Session Name: Digitally mediated mobilities and migration practices in/from Asia
1 - Maintaining Transnational Lives: Foreign Scholars in China During Pandemic Times
Monday, July 29, 2024
16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract Drawing on interview data with foreign scholars in China, this paper examines the ways in which infrastructural interruptions affect transnational lives of highly skilled mobile individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they managed to maintain career progression and family connections despite travel restrictions, isolation, and uncertainties brought by the global health crisis. Foreign scholars in China relied on social media platforms and digital technologies to mitigate, and in some cases overcome, the negative impacts of Covid-induced “infrastructural glitches”, and to maintain their transnational lives by navigating a different set of spatial-temporal conditions in and out of China. This paper aims to examine digitally mediated mobilities, and everyday adaptive strategies that emerge through individual works of waiting, coping, and maintaining ties. By focusing on transnational lives in a period of acute disruption, this paper hopes to provide a deeper understanding of how the digital and the social interweave in transforming migrant identities, aspirations and lived experiences.
.png)