Transnationalism: living in two worlds

Many immigrants vote, invest, and support families back home while starting businesses, establishing churches, and joining parent-teacher associations in the United States. Today savvy organizations recognize this growing transnationalism and collaborate across borders to reduce problems in two countries simultaneously.Immigrants ; Emigrant remittances

Using the Local to Tell a Global Story: How the Peabody Essex Museum Became a World Class Museum

According to the World Bank, one out of every seven people in the world today is an internal or international, voluntary or involuntary migrant. Learning to live with diversity next door or across the globe is the challenge of the day. What role are contemporary museums playing in imparting cosmopolitan values and skills to their visitors? What helps explain how they present the nation in relation to the world? In this article, we use the case of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts to explore these questions. In 1993, the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute were poised to close. Despite their long histories and important collections, they were operating at the far frontier of the regional cultural map. In the ensuing years, the new PEM rewrote that cartography. By telling new global stories about very local objects, and by showcasing its global institutional roots, the museum dramatically transformed visitors’ experiences. It broadened and diversified the possible messages they might take away from their visits and sought to connect them to other times and places. Excavating pieces of Salem’s cultural armature enabled the PEM to display cosmopolitan ideas and to cultivate cosmopolitan skills while rescaling itself and its city in the process.Key words: museums, cosmopolitanism, global, culture, scal

Refugee Rights and Wrongs: Global Cultural Diffusion among the Congolese in South Africa

Every day the media is filled with examples of the ways in which contemporary social, economic, and political life transcends national borders. Some researchers argue that these dynamics attest to the emergence of a global civil society, based on a set of universal norms and practices that works in tandem with or may even supercede national politics. Yet we know little about the ways in which global institutions resonate with the everyday lives of individuals and with the organizations that actually serve people on the ground. How do ordinary people learn about and conceptualize these universal rights and how do they claim them? To what extent do NGOs articulate comparable notions about rights, pursue common strategies to achieve them, and by so doing, contribute to this emerging architecture of transnational governance? This paper uses the case of Congolese refugees in South Africa to explore these questions. It examines how individuals learn about and use global norms and practices and how this learning process varies in their home and host-country context. It also explores the extent to which organizations operating both locally and internationally are exposed to a set of global approaches and expectations and how these influence how things get done

Towards A Field of Transnational Studies and a Sociological Transnationalism Research Program

Each day, the news vividly depicts how social life crosses, alters, transcends and even transforms borders and boundaries. The destruction of the World Trade on September 11, 2001, one of the most potent symbols of cross-border western capitalism, by members of the Al Qaeda terrorist network is perhaps the most powerful example of the transnational nature of todays world. These ostensibly novel transnational phenomena and dynamics have clear historical analogues and antecedents. Indeed, human social formations and processes have always crossed borders to a significant degree. Even contemporary nation-states and the nation-state system have been transnationally constituted and shaped over time and space in powerful ways. These forms and processes of transnationality are the focus of a burgeoning yet fragmented body of scholarship particularly across sub-fields of sociology and closely related social science disciplines. But scholars who produce this work generally treat their efforts as unconnected to each other and work on them in isolation. There is thus both tremendous value in and potential for constructing a sociology of transnationalism. In this paper, we develop the four intellectual foundations of this field. These foundations offer a heuristically rich and compelling set of empirical, methodological, theoretical, philosophical, and normative ideas and options for scholarship that cast new light on a range of old sociological concerns such as power, inequality, culture, identity, organizations, and governance. This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 24. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Beyond the West: Barriers to Globalizing Art History

This article provides an empirical measure of progress toward global inclusiveness in introductory art history textbooks. Using both qualitative and quantitative content analysis, we find that although the discourse of art history has shifted toward global definitions of art, the incorporation of Non-Western artists into introductory textbooks has occurred slowly, making up only 23% of modern and contemporary artists featured in recent editions. There is greater editorial agreement about the canonical significance of Western modern and contemporary artists than about Non-Western artists. Drawing on qualitative interviews with textbook authors, editors, publishers, and reviewers, we identify the epistemological, economic, and institutional factors that have limited movement toward greater global inclusion in survey textbooks

Az egyidejűség konceptualizálása: a társadalom a transznacionális társadalmi mező perspektívájából

A tanulmány a transznacionális migrációval foglalkozó kutatásokat alátámasztó társadalmi elméletet és az abból következő módszertant vizsgálja. Elsőként javaslatot teszünk a migrációkutatás társadalmi mező alapú megközelítésére, különbséget téve a ‘létezés’ és a ‘valahova tartozás’ módjai között. Ezt követően amellett érvelünk, hogy az asszimiláció és a tartós transznacionális kötődések nem összeegyeztethetetlenek egymással, és nem is egymás bináris ellentétei. A harmadik lépésben olyan társadalmi folyamatokat és intézményeket világítunk meg, amelyek a hagyományos migrációs szakirodalomban csak homályosan látszódnak, de amelyek egyből világossá válnak, ha transznacionális szemüvegen keresztül vizsgálódunk. Végezetül elhelyezzük migrációkutató megközelítésünket egy olyan nagyobb intellektuális projektben, amelyet számos tudományterületen alkalmaznak a transznacionális folyamatokkal foglalkozó kutatók abból a célból, hogy újragondolják és újraalkossák a társadalom fogalmát egy olyan keretben, ahol a társadalom határai nem érnek véget automatikusan a nemzetállam határainál

New Perspectives on Immigrant Contexts of Reception

We argue that important, overlooked differences in what we call the ‘cultural armature’ of Portland, Maine, and Danbury, Connecticut help explain the variation in how each city received new immigrants in recent years. Portland has a long history of contact with the outside world and used its cosmopolitan character to promote urban redevelopment and welcome immigrants from a range of countries of origin. Danbury's small-town, insular outlook, and the fact that most of its newcomers came from a single country of origin - some without legal documents - made immigrants' welcome more fragmented. While leaders in both cities speak of multiculturalism and tolerance, the ‘cultural armature’ of each led city leaders to put that talk into action differently. We describe how we see this ‘cultural armature’ at work and argue that it - in combination with demographic realities - led immigrants to be more warmly welcomed in Portland than in Danbury.We argue that important, overlooked differences in what we call the ‘cultural armature’ of Portland, Maine, and Danbury, Connecticut help explain the variation in how each city received new immigrants in recent years. Portland has a long history of contact with the outside world and used its cosmopolitan character to promote urban redevelopment and welcome immigrants from a range of countries of origin. Danbury's small-town, insular outlook, and the fact that most of its newcomers came from a single country of origin - some without legal documents - made immigrants' welcome more fragmented. While leaders in both cities speak of multiculturalism and tolerance, the ‘cultural armature’ of each led city leaders to put that talk into action differently. We describe how we see this ‘cultural armature’ at work and argue that it - in combination with demographic realities - led immigrants to be more warmly welcomed in Portland than in Danbury

Growing old in a transnational social field: belonging, mobility and identity among Italian migrants

This article focuses on ageing in transnationalism. Drawing on the experiences of Italians in the UK as a paradigmatic example of settled European migrants, it explores the lived experiences of this group of older migrants. Using Levitt and Glick Schiller’s framework,it concentrates first on migrants’ways of being and then on their ways of belonging. The article argues that a transnational lens is necessary to understand the experiences of older migrants and that a focus on older people needs to be incorporated into studies of transnationalism. Through a discussion of their narratives and experiences, the article offers a long view on the migration process and brings attention to the significance of gender, time and the life course to understand both migrants’transnationalism and their integration

Learning probabilistic models of hydrogen bond stability from molecular dynamics simulation trajectories

Hydrogen bonds (H-bonds) play a key role in both the formation and stabilization of protein structures. H-bonds involving atoms from residues that are close to each other in the main-chain sequence stabilize secondary structure elements. H-bonds between atoms from distant residues stabilize a protein’s tertiary structure. However, H-bonds greatly vary in stability. They form and break while a protein deforms. For instance, the transition of a protein from a nonfunctional to a functional state may require some H-bonds to break and others to form. The intrinsic strength of an individual H-bond has been studied from an energetic viewpoint, but energy alone may not be a very good predictor. Other local interactions may reinforce (or weaken) an H-bond. This paper describes inductive learning methods to train a protein-independent probabilistic model of H-bond stability from molecular dynamics (MD) simulation trajectories. The training data describes H-bond occurrences at successive times along these trajectories by the values of attributes called predictors. A trained model is constructed in the form of a regression tree in which each non-leaf node is a Boolean test (split) on a predictor. Each occurrence of an H-bond maps to a path in this tree from the root to a leaf node. Its predicted stability is associated with the leaf node. Experimental results demonstrate that such models can predict H-bond stability quite well. In particular, their performance is roughly 20 % better than that of models based on H-bond energy alone. In addition, they can accurately identify a large fraction of the least stable H-bonds in a give