Section 2: MEMBERS’ NEW BOOKS

This interdisciplinary collection explores student mobilities from the Global South, focusing on how class, ethnicity, and gender influence decisions, experiences, and outcomes in studying abroad.

Featuring post- colonial perspectives from Brazil, Indonesia, Ghana, and India, the collection highlights the unique challenges and opportunities faced by these students. It includes personal narratives that add a qualitative dimension, illustrating the individual agency and resilience of international students. The role of educational institutions and policies in shaping mobility is also addressed, including a discussion of how universities and governments create opportunities or barriers. Overall, this collection provides valuable insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and gender in shaping educational trajectories from the Global South.

This book examines the transnational ties maintained by Tunisian migrants and their descendants living in Italy, applying Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework in its entirety. It interprets transnationality as social practice — the actualisation of a habitus shaped by the agents' position in social space, through a constant dialogue between interiority and exteriority. The result is a holistic reading of the transnational migratory experience, of interest to researchers and students working in migration, diaspora, transnationalism, and belonging.

East African Queer and Trans Displacements is the first dedicated open access collection examining LGBTQI+ displacement across East Africa. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship and original creative works by queer and trans diasporic writers and artists, it situates displacement within a decade of escalating state-sponsored homophobia — from Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act to Tanzania's 2018 crackdowns. The collection moves beyond presenting East Africa solely as a site of flight, capturing the region's complexity as simultaneously producing, hosting, and transiting LGBTQI+ refugees, and theorizing the obstacles, movements, and survival strategies that shape their lives 

This book explores the complex intersections of ageing, migration, and transnational family life. Migration reshapes family structures and alters the quality and dynamics of relationships across generations and borders. Rather than viewing ageing solely from the perspective of older adults, this edited volume conceptualizes ageing as a life-long process, offering important connections to life-course perspectives on families and intergenerational relationships. Amid intensified global mobility and population ageing, the chapters present both quantitative and qualitative research from diverse contexts around the world. Together, they illuminate underexamined groups and social settings in the fields of ageing and migration, expanding and deepening current scholarly debates. Drawing on data from a range of social science disciplines, the volume provides rigorous analyses of aged care, health, parenthood, gender, and culture. It reveals the multifaceted ways in which ageing shapes family relationships within the context of migration and transnationalism. The contributions examine how ageing migrants navigate their own experiences of growing older while living apart from their adult children and kin, and how migrants engage with notions of well-being, care, and filial obligation in relation to ageing parents who remain in their countries of origin. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will appeal to scholars and students of migration studies, family sociology, social gerontology, diaspora studies, and anthropology, offering new insights into the lived realities of ageing and care in a transnational world. 

Claiming Citizenship focuses on Indian American civic and political activism in the U.S. public sphere around U.S.-based and India-based issues. Indian Americans are a group of interest to study immigrant and diasporic politics since they are a rising political force whose patterns of activism do not follow the unified model of mobilization of other powerful American ethnic groups. They have multiple types of advocacy organizations: those mobilizing around an Indian American identity; those mobilizing around a South Asian American identity; organizations for Indian Americans of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist backgrounds; organizations representing Indian American Democrats and Republicans; and even combinations of these such as the Republican Hindu Coalition that mobilized around Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016. There are also generational differences between second-generation members and the immigrant generation. Unified ethnic mobilization is rare and does not take place through a single professional advocacy organization, or even through well-coordinated campaigns. The book examines the dialectical process through which immigrants conform to the structures and cultures of the society they have immigrated to but also work to transform it to accommodate their unique needs. It shows the relative roles played by domestic and international influences on the political mobilization of immigrant groups in the United States as well as the importance of social media in shaping these mobilizations.  

Claiming Citizenship presents an excellent template to understand how religion, national identity, race, and pan-ethnicity interact in ethnic politics, in addition to examining the role that generational status plays in determining some of these patterns. 

How do Indian men and women migrant entrepreneurs play a part in repositioning India as a pivotal actor in the twenty-first century's multipolar world order? In Becoming Boundless, Manashi Ray draws on ethnographic and archival research to uncover how they create and participate in transnational networks, and how these networks in turn drive the growth of global capitalism. Ray pays particular attention to the expansive global networks of transnational Indian entrepreneurs between the United States and India and across several other nations.

Covering a 10-year period in India's post-reform era, Ray deftly highlights complex connections between the social and spatial mobility of this diverse, bi-cultural population, and uniquely theorizes the intersection of class, caste, and gender. She questions whether migration reinforces dominant forms of social inequality or transforms it through the redistribution of valued goods and life chances, especially for women in male-dominated sectors. The book therefore recasts contemporary migration as a crucial part of the emergence of transnational economic spaces, and analyzes the ways that these spaces are fragmented and hierarchical.

The monograph examines Chinese business and labour in Kazakhstan from 1991 to 2025, situating them within China’s expanding economic, investment, trade, institutional, and soft-power presence. It argues that China has become a long-term, and possibly permanent, influence on Kazakhstan’s development, while also raising concerns about economic and technological dependence, environmental risks, and governance challenges, including corruption.

A major contribution of the book is its pioneering monitoring study of public attitudes in Kazakhstan toward China and Chinese migrants, conducted in 2007, 2012, and 2023. These findings challenge simplified narratives of entrenched Sinophobia by showing more nuanced and changing perceptions over time. The 2023 focus groups also explore how Han Chinese entrepreneurs, employees, and university students perceive Kazakhstan and its people.

The book aims to inform decision-making on Chinese–Kazakhstani labour and business migration, bilateral cooperation, and broader regional policy. Its audience includes scholars, policymakers, business actors, international organisations, journalists, and readers interested in China’s political, economic, legal, social, and cultural presence in Kazakhstan.

Two out of the book’s eight chapters focus on perceptions and changing attitudes of Kazakhstan’s local population towards China and Chinese migrants, based on a series of sociological studies implemented in Kazakhstan in 2007-2023. The latest focus groups (2023) explored the perceptions and attitudes of migrant Han Chinese entrepreneurs, employees, and university students towards the host country and its people. The value of these studies cannot be overestimated, considering the centuries-old Sinophobia and the imperative to address it. 

This book examines the growing role of migration intermediaries and labour migration agents in contemporary labour mobility. Using an economic sociological perspective, it reconceptualizes migration brokerage as an institutionally organized and contested market rather than simply a byproduct of neoliberalism or a source of migrant precarity. Focusing on labour-exporting states such as Nepal, the book explains why migration brokerage consolidates into a durable industry, how it aligns with state interests, and why intermediaries persist despite expanding migrant networks and state regulation. The book contributes to debates on migration, labour governance, economic sociology, and the sociology of work.