Description:
This book analyses the relevance of locality for a mobile group and provides a new perspective on migrant professionals by considering the relevance of social identities for local encounters in socially unequal cities. Contributors explore shifting identities, senses of belonging, and spatial and social inequalities and encounters between migrant professionals and "Others" within the cities. These qualitative studies widen the understanding of the importance of local aspects for the social identities of those who are in many aspects more privileged than others.
Review Quotes:
Lars Maier has edited a timely, insightful and well-written volume exploring the interplay between locality and the social identities of 'migrant professionals'.
The greatest value of the book might be in showing us how rarely we see the city from the perspective of those who are privileged in this particular way and how important it is to include such accounts in studies of inequality in cities. The book should be read as a timely reminder that in our continuing focus on the disadvantaged, we might have forgotten to reformulate the city from the perspective of those dwellers who are privileged in certain ways. Only with the privileged as well as the disadvantaged in mind will we be able to grasp cities' contemporary inequalities more comprehensively.
Ana Aceska, Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands - Reviewer for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
A masterful collection for students of globalization, global migration, and social inequality in comparative urban settings...This edited collection is extraordinarily well organized and well written, and it offers copious insights into the per-sonal and professional lives of highly mobile and highly skilled professionals who are migrants to twelve specific urban locations...By focusing on professional, highly mobile migrants, this book pointedly draws our attention to the issue of class in analyzing global migration flows. These accounts, largely neglected in other studies, add much to our understanding of migrants but also, importantly, to our understanding of social inequality in cities.
Robert E. Parker, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, USA - Reviewer for Contemporary Sociology
This book is a must-read for the student of spatial studies, migration, transnationalism, and social inequalities. It breaks away from the dominant academic paradigm of immigrants' integration into the host society, to examine the settlement experience of 'migrant professionals' [...]. The value of the book also lies in its exploration of a gamut of direct experiences of the city in which social networks are locally formed, used, and reproduced, and the rich insights gleaned from the migrant professional's exposure to the interplay of locality and social identity. What stands out is the sensitive portrayal of feelings of confusion and isolation, and a sense of not belonging anywhere, highlighting instances where the self feels 'othered' by the host society while simultaneously 'othering' the local, deeming it 'different'. It is this thread of marginalization, teased out from a pastiche of responses to living life in liminal spaces that renders this collection lustrous.
Mini Chandran Kurian, University of Edinburgh, UK - Reviewer for Sociological Research Online