Transnational Lives in Global Cities

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Accounting for Transnational Lives

   • Caroline Plüss

   Pages 1-30

3. (Dis)Embeddedness in Transnational Contexts

   • Caroline Plüss

   Pages 31-61

4. Being Chinese in a Chinese Global City: Hong Kong

   • Caroline Plüss

   Pages 63-93

5. In the East and in the West: London

   • Caroline Plüss

   Pages 95-134

6. Incongruous Transnational Lives: New York

   • Caroline Plüss

   Pages 135-173

7. Gendered Transnationalism: Singapore

   • Caroline Plüss

   Pages 175-236

8. Conclusions

   • Caroline Plüss

   Pages 237-295

9. Back Matter

   Pages 297-304

   PDF

This book investigates the transnational experiences of Chinese Singaporeans who lived in one of four global cities: Hong Kong, London, New York, or Singapore. Plüss argues that these middle-class, well-educated, and often highly skilled migrants mostly experienced a sense of dis-embeddedness, and not cosmopolitanism, or hybridity, in their transnational lives. The author’s multi-sited study intersects the Chinese Singaporeans’ highly varied perceptions of these global cities and their biographies to show that these migrants—who often were repeat migrants—foremost experienced ruptures and disjuncture in their education, work, family, and/or friendships/lifestyle contexts. Transnational (dis)embeddedness is explained in terms of the Chinese Singaporeans’ access to resources and their views of self, others, places, and societies. Plüss recommends that research on these migrants should more fully account for the complexities of transnational processes, and contributes with such a knowledge to the scholarship on transnationalism, migration, race and ethnicity, and migrant non-integration.

• Urban Space
• Urban Studies
• Transnationalism
• Globalization
• Cities
• Migration
• Transnational Space
• Cosmopolitanism
• Global Migrants
• Ethnic Migrants
• Urban Demography
• sociology of citizenship
• urban geography and urbanism

“Transnational Lives in Global Cities offers a timely and much-needed multi-sited analysis of the lived experience of transnational migrants in global cities. … With transnational migrants disproportionately moving to global cities and contributing to these cities’ globality, the knowledge produced in this book will undoubtedly be relevant for scholars within, and well beyond, migration, transnationalism, and urban studies.” (Yeo Si Jie Ivin, International Migration Review, April 8, 2020)

• University of Liverpool, Singapore, Singapore

  Caroline Plüss

Caroline Plüss is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool, Singapore. 

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