Politics of the temporary: migrant life in urban Malaysia

In this project, I look at an aspect of contemporary migration that has been largely sidelined and marginalized in mainstream debates, policy circles and research work – what happens to ‘host societies’ in the developing South that experience a rapid increase in numbers and diversity of urban populations owing to temporary migration. What are the implications of ‘temporariness’ on people’s everyday lives, practices, experiences, social environments and the urban spaces they inhabit? How does the presence and work of diverse groups of ‘temporary migrants’ alter and re-shape social, cultural and political dynamics of societies that have already been experiencing massive transformations and developments? What new forms, new practices, new networks, new hierarchies, new inequalities, and new strategies emerge in these contexts that might provide important knowledge from a transnational sociological perspective and critical studies standpoint? In order to address these broad questions, I looked at the experience of temporary labor migration in Malaysia, following a period of field research in the country. My concern that the agency of migrants is increasingly being looked at almost exclusively through an economistic, top-down lens dominated by development has prompted me to seek out the alternative experiences, conditions and practices that the Migration Development Nexus obscures and renders invisible. I sought to do this by looking at how 'temporariness' appears from below - from the perspectives of migrants, non-citizens and other inhabitants of an actual urban center in a fast-developing country of the Global South

Drones, maps and crescents: CBS News’ visual construction of the Middle East

Over the last two years, the authors have noticed in CBS World News online an increased reliance on graphics inset into news articles in place of photojournalism, particularly in articles about Middle Eastern conflicts. What are the emergent patterns of this change? By analyzing the visual symbolism of these graphics, they discuss a number of distinct patterns, which they interpret by examining the following aspects: disconnections in the article between the visual and written text; the use of an image bank in composing these images; the de-contextualization of maps as out of place; the conflation of Islam and the Middle East through the juxtaposition of Islamic symbols with those of current military conflicts; the prevalence and influence of Arab exceptionalism; and finally the representation of Islam as monolithic