condition. The term franchise nation seeks to encapsulate and critique the idea that the core elements of a nation’s culture can, like all franchises products and services, be replicated to order. I contend such a framework to be necessary because current approaches tend to emphasize certain aspects of migration dynamics at the expense of others. In what follows, I explain why this is so and what the franchise nation frameworks add to the analysis of Chinese migration that would otherwise be absent. Instead of dyadic understandings of the relationship between diaspora and nations that explain diasporic connectivity variously as long-distance nationalism, state-led transnationalism or domestic abroad transnationalism, the franchise nation framework is premised on a triadic relationship between diaspora, home and host nation. Starting with the example of Mainland Chinese provisional business migrants (PBMs), the article explains what the franchise nation framework brings to the investigation of the ways in which their everyday connections via Chinese social media inflect their experience of multiple belongings in Australia. The three arms of franchise nation triad in this instance consist of: the business migration policy that connects the Chinese PBMs to Australia; the diaspora engagement strategies with which China reaches out to the Chinese PBM diaspora; and the soft power policy that China employs in its dealings with other nations like Australia. The aim here is to argue for a change in how the study of migration is approached, shifting from a dyadic to a triadic framework.

Transnational Student-Migrants and the State: The Education-Migration Nexus, Shanthi Robertson (2013) Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 204 pp. ISBN: 9781137267078, h/bk, £61

Insider Research on Migration and Mobility, Lejla Voloder and Liudmilia Kirpitchenko (eds) (2014) Surrey: Ashgate, 220 pp. ISBN: 9781409463214, h/bk, £54