Return mobilities of highly skilled young people to a post-conflict region: the case of Kurdish-British to Kurdistan – Iraq

Building upon insights from recent studies on the ‘return mobilities’ of children of migrants to their parents’ country of origin, this paper focuses on the motives of highly skilled young people from the UK who migrate to their parental post-conflict region (Kurdistan-Iraq), an area that has experienced long-term conflict and profound economic and political instability. The existing studies on children of migrants’ return mobilities place more emphasis on cultural and economic considerations while paying little attention to the associated ideological and political elements. Based on interviews concerning 32 highly skilled young British-Kurdish people’s migration to Kurdistan-Iraq, this paper argues that the transnational mobilities of the 1.5 generation and second generation of refugee-diasporas are more driven by the collective trauma of their parents’ displacement, their feeling of expulsion and intergenerational articulation with an imagined homeland, than they are by economic considerations and/or nostalgia. The Kurdish political aspiration to develop Kurdish institutions and a national economy for a potential statehood in Northern Iraq has also created hope among young Kurdish people and influenced their motivations to ‘return’. In this context, this paper focuses on the political, ideological and emotional dimensions of return mobilities and draws attention to return mobilities among a new generation of refugees to their parental post-conflict homeland

Multiple tests of association with biological annotation metadata

We propose a general and formal statistical framework for multiple tests of association between known fixed features of a genome and unknown parameters of the distribution of variable features of this genome in a population of interest. The known gene-annotation profiles, corresponding to the fixed features of the genome, may concern Gene Ontology (GO) annotation, pathway membership, regulation by particular transcription factors, nucleotide sequences, or protein sequences. The unknown gene-parameter profiles, corresponding to the variable features of the genome, may be, for example, regression coefficients relating possibly censored biological and clinical outcomes to genome-wide transcript levels, DNA copy numbers, and other covariates. A generic question of great interest in current genomic research regards the detection of associations between biological annotation metadata and genome-wide expression measures. This biological question may be translated as the test of multiple hypotheses concerning association measures between gene-annotation profiles and gene-parameter profiles. A general and rigorous formulation of the statistical inference question allows us to apply the multiple hypothesis testing methodology developed in [Multiple Testing Procedures with Applications to Genomics (2008) Springer, New York] and related articles, to control a broad class of Type I error rates, defined as generalized tail probabilities and expected values for arbitrary functions of the numbers of Type I errors and rejected hypotheses. The resampling-based single-step and stepwise multiple testing procedures of [Multiple Testing Procedures with Applications to Genomics (2008) Springer, New York] take into account the joint distribution of the test statistics and provide Type I error control in testing problems involving general data generating distributions (with arbitrary dependence structures among variables), null hypotheses, and test statistics.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/193940307000000446 the IMS Collections (http://www.imstat.org/publications/imscollections.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A contextual understanding of diaspora entrepreneurship: identity, opportunity and resources in the Sri Lankan Tamil and Kurdish diaspora

Purpose - Within the growing study of transnational entrepreneurial practice, existing conceptualisation of diaspora entrepreneurship has often lacked engagement with the particularities of the diaspora condition. This paper seeks to advance theoretical understanding and empirical study of diaspora entrepreneurship through identifying the processes that generate diaspora entrepreneurship across economic, social and political spheres. Design/Methodology - To analyse the relationship between the development of venture activity and diaspora (re)production, in depth, qualitative biographical analysis was undertaken with UK based diaspora entrepreneurs embedded within the particular contexts of the Sri Lankan Tamil and Kurdish diasporas. Skilled and active diaspora entrepreneurs were purposively selected from these extreme case contexts to explore their entrepreneurial agency within and across the business, social and political realms. Findings – Results identified key dimensions shaping the development of diaspora entrepreneurship. These comprised the role of diaspora context in shaping opportunity frameworks and the mobilisation of available resources, and how venture activity served to sustain collective diaspora identity and address diaspora interests. These findings are used to produce an analytical model of the generation of diaspora entrepreneurship to serve as a basis for discussing how heterogeneous and hybrid entrepreneurial strategies emerge from and shape the evolving diaspora context. Originality - By placing the reproduction of social collectivity centre-stage, this paper identifies the particularities of diaspora entrepreneurship as a form of transnational entrepreneurship. This recognizes the significance of a contextualised understanding of entrepreneurial diversity within wider processes of diaspora development, which has important implications for policy and practice development in homeland and settlement areas

Playing politics with the plight of refugees. How the EU went into Erdogan’s political receivership

At the peak of the ‘refugee crisis’ in late 2015-early 2016, the EU reached an agreement with the Turkish government, known as the EU Facility for Refugees in Turkey. It has served as a bone of contention between the EU and Turkey ever since its implementation. As anticipated by many experts, critical voices and NGOs in Turkey and Europe, the Facility has provided the Erdogan regime with a strategic tool to blackmail the EU without caring for the humanitarian needs

Diasporas, agency and enterprise in settlement and homeland contexts: politicised entrepreneurship in the Kurdish diaspora

Through its focus on state-diaspora relations, existing research has given limited consideration to the role of nonstate entrepreneurial actors in understanding diaspora politicisation. This paper addresses this research gap by examining the contextually embedded relationship between diaspora politicisation and entrepreneurial activity within diaspora settlement and homeland spaces. Findings are presented of original qualitative research with Kurdish diaspora entrepreneurs based in Europe operating in the media and publishing industries. Results demonstrate how the intersection between diaspora identity, opportunity frameworks and available resources generates forms of politicised diaspora entrepreneurship, and how these venture activities contribute to the transnational (re)production of diaspora identity and the mobilisation of locally rooted diaspora populations. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to enhancing current understanding of diaspora entrepreneurship and the significance of non-state actors within the diaspora politicisation process, and their relevance to policy thinking across homeland and settlement contexts

Gender equalities: what lies ahead. Work, Employment and Society, 35 (4) . pp. 615-620. ISSN 0950-0170

It is hard to over-estimate the importance of the social sciences in informing us of deepening inequalities at work and how they are likely to play out as the economic crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds. Understanding the long-term impact of the pandemic requires us to think across the intersection of work and society. This is challenging work as part of taking an intersectional position means accepting that transmission thrives on inequality where occupation and occupational risk are often mapped onto class, race, ethnicity, sex and geography (Middleton et al., 2020). [...

Migrants with insecure legal status and access to work: the role of ethnic solidarity networks

This article explores the complexities of ethnic solidarity and ethnic capital in enabling participation on labour markets for migrants with insecure legal status in the UK. By drawing together research insights and data from a questionnaire survey of 178 Iraqi-Kurdish migrants with insecure legal status, four focus groups and ten expert interviews, this paper examines how ‘unauthorised’ migrants get access to the segmented labour market at a time of increased in-border controls in the UK. It argues that conflict-generated diasporas such as the Kurds display a distinct solidarity with their community members with insecure legal status and provide access to the labour markets against the tangible threat of in-border migration enforcement. We term this form of solidarity as stretched solidarity which emerges during risky, difficult and destitute times and it is a reluctant act of empathy and socio-political position. This paper identifies the social phenomenon of stretched solidarity and sets out a model for understanding its embeddedness within conflict-generated diasporic networks

Migrants at work: perspectives, perceptions and new connections. Work, Employment and Society, 34 (5) . pp. 745-748. ISSN 0950-0170

Migration – and the experiences of migrants – continue to occupy an important and controversial place in the scholarly and political debates on contemporary labour markets and societies. As new scenarios emerge at local, national and global levels, new insights and perspectives become necessary. The articles in this themed issue reflect the interest Work, Employment and Society has had in the topic of labour migrations and migrants at work for well over a decade and which led, for example, to the themed issue Migration at Work: Spaces, Borders and Boundaries in 32(5), 2018. Migration has of course been a prominent issue across the social sciences, and in recent years particularly in relation to the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 and to intra-European migration ahead of and in light of Brexit. The experiences of migrants from Eastern and Central Europe in the workplace, their overqualification and devaluing of their cultural capital, and their positioning within segmented labour markets have produced a number of articles in past issues (e.g. Ciupijus, 2011; Samaluk, 2016; Sirkeci et al., 2018) to which those in the current issue (Leschke and Weiss; Rydzik and Anitha) make an important addition. [...

Working Lives in India: current insights and future directions

India presents a rich context for research on work and employment, epitomising the paradox of an ‘emerging economy’ but one where 92.4 percent of the workforce is informal - insecure, unprotected, poor – and women and disadvantaged groups most vulnerable. It displays a wide range of production relations in its formal/informal economy, embedded in diverse social relations, and the related forms of exploitation and resistance. This e-special issue of Work, Employment and Society (WES) aims to review existing WES scholarship on India since 2001, identifying both gaps in scholarship and fruitful avenues for future research on India. The purpose is to showcase some of this scholarship while also advancing the internationalization and expansion of the journal’s presence in countries in the Global South. This effort is timely as decolonisation of scholarship and increased focus on the South is on the intellectual agenda, challenging established structures of power and knowledge in academia

Populism as new wine in old bottles in the context of Germany: 'symbolic violence' as collective habitus that devalues the human capital of Turks

Populism in Germany is not a new phenomenon. For a long time, the alleged integration problems of Turkish workers in Germany have been at the center of the dominant discourse and academic studies. This paper demonstrates how ‘symbolic violence’ as collective habitus frames the human capital of Turks as deficient, a phenomenon which has prevailed even prior to the recent populist movements. Drawing on a company case study, interviews, and observations, our empirical investigation operationalises and expands the Bourdieusian conceptual trinity of habitus, capital, and symbolic violence through the lens of ethnicity and how it relates to populism