Digital Transnationalism

The first book in English on Chinese-language media in Australia, Digital Transnationalism explores the challenges, opportunities and development of this sector against the backdrop of China’s rise, its soft power agenda, and renewed hostility between China and the global West. Situated in the Australian context, this study nevertheless is essential to understand the complex and evolving nature of Chinese-language digital media, and the role they play in fostering digital transnationalism among first-generation Chinese migrants across the globe.

WeChat (the international version of Weixin), launched in 2012, has rapidly become the most favoured Chinese social media. Globally available, equally popular both inside and outside China and widely adopted by Chinese migrants, WeChat has fundamentally changed the ways in which Mandarin-speaking migrants conduct personal messaging, engage in group communication and community business activities, produce and distribute news, and access and share information. This book explores a wide range of issues connected to the ways in which WeChat works and is used, across the world among the newest members of the Chinese diaspora. Arguing that digital/social media afford a great degree of individual agency, as well as a collective capacity for sustaining an ‘imagined community’, the book shows how WeChat’s assemblage of infrastructure and regulatory frameworks, technical capabilities, content and sense of community has led to the construction of a particular kind of diasporic Chinese world, at a time marked both by China’s rise, and anxiety about Chinese influence in the West. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

In recent years an increasing number of scholars have incorporated a focus on emotions in their theories of material culture, transnationalism and globalization, and this book aims to contribute to this field of inquiry. It examines how ‘emotions’ can be theorized, and serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the interrelated mobility of humans, objects and images. Ethnographically rich, and theoretically grounded case studies offer new perspectives on the relations between migration, material culture and emotions. While some chapters address the many different ways in which migrants and migrant artists express their emotions through objects and images in transnational contexts, other chapters focus on how particular works of art, everyday objects and artefacts can evoke feelings specific to particular migrant groups and communities. Case studies also analyse how artists, academics and policy makers can stimulate positive interaction between migrants and non-migrant communities.

Diaspora & transnationalism are widely used concepts in academic & political discourses. Although originally referring to quite different phenomena, they increasingly overlap today. Such inflation of meanings goes hand in hand with a danger of essentialising collective identities. This book analyses this topic.

This edited collection interrogates the diversity of transnational migration experiences in the Asia-Pacific through the lens of digital ethnography in order to explore the transformative effects digital media plays in these experiences. While there has been work on the various ways in which internet communication technologies (ICTs) particularly mobile communication allows for various forms of connectivity between individuals and groups in this age of hyper (transnational) mobility, there is a scarcity on the way digital media presents challenges, creates agency and alters relationships within the broad umbrella of the transnational migration experience. The authors in this collection– who come from diverse disciplinary backgrounds across social, cultural, education and communication research – present cutting edge cross and trans disciplinary analyses of transnational migration where digital media becomes a creative, if not fundamental avenue, for migrants to develop new strategies for dealing with their cross-border mobilities.

The computational turn in the social sciences and humanities has generated much excitement about the potential to refresh our approaches to the study of the techno-social. From natively digital to digitised data, researchers of digital diasporas increasingly find themselves working with a range of disparate digital objects. These digital objects can include anything from hyperlink to timestamps, from platform behavioural metrics such as react, share, or retweet to different media formats such as text, image, pre-recorded or livestreamed videos. Taking these disparate objects into account, this book introduces digital methods as research strategies not only for dealing with the ephemeral and unstable nature of tracing the diaspora with digital data, but also for reconceptualizing digital diasporas as assemblages and networks of more-than-human actors. The book also introduces a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological techniques to studying digital diasporas as contingent and processual hybrid collectives of heterogeneous material, cultural, and practice-based assemblages. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the digital space and transnational communities.

Providing a critical overview of transnationalism as a concept, this Handbook looks at its growing influence in an era of high-speed, globalised interconnectivity. It offers crucial insights on how approaches to transnationalism have altered how we think about social life from the family to the nation-state, whilst also challenging the predominance of methodologically nationalist analyses.

This handbook presents cutting-edge research on Asian transnationalism written by experts in the areas of migration, diaspora, ethnicity, gender, language, education, politics, media, art, popular culture and literature from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. The Asian region not only constitutes one of the largest diasporic populations in the world but also the most diversified diasporas in terms of their historical trajectories of emigration, geographical spread, economic and political strength, socio-cultural integration in the host country and transnational engagement with the homeland. Divided thematically into six broad sections, the chapters in this handbook critically discuss and debate some of the pertinent issues of Asian transnationalism: Contextualizing Asian Transnationalism Transnationalism and Socio-Cultural Identities Transnationalism, Education and Infrastructure Transnationalism, Gender and Development Transnationalism and Dynamics of Diasporic Politics Transnationalism, Art and Media The Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and students interested in the study of international migration, Asian diaspora and transnationalism. Chapter 29 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.