The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and the India China Institute at The New School host a lecture by Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, entitled "Conceptualising 'Contemporaneous Migration' through China's Global Connections."

What might reimagining citizenship and state spaces look like if we examine emigration, immigration and re-migration under the same analytical lens? This presentation develops the concept of ‘contemporaneous migration’ as an analytical framework to draw together the different manifestations of migration directionality that converge in a polity and their interconnections across global space. Through interviews findings and ethnographic data, this presentation interfaces Chinese emigration with China’s current transition into an immigrant society. Seemingly distinct trends of emigration, immigration and re-migration have been normally subsumed under national narratives portraying China as the ancestral homeland of the overseas and returning Chinese, or by depicting foreign immigration as a potential threat to public security and the purity of the Chinese nation. This presentation argues that the presence of ‘foreign’ Chinese diasporic descendants in China can be usefully juxtaposed against the experiences of non-Chinese foreigners to draw out the nuances of how fraternity and alterity manifest in Chinese society today. In so doing, the presentation argues that the different manifestations of migration directionality can and should be analysed alongside one another so as to draw out the spatial connections and temporal considerations that are otherwise elided in studies that compartmentalise such types of migration.

Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho is Associate Professor of Geography at National University of Singapore. Her work focuses on transnational migration and citizenship, 'diaspora' strategies and extraterritorial citizenship, Asian forced migration, emotional geographies, and the politics of cosmopolitanism. She has been recently conducting research on China-Myanmar borderland migrations, Chinese diaspora and transnationalism, Asian forced migration, and urban aspirations of new immigrants in China. Her recent publications include ‘The geo-social and global geographies of power: Urban aspirations of ‘worlding’ African students in China’ in Geopolitics, and 'Mobilising affinity ties: Kachin internal displacement and the geographies of humanitarianism at the China-Myanmar border' in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

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