The Space Of The Transnational

Social relations in our globalising world are increasingly stretched out across the borders of two or more nation-states. Yet, despite the growing academic interest in transnational economic networks, political movements and cultural forms, too little attention has been paid to the transformations of space that these processes both reflect and reproduce. Transnational Spaces takes a innovative perspective, looking at transnationalism as a social space that can be occupied by a wide range of actors, not all of whom are themselves directly connected to transnational migrant communities.

This book examines Muslim women's creative strategies of deploying religious concepts such as ummah, or community, to solve problems of domestic and communal violence, polygamous abuse, sterility, and heteronormativity. By closely reading and examining examples of ummah-building strategies in interfaith dialogues, exchanges, and encounters between Muslim and non-Muslim women in a selection of African and Southeast Asian fictions and essays, this book highlights women's assertive activisms to redefine transnationalism, understood as relationships across national boundaries, as transgeography. Ummah-building strategies shift the space of, or respatialize, transnational relationships, focusing on connections between communities, groups, and affiliations within the same nation. Such a respatialization also enables a more equitable and inclusive remediation of the citizenship of gendered and religious citizens to the nation-state and the transnational sphere of relationships.

During the first twenty years of the new millennium, many scholars turned their attention to translingualism, an idea that focuses on the merging of language in distinct social and spatial contexts to serve unique, mutually constitutive, and temporal purposes. This volume joins the more recent shift in pedagogical studies towards an altogether distinct phenomenon: transnationalism. By developing a framework for transnational pedagogical practice, this volume demonstrates the exclusive opportunities afforded to freshmen writers who write in transnational spaces that act as points of fusion for several cultural, lingual, and national identities. With reference to recent works on translingualism and transnationalism, this volume is an attempt to conceptualize effective writing pedagogy in freshman writing courses, which are becoming more and more transnational. It also provides educators and first year writing administrators with practical pedagogical tools to help them use their transnational spaces as a means of achieving their desired learning outcomes as well as teaching students threshold concepts of composition studies. This volume will be particularly useful for first year writing faculty at colleges and universities as well as writing program administrators to create a more effective curriculum that addresses these needs in classroom settings. All scholars with a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition, English as a Second Language, Translation Studies, to name a few, will also find this a valuable resource.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the European Union is an increasingly dense transnational social and political space. More and more non-governmental organisations develop transnational links, which are usually more intensive within the EU, even if they often extend beyond its borders to the wider world. This multi-disciplinary volume explores the importance of these structures, actors and relations for EU and European governance in the context of the theoretical debate about European integration in the social sciences. This book delivers: theoretical chapters examining and discussing the main conceptual perspectives to studying the transnational EU to provide a current overview empirical case studies of transnationalism in practice on transnational party, trade union and police cooperation to transnational education policy-making and transnational consensus-building in EMU governance. This volume will be of great interest to students in social sciences, contemporary history and law.

An ethnographic analysis of the purported transnational gang crisis between the United States and El Salvador, based on extensive research in Los Angeles and San Salvador.

Five centuries after the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain, Europe is once again becoming a land of Islam. At the beginning of a new millennium, and in an era marked as one of globalization, Europe continues to wrestle with the issue of national identity, especially in the context of its Muslim citizens. Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam brings together distinguished scholars from Europe, the United States, and the Middle East in a dynamic discussion about the Muslim populations living in Europe and about Europe's role in framing Islam today. Working at the knotty intersection of cultural identity, the politics of nations and nationalisms, and religious persuasions, this is an invaluable anthology of scholarship that reveals the multifaceted natures of both Europe and Islam.

As a religious and cultural minority in Turkey, the Alevis have suffered a long history of persecution and discrimination. In the late 1980s they started a movement for the recognition of Alevi identity in both Germany and Turkey. Today, they constitute a significant segment of Germany's Turkish immigrant population. In a departure from the current debate on identity and diaspora, Sökefeld offers a rich account of the emergence and institutionalization of the Alevi movement in Germany, giving particular attention to its politics of recognition within Germany and in a transnational context. The book deftly combines empirical findings with innovative theoretical arguments and addresses current questions of migration, diaspora, transnationalism, and identity.

This book draws attention to the various factors that characterize migrant flows and mobilities, calling into question familiar concepts such as push and pull, migration as a life project and sociocultural integration. It highlights processes such as fl exible migrant routes, temporary and return migration, mental aspects of migration processes and transnationalism, which are organised around the themes of shaping trajectories, frictions in space, and the migrant mental framework. It brings together work from scholars from Europe and beyond, with the contributions collected emphasizing the social and mental processes that underpin the migratory process, which can be seen as the ‘soft side’ of migration. Too often, this side is neglected when the governance of migration is discussed. The novel ideas expressed here also help to overcome the mechanistic view of migration as a push-pull event. Thus, the book suggests a different understanding of migration and mobility as relational, non-linear and fluid social processes, characterized by instability in migrant life trajectories. Emphasizing the fl exibility of migrants and migration and advocating the importance of emotionally charged, individual perceptions as central to migrant decision-making, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, politics and geography with interests in migration and diaspora studies.