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A Field Theoretical Approach to Expatriate Mobilities: Ethnographic Research on Mobility in Culinary and Sexual Fields

Veranstaltungsdaten

Im Rahmen des ChinaWhite Forschungsprojekts wird Prof. James Farrer am 09.02.2021 um 11 Uhr einen Vortrag zum Thema "A Field Theoretical Approach to Expatriate Mobilities: Ethnographic Research on Mobility in Culinary and Sexual Fields" halten. Die Veranstaltung findet via Zoom statt. Klicken Sie bitte auf den Registrierungslink, um an der Sitzung teilzunehmen.

"Abstract: When people move, they move not only through geographic spaces, but also within and across social fields, including fields of work, culture, sexuality and other more specialized areas of life and livelihood. How then do we best conceptualize expatriate mobilities and their relationship to field mobilities? Based on twenty years of ethnography in Shanghai, I will use sex and food as a lens to think about expatriate mobility (Farrer 2019, 2020; Farrer and Dale 2014). Food and sex are two fundamental human activities, and both can be conceptualized as social fields (Leschziner and Green 2013). When migrants move, their sexual and culinary activities and interests (their habitus) move with them. They also bring certain field specific resources, ranging from skills and knowledge to embodied sexual capital or culinary capital. When resource-rich migrants, such as expatriates, move, they are not only able to relocate their everyday individual practices but also mobilize resources to reshape the sexual fields and culinary fields in which they live and act. In short, expatriates experience not only mobility within the field – a rise or a fall in the worth of their personal capital portfolios – but also engage in reshaping transnational fields within which they act and seek affirmation. A study of expatriate mobilities must look at both processes: (1) individual mobility within social fields as individual-level processes and (2) the mobility of the fields themselves as meso-level social and political processes."

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