Francis L. Collins

Getting 'entangled': reflexivity and the 'critical turn' in tourism studies.

Reflecting a broader postmodern shift to unmask the cultural politics of research and knowledge-making in academia, tourism studies as a field is demonstrating a notable ‘critical turn’—a shift in thought that serves to provide and legitimize a space for more interpretative and critical modes of tourism inquiry. In response to this critical turn, this paper addresses the central issue of ‘reflexivity’ which, while alive in other disciplines and fields, has received rather limited attention within tourism studies. By drawing on our own personal academic/research experiences working at the crossroads of this turn in thought, we identify a range of ‘entanglements’ that influence and constrain our research choices, textual strategies and ability to pursue reflexive knowledge. These entanglements centre around four broad, but interlinking, themes: ‘ideologies and legitimacies’; ‘research accountability’; ‘positionality’, and ‘intersectionality with the researched’. In writing this paper, we aim to uncloak the current cultural politics in the tourism studies field, deferring as a basis to more mature debates on reflexivity in the social sciences. Ultimately, we stress the need to recognize reflexivity not only as a self-indulgent practice of writing ourselves in to our research, but also as a wider socio-political process which must incorporate and acknowledge the ‘researched’ and our responsibilities to them in the production of tourism knowledge. More importantly, in order to move the perceptions of reflexivity beyond the self, we urge all researchers to find a common territory and engage in the art of reflexivity, irrespective of their ontological, epistemological and methodological binds.

Transnational mobilities and urban spatialities Notes from the Asia-Pacific

Recent debates in migration studies have emphasized the importance of attending to the urban as part of an effort to respatialize the study of mobility and transnationalism. This paper critically expands on these interventions through a more detailed engagement with ideas of relationality and territoriality moving beyond permanent settlement to consider temporary migrants, and considering urban centres outside North America and Europe through discussion of cities in the Asia-Pacific. The paper discusses two potential avenues towards a more sophisticated conceptualization of transnational mobilities and urban spatialities: moving beyond rupture in analysis of migrant settlement, and interrogating transnational and urban mobilities.

Of kimchi and coffee: globalisation, transnationalism and familiarity in culinary consumption

This paper discusses the culinary consumption choices of South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand as a route to re-considering the transnational production of familiarity. In particular, this study questions the extent to which culinary consumption by transnational migrants is always an intentional declaration of ‘group loyalties’ or about the re-production of local or national identities. Drawing on research with students this paper illustrates that while some aspects of the familiarity enacted in culinary consumption appear to be ‘local’, in the sense that they are encoded as ‘Korean’, other aspects appear to represent forms of ‘global’ familiarity. Hence, it is argued that culinary consumption in transnational worlds can also more subtly represent an effort to recreate familiarity through reference to characteristics of everyday life before migration that may include what appear to be both global and local products. Such familiarity is then not necessarily about group loyalties or identities but rather an example of the importance of practical know how and familiar sensations in feelings of belonging and attachment.

Connecting ‘Home’ With ‘Here’: Personal Homepages in Everyday Transnational Lives

The study of migrant transnationalism focuses on the ways in which (certain) individuals are able to act socially, economically or politically in more than one locale. One crucial element to such action is the use of communication technologies—and in particular the internet—as a means to bridge the gaps between different places. In this paper I focus on the use of personal homepages amongst South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand, to investigate the ways in which this communication technology (CT) serves to connect idealised notions of ‘home’ (South Korea) with the physical realities of ‘here’ (Auckland). This connection with ‘home’, however, is shown to be Janus-like in its effects on students’ everyday transnational lives—both facilitating and constraining their actions. I argue that a reading of transnational communication practices that conceives access as necessarily positive is naïve in that it fails to recognise the ways that engagement with spaces of belonging—personal, familial or national—are also characterised by inclusion and exclusion and by the processes of surveillance and disciplining that seek to police the borders between bodies and subjectivities, both on and offline.

Mobility and desire: international students and Asian regionalism in aspirational Singapore

Higher education is playing an important role in Singapores most recent cycle of modernization: to re-make itself into a global city through the continued accumulation of capital, ‘talent,’ and knowledge. This paper is a critical analysis of the accounts of a group of international students enrolled at the National University of Singapore, a key strategic site in Singapores bid to reconfigure itself into a knowledge hub. We discuss international student negotiations of Singapores global city imaginings against a policy context that foregrounds a desire for regional students in the states imagination and aspiration. In inquiring what political work international education is called upon to do to further Singapores progressive developmentalism, we open up an analytical space for understanding the global city as both a cosmopolitan metropolis that is continually being refashioned by the desires and aspirations of new student actors, and a place of transit from which students leave having acquired valuable navigational capacities.

Organizing Student Mobility: Education Agents and Student Migration to New Zealand

The movement of international students represents an increasing component of contemporary population mobilities. Like other forms of migration, international student mobility takes place through a complex assemblage of actors and networks, including origin and destination states, educational institutions, families, friends and communities, and of course students themselves. In the midst of these arrangements education agents appear to occupy a pivotal position, serving as a bridge between student origins and study destinations in a manner that enables multiple movements across educational and geographic divides. Establishing and maintaining this important position in international student mobilities is a complex endeavour that requires agents to bridge the gap between a solely profit-oriented education industry and the social lives of students and their families. This paper investigates the position of agents in student mobilities by focusing on the development of export education activities since the early 1990s in New Zealand and the changing relationships of agents with the state, education providers and students. I trace the emergence of agents to the early liberalization of student mobility and educational provision but also note how agents became increasingly incorporated into a more formalized education industry as later governments engaged in more direct intervention and regulation of student flows and educational quality. To broaden this general overview of the role of agents the paper focuses on the specific activities and relationships of agents involved in the movement of South Korean international students. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for research on agents and other intermediaries to focus in more detail on the manner in which these actors mediate different sorts of relationships, between migration/education industries and migrant/student social networks as well as between changing state liberalization and intervention and emerging industry formations.

Aspiration, desire and drivers of migration

ABSTRACT Introducing a special journal issue by the same title, this article provides a foundation for seven other articles with a theoretical mission to better understand the forces and frictions through which migration comes about and is experienced. The collection seeks to contribute to migration theory by considering crosscutting themes related to the concepts of aspiration, desire and drivers of migration. This introductory article locates the three concepts within the development of migration scholarship. First, we show how a reappraisal of theory is grounded in influential developments in migration scholarship, such as the transnational turn, feminist approaches and, more recently, a growing theoretical interest in emotions and temporalities. Second, we examine the ways in which ‘aspiration’ and ‘desire’ have figured in migration theory. Sometimes treated as synonyms, the terms both belong to a broader semantic field of potentiality, yet connect with different theoretical approaches. Third, we address the rise of ‘drivers of migration’ as an analytical concept, noting how it seems to be replacing ‘causes’ and ‘determinants’ in the literature.

Teaching English in South Korea: mobility norms and higher education outcomes in youth migration

In many Western contexts, travel has a long historical association with youth, young adults and coming of age, an association that often connects temporary mobility with the lives of the educated middle classes and elite. Indeed, from the colonial adventure and the ‘grand tour’, to contemporary ideas of the ‘gap year’ or ‘overseas experience’, the mobility of Western youth and young adults is often considered voluntary and based on a desire to explore places and develop positive personal attributes, marking a stark contrast to depictions of migration from the developing world as directly or indirectly forced and driven primarily by economic considerations. This paper questions this depiction of developed world mobility in the context of the changing economic conditions that face young graduates in many Western countries. Drawing on survey and interview data I focus on the profiles and biographies of young adults from English-speaking countries working as foreign language instructors in South Korea. Although the personal narrative of travel and exploration amongst these individuals remains significant, findings from this research also suggest that many of these young graduates are also driven by economic circumstances: unemployment or underemployment and high levels of debt usually associated with tertiary studies. This tension between the opportunities available to young people and the constraints imposed by their own circumstances raises important questions about the multiple layers of social and economic differentiation operating through higher education and international mobility in the lives of young people.

Making the Most of Diversity? The Intercultural City Project and a Rescaled Version of Diversity in Auckland, New Zealand

Contemporary policy approaches to ‘cultural diversity’ are increasingly focusing on ‘the urban’, marking a considerable departure from configurations like biculturalism and multiculturalism in which the space of the nation was viewed as the key arena for the making of diverse and cohesive societies. In this context, this paper analyses the Intercultural City Project (ICP), a multicity planning initiative developed by the private consultancy Comedia, focusing on the ICP’s deployment in Auckland, New Zealand, where it was used to rethink issues surrounding diversity and urban planning. The analysis focuses on three key issues that emerge in the ICP: the targeting of cultural diversity and interaction; the rescaled ‘urban’ version of diversity; and the connections between this model of diversity and neo-liberal urban policies.

Volunteering, Social Networks, Contact Zones and Rubbish: The Case of the ‘Korean Volunteer Team’

Encounters with difference are an increasingly common aspect of everyday life in contemporary cities. Indeed, Ang (2001: 89–90) notes that in the global city ‘groups of different backgrounds, ethnic and otherwise, cannot help but enter into relations with each other, no matter how great the desire for separateness and the attempt to maintain cultural purity’. Yet, despite the increasing commonality of such encounters, most research indicates that everyday life in multicultural spaces is characterised by tensions, racism, encounters that are superficial or exploitative, and more generally feelings of physical and sociocultural distance between individuals and communities. In this context, this chapter argues that there is value in drawing attention to small examples that offer the possibility of or hope for different kinds of everyday multiculturalism in contemporary cities. To do this I draw on the literature around volunteering and contact zones to tell the story of a group who called themselves the ‘Korean Volunteer Team’ (KVT). Despite this ethno-specific name, the KVT’s members were South Korean, Japanese and Chinese international students, as well as Pakeha (European) New Zealanders. As part of an attempt to engage with the public in Auckland and to overcome racial stereotypes about ‘Asian students’, the KVT met every Saturday to pick up rubbish in Auckland’s inner city. This rather unlikely activity sought to bridge the significant gap between international students from the Asian region and other inhabitants in Auckland, especially the dominant Pakeha population. During the two years that the KVT operated, the group had many noteworthy encounters with members of the public, both positive and negative. They also established a network of friendships that are