{"id":702,"date":"2017-11-02T13:24:06","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T13:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crab.port.ac.uk\/?p=702"},"modified":"2017-11-02T13:24:06","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T13:24:06","slug":"conference-report-rethinking-transnationalism-in-the-global-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crab.port.ac.uk\/?p=702","title":{"rendered":"Conference report: Rethinking Transnationalism in the Global World"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Isabelle Cheng (University of Portsmouth),\u00a0Lara Momesso (University of Central Lancashire) and\u00a0Dafydd Fell (School of Oriental and African Studies)<\/em><\/p>\n

Academics around the world are frequently reminded by their governments, funding agencies, audiences and their own community that scholarship is not only for the pursuit of knowledge but also for making a difference to human life. Claiming that organising a conference can achieve these goals is an overstatement. Yet, hoping to facilitate a close dialogue between scholarship and activism was the rationale behind the design of our recent conference, Rethinking Transnationalism in the\u00a0Global World: Contested State, Society, Border, and the People in-between<\/a> (held\u00a07-8th September 2017 at the University of Portsmouth).<\/p>\n

This lively forum was set against our ambition of strengthening the theoretical vigour of transnationalism as a theoretical framework as well as a social phenomenon, the prevalence of which is steadily growing in East Asia. This ambition was to be realised by focusing on the significance of Taiwan and Hong Kong in the regional as well as global movements of capital, people, ideas and commodity. By applying an intersectional approach, conference participants explored issues critical to the understanding of the dual meanings of transnationalism. They included the institution of sovereignty of Taiwan, the governance of citizenship in Taiwan and China, the flow of capital, the dissemination of ideas, and the consumption of culture across the Taiwan Strait and between Taiwan and Hong Kong, the tension arising in intimacy in marriages located in Taiwan or elsewhere, the restriction of modernity on social innovation in Hong Kong, and the various forms of activism exercised at grassroots, community and transnational level.<\/p>\n

An often overlooked dimension to transnationalism is time, or, specifically, the temporality in migrants\u2019 transnational life. Taking transnational family experiences as a case study, Professor Brenda Yeoh, the keynote speaker and the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the National University of Singapore, reminded us that temporality, in the sense of rhythm, liminal times, and synchronous times, significantly affect the lives of the members of these families. They often rely on, sometimes unreliable, online technology to maintain their intimate relationships across the distance between the origin and destination of the migration.<\/p>\n

The conference delved into transnationalism by four inter-related themes:<\/p>\n