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... spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of intimate relationships 23 2.3.4 The Social (Re )production of Everyday Life In centering students at the heart of the everyday, quotidian, and transnational... variety of spaces and times participate in the making, routinizing, and/ or disrupting of these elements Building on the perspective of space and ‘place’ in examining the geographies of student migration, ... actions and narratives But it is also, as they argue, exactly the attendance to negotiation and coordination of everyday life across multiple time- spaces that will expose the asymmetry of power relations
1.1 A Provocation for Research Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter… (Deleuze, 1968: 139) Year 2010. I made a new friend, and I identify him as Andy (a pseudonym)… I met Andy at a friend’s gathering. He was at a corner all by himself, fiddling with his mobile phone. I teased my friend for being a ‘poor’ host and guided his attention to Andy. My friend knew that I had prior research experiences with SingaporeanVietnamese international marriages and ‘shoved’ me towards Andy, “He’s Vietnamese. Help me entertain him please!” Encountering a Student Migrant… Andy was a 21 year-old Vietnamese who came to Singapore in 2007 to study at a private university. He told me that he was finishing up his study and had to return to Vietnam, yet he was unhappy about it. I recall his explanation to be a complex mixture of pragmatic and emotional logics. He felt that he would earn more money and lead a better life here in Singapore. In addition, he had forged new friendships in Singapore that he could not bear to part with. Andy likened this to, in his words as I remember, having to “start all over again” and re-adapt himself to the lifestyle and environment of Vietnam. But at the same time, he also looked forward to seeing his family and friends back in Ho Chi Minh City. A week before Andy’s departure… I had exchanged Facebook contact with Andy in order to stay in touch with him and later discovered that we lived in the same precinct. A week before Andy was due to leave Singapore, he asked me out for coffee. Andy was feeling ambivalent about returning home. When I asked him what his plans were, he told me that he would not discount the possibility of coming back to Singapore for postgraduate study or work in a few years’ time. In fact, he appeared 1 steadfast in his belief that he would return to Singapore soon. Andy asked me the same question. I explained to him that I would begin my graduate study by research in August 2010… 1.2 Stories of Student Migration from Singapore The encounter with Andy has provoked me to wonder about the intimate worlds of international students who leave their homes to study in Singapore. Andy’s narrative opened up a series of questions surrounding the logics of their migratory journeys, youthful aspirations, and the social connections they maintain and forge in host communities. At the Heart of Student Migration builds on this one encounter. It is about young Southeast Asian overseas students at the heart of the everyday, quotidian, and transnational geographies of education migration. By mobilizing a range of critical perspectives on young people, education, and migration, I assemble stories about these student migrants’ class-travelling aspirations, changing positions and identifications with the self and others, as well as the variegated forms of social ties that connect them to people and places afar. Central to this thesis is a concern with the everyday processes and practices involved in socially reproducing young people’s cross-border lives. At the same time, social reproduction is taken to be a complex iterative process that operates through both spatial and temporal organization. As Kell and Vogl (2010) observed, global student mobility has gained significance in the wake of contemporary cross-border flows and globalization. Previous studies on the geographies of student mobility have often placed emphasis on student migration from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’. Yet, the global mobility of students in the last decade has become more multi-directional and disturbs the 2 simplistic classification of an East-West trajectory of student migration. Indeed, East Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore are actively promoting themselves as ‘education hubs’. This research focuses on the intra-regional stories of international student migration by attending to the voices of Southeast Asian students who pursue higher education in Singapore. In recent years, we have witnessed a change in how Singapore’s education landscape is increasingly made up of a more diverse student population. As revealed by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (2011) in the National Day Rally address, international students account for 18% of the student body in local universities. This significant proportion of international students is perceived to be paramount to building Singapore’s reputation as a world-class education hub on the one hand, and as a vehicle in fueling the citystate’s knowledge economy. At the same time, the growing number of international students in Singapore is also sparking debates over whether Singaporean young people are pushed out-ofplace in the face of competition from foreigners. This has led to resentment over the perceived preferential treatment towards ‘foreigners’. In order to appease the ‘nation’, and as part of the calibrated and measured style of immigration policy characteristic of post-independence Singapore government, the Minister of Education announced that a ‘cap’ has been put in place to bring down the proportion of foreign students from 18% to about 15%. In order to achieve the ‘cap’, universities will expand their intake by 2,000 more places for Singaporean students while retaining the present level of international students. This Singapore-style strategy to regulate student migration reflects the persisting conviction that the city-state is to be augmented by a constant supply of talented young people to meet the expanding knowledge economy. Yet, the view that international students occupy an important role in fueling the 3 economic growth is symptomatic of an economic pragmatism that tends to portray students as ‘objects of education’. This parallels Brooks and Waters’ (2011: 131) observation that: More generally, in many ways the voices of international students have been silenced within contemporary debates… This is, potentially, one consequence of the tendency to perceive international students as ‘cash cows’ – the quality of their social and pedagogical experiences comes second to and far below the need to attract international students. In my research on Southeast Asian overseas students in Singapore, I emphasize the need to focus on their everyday social relations and negotiations, and more importantly, the recognition that these youths are embodied agents who construct their own educational and migratory geographies. As a starting point, this study views international students as individuals who have certain dispositions and lifestyles that are simultaneously affiliated to the categories of ‘student’, ‘young people’, and ‘migrant’. As Holloway et al. (2010: 594) point out, attending to "the voices and subjectivities of young people" as constituted through diverse connections with families, friends, and the larger communities not only has the potential to advance existing knowledges surrounding the social and cultural geographies of education, but also forces us to write stories about the nexus between globalization and education that eschews an adultist perspective. 1.3 Research Objectives At the broadest level, this thesis aims to kick-start a critical project to think ‘time' alongside ‘space' in examining the complexities of cross-border mobilities. While the transnational perspective has arguably provided a corrective to the view that ‘space' is circumscribed to a bounded locality, ‘time' has been less of an explicit 4 concern within migration studies. This research focuses on two interrelated objectives in studying the geographies of student migration. First, I examine how spatiotemporalities shape the ways in which student migrants articulate their experiences of mobility. Second, I unpack how these student migrants perceive and organize intimate relationships through their imagined and lived experiences of time and space. These will be explored through the following cross-cutting questions: 1. What are the motivations for these students to further education in Singapore, and what are the aspirations emerging from their experiences of mobility? 2. What are the meanings, practices, and technologies involved in the production and maintenance of different social relationships in the cross-border context? 3. How do ‘time’ and ‘space’ configure and organize these personal experiences, social relations, and practices that constitute the everyday life of student migration? 1.4 Thesis Map This chapter has outlined a broad overview of the research impetus, direction and objectives of this study. Chapter 2 provides a critical evaluation of selected literature on international education, young people’s experiences of education and mobility, and transnational migration studies. The theoretical abstractions identified here will form the basis for the conceptual framing adopted in the thesis. In Chapter 3, I will focus on the rationale for Singapore to internationalize its education spaces and the strategies to attract Southeast Asian overseas students. Chapter 4 goes on to map out the methodological route and reflects on the methods and ethical issues 5 involved in the study. The empirical materials will be analyzed in two sections. In Chapter 5, I frame student migrants’ experiences within globalizing spaces of education through the lens of ‘transition’ to discuss their stories of ‘going away’, moving with/against time, and orientations toward the future. Chapter 6 attends to the intimate accounts of how different meanings and transnational practices are negotiated in shaping their proximate and distant lives with others. I will then conclude in Chapter 7 by critically reflecting on what a spatio-temporal perspective has brought to bear on the geographies of student migration. 6 2.1 Introduction This chapter evaluates selected bodies of literature to draw out theoretical intersections that will orientate a critical analysis of young student migrants’ experiences in Singapore. These overlapping strands of work include contributions of scholars who are interested in international education; sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers who study young people’s everyday experiences; and migration scholarship that adopts a transnational perspective to examine cross-border lives. While the scope of review is wide, an engagement with a broader set of literature can help de-center certain assumptions made by existing studies of student migration. This, I argue, is useful for constructing a more grounded, intimate, and accountable rendering of the globalizing spaces of education. I begin by raising the phenomenon of student migration as an instance of the globalizing spaces of education. This will be discussed in Section 2.2 where I posit international students as inhabitants of transnational spaces, therefore revealing a more expansive range of relationships, interactions, and practices that constitute their experiences of mobility. I also argue that in order to gain a better understanding of the intimate grounds that student migrants navigate, there is a need to accord more weight to the ‘voices’ of these young people in telling stories of their migratory and educational journeys. In Section 2.3, I discuss three critical junctures in the review of existing literature about young people, education, and migration. The theoretical abstractions are organized into three ways of thinking about young people’s experiences in international education spaces – the intersection between lifecourse and migration; the ‘scholarization’ of student lives; and the role of networks and intimate ties that underpin transnational geographies. The central concern is to do with the social (re)production of everyday social relations, practices, and affects, and the ways in 7 which a variety of spaces and times participate in the making, routinizing, and/or disrupting of these elements. Building on the perspective of ‘space’ and ‘place’ in examining the geographies of student migration, I propose a critical time-space lens to further explicate the complex social ordering of social relations and practices in these geographies. Section 2.4 tries to make clear the role of time/temporality (and space/spatiality) in the making of everyday life by presenting three registers at which the cartographies of time can be unfolded. In doing so, I develop a framework that takes ‘space’ and ‘time’ as multiply experienced, practiced, and materialized to analyze the temporal horizons, powers, and textures that co-produce specific spatial continuities and discontinuities in student migrants’ lives. 2.2 Globalizing Spaces of Education: a Case of Student Migration In the face of globalization, education as an enterprise has become highly competitive as a key site in the production of knowledge economies. This is especially clear in the case of higher education landscape, where tertiary education is said to be central to the economic well-being of many societies through its contribution to shaping a skilled workforce and sharpening key competencies such as creativity, critical thinking, and capacity for learning. As such, governments and institutions are eager to capture globalization’s advantages by developing strategies to internationalize education. Indeed, many of the works in this area have pointed out that in order to remain competitive on the global stage, universities have to plug themselves into the wider assemblage of knowledge spaces and develop strategies to attract and retain expertise that are constantly circulating within these networks (Altbach, 2003; Hoyler and Jöns, 2008; Jöns, 2009; Olds, 2007). For example within the Asia-Pacific context, quality assurance and accreditation of international 8 education is becoming a pressing issue for education providers and consumers in the region (Knight, 2010), and this can become a major factor in influencing students’ choices of places to further education. Other studies have begun to trace the impacts of transnational education markets on both sending and hosting countries, institutions, and practices (Macaranas, 2010; Hall, 2008). Against the background, and acknowledgement, of the political-economic impacts of the internationalization of education and its potential for stimulating economic growth (Postiglione, 1997; Kemal, 2008), this section sets an agenda for a more critical attention on student migrants as one of the key actors in the globalizing spaces of education. 2.2.1 From ‘International’ to ‘Transnational' Student Migration As Findlay and Tierney (2010) note, international student mobility is becoming ever more significant in the past few decades as the number of people who migrate for education within and across regions continues to increase. While policy planners are often interested in the large-scale trends of such flows, it is also important to acknowledge that the complexities of these migrations cannot be fully grasped by referencing to global trends, demographic patterns and country statistics. In light of this, an existing body of scholarly work has focused on the experiences of international students, with especial attention to cross-cultural issues within host societies and institutions. These studies show that international students’ experiences of living and studying in new environments are deeply intertwined with their nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, and the languages they speak (see Andrade and Evans, 2009; Gordon et al., 2000; Kell and Vogl, 2008; Montgomery and McDowell, 2008). However some scholars, notably geographers who research on students as 9 transnational migrants, have argued that the experiences of international students are also embedded in broader sets of connections that span across both sending and host communities (Waters, 2005; 2006). Here, it is instructive to underscore the epistemological shift in how migration processes have been conceptualized by both migration scholars and geographers. Rather than bracketing international student mobility into a linear process, a transnational perspective argues that migration trajectories are diffused into multiple circuits of movement facilitated by a globalizing capitalist system (Basch et al., 1994) and grounded by multi-stranded networks that connect communities across nationstates (Hannerz, 1996; Portes et al., 1999; Levitt, 2001; Vertovec, 2001). These attachments and ties that straddle between the ‘here and there’ also involve a host of emotions and affects that in turn define and shape mobile experiences (Velayutham and Wise, 2005; 2006). Geographers in particular have shown how examining such relations can challenge the grand narratives of transnational mobilities. These counter-narratives, which often emerge from migrants’ everyday spaces (Ley, 2004), include those that challenge the masculinist assumptions embedded within transnational topographies (Pratt and Yeoh, 2003), the excessive accordance of ‘footloosed-ness’ to mobile trans-migrants (Mitchell, 1997), and the revelation of multiple actors and networks involved in constructing transnational experiences that might not necessarily entail physical movements but cultural transfers (Crang et al., 2003). In the field of student migration, it has been documented that transnational connections are important resources for both young people and their families to advance their socio-economic positions through overseas education (Cairns and Smith, 2011; Waters, 2005; 2006). At the same time, international students also shape 10 the urban landscapes of host destinations through both their bodily presence and the cultural and material modifications enabled by their transnational connections (Collins, 2008; Fincher and Shaw, 2006). These works not only stress the importance of observing everyday mobilities, practices and connectivities (Conradson and Latham, 2005a), but also point towards according greater attention to transnational spatialities as “the diverse ongoing connections and networks that bind different parts of the world together and that are constituted through (and in fact constitute) particular sites and places” (Featherstone et al., 2007: 383-384). In another words, socio-spatial relations are integral to the shaping of crossborder experiences. As international education scholar Gargano (2009: 337) argues, a critical examination of international student mobility demands a more complex “conceptual space for addressing evolving familial, academic, and social networks across borders”. For her, the concept of ‘social fields’ opens up a space to investigate the ways in which student identities and subjectivities are shifting vis-à-vis changing relations with families abroad, educational experiences, and other ties forge at both the local and cross-border contexts. However, I argue that this concept may not sufficiently articulate the geographical specificities and role of place in anchoring transnational processes, practices, and affiliations. For example, Collins (2008: 166) has shown that Korean students in Auckland find it “possible to at least temporarily reground everyday lives that have been uprooted in the processes of migration” through eating out in places that create an intimate sense of proximity to ‘home’ and feelings of familiarity. In order to more fully understand the practices, meanings, and feelings that emerge from student migrants’ inhabitance of space and place, I suggest that the conceptual lens of transnationalism be critically inflected through the perspective that 11 student migrants inhabit the grounds of both material and social spaces through their bodies. Adopting this perspective could also means that we need to take the ‘voices’ and practices of student migrants as the starting point to think about their migratory experiences, and question how these ‘voices’ and practices are connected to the production and politicization of everyday socio-spatial relations. 2.2.2 A ‘Student-Centered’ Perspective: Stories through the ‘Body’ In his paper on the geographies of studentification, Hubbard (2008) points out the importance of situating students at the center of geographical studies on the continuing expansion of education spaces. Put it simply, there is a concern with what matters for these young people. Viewed from a ‘student-centered’ approach, the role of student migrants becomes more salient and meaningful in the production and reproduction of everyday lives within the transnational spaces of education. This entails a shift away from the market-oriented approach towards a more humanizing account of the bodies that navigate across borders, including what the bodies are capable of doing – their practices, feelings, imaginations, and all other modes of engagement with the worlds they live in. For instance, studies have shown that apart from family and education, friendship and romance also have crucial bearing on how international students negotiate emotional well-being (Wang and Mallinckrodt, 2006; Hendrickson et al., 2010). This calls to attention the importance of understanding student lives through a more expansive lens – one that takes into consideration the diverse thick and thin social relations and subjectivities that are tied to the less palpable sites of their intimate lives, or what Walsh (2009) calls the ‘heart of transnational spaces’. In examining cross-border geographies of embodied relations, the concept of 12 ‘embodied transnationalism’ (Dunn, 2010) has been adopted by several scholars to consider how transnational lives are spatialized according to the bodily movements, practices, imaginations, and a whole range of affective styles resulting from a combination of these ‘body-works’. In a similar vein, Ho and Hatfield (2011) argue that understanding the intimate and quotidian life-worlds of migrants require scholars to examine the seemingly insignificant norms, routines and everyday experiences. Collectively, this set of scholarly literature gathers insights from a range of theories on the embodied, the emotional, and the non-representational to draw attention to the sociality and materiality of everyday life. These include social relations and interactions, as well as the material cultures that constitute the social and cultural worlds that trans-migrants inhabit. Here, the body is seen as a central site in which the styles of gender, race, nationality, sexuality and other differences are enacted, but at the same time also capable of disrupting these routinized performances. In this sense, there is a politics to the production and reproduction of bodies that are tied to the socio-spatialities of migration events and processes. Building on the theoretical contributions by feminist scholars surrounding the politics of embodiment, Dunn (2010) made several important points about embodied transnational topographies – bodies are disciplined and regulated in migration regimes; they are unevenly empowered through embodied and institutional politics; they bear emotional and affective ties within and across spaces; and bodies are differently emplaced and made mobile across transnational spaces. In writing about the concept of embodiment in the context of mobilities, Gorman-Murray (2009: 444) has also argued if we accept that migrants are not disembodied actors, then “sensual corporeality, intimate relationality and other facets of emotional embodiment” can be said to have profound implications on migratory mobilities, trajectories and practices. 13 In this sense, it is the complex interweaving of such elements of the ‘everyday’ – feelings, practices, interactions, materialities – that form the texture of our intimate experiences with the world, which at the same time cannot be divorced from their more ‘global’ and transnational exchanges, flows and rhythms. In bringing the above theoretical perspectives to bear on researching the globalization of education spaces, the project of constructing knowledges based on narratives and observations about student migrants’ everyday lives is not so much of an indulgent practice, but seen as a critical strategy to produce alternative scripts of contemporary globalization processes. In Mountz and Hyndman’s (2006: 458) words, in order “to question disembodied knowledge production”, there is a need to consciously “propose embodied epistemologies that create more accountable renderings of globalization”. The authors also reminded that embodied social relations, while deeply grounded in the everyday and experienced through the ‘body’, are subtly connected to the intimate stories emerging, and often in a simultaneous fashion, from other places and times. Hence, a ‘student-centered’ perspective points towards foregrounding, amongst others, at least two theoretical orientations that will underpin the rest of this thesis. First, the attendance to student voices through individual biographies means a heightened sensitivity to the (re)production of identities, feelings, and practices in the spaces they inhabit. Second, although these elements of their everyday lives emerge through the ongoing interactions occurring within present space-time, they are constituted through the stretching of sociospatialities that connect to a variety of places, sites and scales. 2.3 Critical Perspectives on Young People, Education, and Migration In the previous section, a critical agenda has been contoured around the study 14 of globalizing education spaces to argue that we need to shift out attention away from ‘globalist’ narratives towards a more ‘grounded’ and ‘embodied’ approach. This research specifically focuses on student migrants as important ‘bodies’ hitherto less examined in existing literature on geographies of education. In order to further Gargano’s (2009: 337) proposal to “better understand how educational sojourners position themselves within academic and international student communities, make sense of their networks of associations, and envision possibilities”, it is useful to consider a broader range of scholarly perspectives that have sought to examine the different geographies that student migrants navigate. It is important to point out that in discussing a broader range of scholarly works, I am not aiming to provide an exhaustive précis. Rather, the literature presented in the following is an outcome of abstracting what I consider to be critical junctures in the relatively disparate sets of literature. These abstractions will then lay the foundation to frame the conceptual approach adopted in this study, as well as be put into their material contexts to reflect on the ‘voices’ of student migrants (see Chapter 5 & 6). In this section, I draw on scholarly works produced by geographers, and to a lesser extent anthropologists and sociologists, to discuss three sets of critical perspectives that will nuance our understanding of the lives of educational sojourners. Towards the end, I connect these strands of perspectives through the intellectual lens of social reproduction, and argue that student migration is at once a response to the globalizing spaces of education as well as an arena for the making, maintenance, and resistance towards the routinizing effects of these forces. 2.3.1 Lifecourse, Mobility, and Migration In Findlay et al.’s (2006) study of student mobility as a process that links life- 15 stages of schooling, university life and entrance into the labour market, the authors argue that there is a need to situate knowledges of mobility not only geographically but also in relation to different life-course trajectories. According to Bailey (2009: 407), the lifecourse approach “seeks to describe the structures and sequences of events and transitions through an individual’s life”. Indeed life-stages, events, and other significant moments have long been acknowledged to be part of migration motivations and trajectories (Mortimer and Shanahan, 2004). For instance, King and Ruiz-Gelices (2003) have shown that international students concoct strategies across education, career and even residency or citizenship statuses to improve their present and future situations. Similarly, Brooks and Everett (2008) also show how future plans and aspirations are integral to the ways in which young migrants strategize to accumulate social and cultural capital. This can be in the form of choosing which institutions to study at or making plans for the subsequent migration destination upon graduation. At the same time, these key moments in the lives of young people are not disconnected from the changing gendered, classed, and intergenerational relations shaping their decisions about mobility at the sites of family and community. Whether these relations play out as constraints or opportunities, and are advantageous or disadvantageous towards them (Langevang and Gough, 2009; Ansell et al., 2011), there is a sense that their mobility is not always smooth and straightforward. Instead there are constant negotiations that take place throughout the course of migration – from the ‘points’ of departure to arrival and perhaps eventual return. All these ‘points’ present complex situations, relations, and often emotional dilemmas that need to be examined in relation to the young people’s personal understanding of growing up in a world that is increasingly porous and interconnected. The rhythms of 16 growing up not only shape their subjectivities at the level of the ‘everyday’; they are also simultaneously shaped by young people’s experiences of other (competing) rhythms across different sites and scales. Jarvis et al. (2011: 519) conceptualize this convergence of different rhythms at various scales as a form of ‘multi-scalar rhythms’, whereby “the ways in which different aspects of space, time, and lifecourse intersect in relation to the multiplicity of demands” that are experienced on a daily basis. At one level, this is a call for scholars who are interested in deploying the lifecourse perspective to also examine the time-space coordination found in banal practices, actions and narratives. But it is also, as they argue, exactly the attendance to negotiation and coordination of everyday life across multiple time-spaces that will expose the asymmetry of power relations and the instability of structures. A similar argument can be found in writings from geographies of young people. Hopkins and Pain (2007) argued that everyday social interactions with different groups of people produce and re-shape discourses about age, and that ‘age’ should thus be understood as fluid and relational over and within the lifecourse. This means that the predominant view that biological age structures one’s lifecourse mobilities and trajectories is no longer tenable, and instead age itself as a social category is “constantly produced in and through the experiential plane(s) of everyday life” (Barker et al., 2009: 5). Taken together, these studies suggest that even if migration appears to be one of the many events occurring in one’s lifecourse, the idea that there is a ‘right time’ to move (Metcalfe, 2006) reflects the assumptions that people make about their lives in the past, present, and future. Whether these assumptions are figments of the mind or products of material relations, a close examination of the specific timings and spacings of these narratives can open up more critical understandings of student 17 migrants as young, aspiring, and embodied beings. 2.3.2 ‘Scholarization’ of Young People’s Lives A study that focuses on student migrants’ experiences cannot sidestep the question of their educational experiences. Institutions such as schools and universities are central to the dissemination of information and values, as well as providing spaces in which students encounter similarities and differences. As Philo and Parr (2000: 514) argue, institutional settings “restrain, control, treat, ‘design’ and ‘produce’ particular and supposedly improved versions of human minds and bodies”. This view has also been termed by Ennew (1994: 126) as the “scholarization” of young people’s lives, where temporal scheduling and spatial containment have become remarkably intense in the production of children, youths, and adults. Viewing young people’s educational experiences in this manner also means being cognizant that their social relations, practices and identities are often structured, produced, and shaped through the institutionalization, normative ordering and daily practices of time in a variety of spaces operating simultaneously in their lives (McGregor, 2004; Hopkins, 2010). As Holloway et al. (2011: 2) note in the context of neoliberalizing knowledge economies “because education for all seems to offer the route to social mobility for aspirational individuals”, it is a resource highly valued by young people. In this sense, education is often held as a key site through which the body learns to become ‘better’, more skillful and knowledgeable, and instilled with values. Yet, social geographers have also pointed out that the places in which education is carried out are often places where inequalities are reproduced. Here, the promise of education is problematized through an exposure of the power geometries that cut across ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability (Burgess and Wilson, 2005; Holloway and Valentine, 2003; 18 Holt, 2007; Johnston et al., 2007; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Skelton and Valentine, 2002). These authors have argued that bodies are marked out as ‘in place’ or ‘out of place’ through various discourses and practices that circulate within and beyond the boundaries of the school, thus rendering young people differential access to resources and mobilities. Hollingworth and Archer (2010: 598) have also demonstrated how “feelings about place” in terms of positive attachments and fear and disgust have implications on the children of London’s working-class in terms of their relationship with education. However, in the face of such constraints, young students are also shown to be able to “find ways to circumvent the constructions or bounds placed on their use of space” (Catling, 2005: 327). For instance, Holloway and Valentine (2000) have explored the notion of ‘play/playing’ in the construction of young people’s everyday experiences through their edited volume on children’s geographies, where ‘play’ times and spaces are strategically employed by young people to negotiate independence, autonomy, and freedom. Similarly, Katz (2004) also showed how young people’s bodies are reproduced through everyday routines and interactions through both ‘play’ and ‘work’ – they offer young people opportunities to learn and transform existing bodily practices, knowledges, and ideas that in turn create new spaces. As Hopkins (2011) argue, spaces of education are differently constructed, contested, and experienced by various groups of people, leading to different degrees of inclusion and exclusion, comfort and discomfort with inhabiting in host destinations. In the context of student migrants, these spaces are experienced as a stretching of socio-spatial relations across borders. As Holloway et al. (2010: 595) suggest, “rather than focusing on education within specific sites, we [also] need to 19 trace the webs of connections” across different places to show “how sociospatial practices in each shape children, youth and families’ experience”. 2.3.3 The Networks, Connections, and Ties that Bind The view that there are transnational spatialities to the intimate lives of student migrants (as proposed in Section 2.2) draws attention to the ways in which networks, connections, and relationships are forged across borders. Very often, these connectivities are enacted between migrants and non-migrants, and contingent upon the continuous flows and exchange of information, money, and objects, or what Levitt (2001) calls the economic and social remittances. In this way, the socio-spatial relations spanning across different places are not disembodied, but rather constituted through the investment of personal meanings and feelings that enable cross-border relations to be imagined, articulated and maintained as close and proximate in the face of geographical distance. In existing literature, geographers and migration scholars have studied three distinct forms of close ties – family, friendship, and romance – as intimacies (Giddens, cited by Bell and Coleman, 1999) that bind migrants and non-migrants together. Waters's (2005; 2006) study on Hong Kong young trans-migrants who move to Canada for education discusses how student migrants act as agents for accumulating social and cultural capital primarily in the form of established networks and ties, which in turn can be converted into physical and social mobility for the family over time. Indeed, this is a common migration strategy found in many studies on East Asian transnational education, whether they are described as ‘parachute’ or ‘satellite’ kids, and ‘astronaut’ or kirogi (‘wild geese’) families (Yeoh et al., 2012). However, this conceptualization of student migration also appears to be extrapolated 20 from the typical Chinese strategic family relations resting on notions of filial piety and Confucian thought. Concomitantly, it also tends to delimit the understanding of intimate affiliations and negotiations of intimacy to the site of the family. In Weller's (2010) study on children’s transfer to new schools, she shows how young people actively connect and disconnect with friends and family members, constructing each set of social relations as more ‘intimate’ than the other across specific and strategic times and spaces. In this sense, circumscribing student migrants’ experiences to that of the family can potentially reify certain ethno-familial discourses as “rigid categorizations” that may “fail to recognize [other] elements of identity significant to individuals and/or collectives" (Weller, 2010: 885). This approach resonates with Valentine’s (2008a: 2105) observation that "intimacy and care increasingly takes place beyond the family, for example, through networks of friends and lovers"; that some close ties “may be more or less meaningful” depending on the interactions that take place in specific time-space contexts. One of the most well-established literature on how intimate connections stretch across places in the context of migration is that of studies on diasporic communities and their desires for ‘home’ (Brah, 1997; Espiritu, 2003; Blunt, 2005); and the migratory journeys, practices, and labour involved in the maintenance of cross-border familial relationships (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002; Yeoh et al., 2005). For example, geographers have studied the mobile geographies of home by looking at the ways in which migrants are able to feel ‘at home’ whilst on the move (dwell-intravelling) and become ‘mobile’ through mobilizing artefacts, imaginations and practices that enable them to connect ‘home’ in other places and times (travel-indwelling). Through this, it is argued that the traditional place-based concept of home can no longer explain the realities of migrant experiences and home-making practices 21 (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Fortier, 2001). Shifting their emphasis from ‘home’ to ‘family’, scholars who study transnational families have also argued that despite being physically dispersed, family members continue to maintain communication with one another to substitute for physical absence through remittances, letters and phone calls (Asis et al., 2004; Chamberlain and Leydesdorff, 2004); or negotiate caring roles and relations with children or elderly kin back in migrant-sending communities in order to fill the gap of the ‘missing’ family member (Baldassar, 2007; Gardner, 2006; Parreñas, 2005). In Conradson and Latham’s (2005b: 294) work on New Zealand young transmigrants, they highlight that apart from the importance of community and kinship relations for international mobility, there is also a “remarkable centrality of friendship networks” to the configurations of their transnational practices, mobilities, and trajectories. Brooks and Waters (2010) have also shown that friendship networks operate alongside kinship and romantic relationships to shape transnational mobility in many overlapping ways. As Pahl (2006) has argued, friendship is something that needs to be nurtured, and this relational work is often predicated on both negotiations around material returns that the sociality might generate as well as the affective sense of connection deriving from the activities, interactions and times spent together. In this sense, “friendship is important because it is a key aspect of patterns of sociability and the recognition (or not) of solidarities and communal belonging” (Bowlby, 2011: 605). At the same time, because friendships (like any other social relations) do not operate outside the exchanges of personal knowledges and information, it is not just any form of sociality but one that can be considered as intimate and has immense potential in shaping both individual aspirations and human dynamics (Jamieson, 1998). 22 The third form of intimacy – cross-border romance – is only just beginning to receive attention by scholars in recent years. Cross-border romance can be differentiated into a variety of (perhaps interconnected) ‘phenomena’ such as penpals, internet dating, commercially-arranged marriages, and long-distance relationships (Padilla et al., 2007). Through examining these intimate interactions and exchanges, Constable (2003) argues that variants of romance on the ‘global stage’ operate through the highly complex spatialities, politics, and cultures of gender, race, nationality, and other socio-material forces. Collectively, these works have demonstrated the range of caring efforts and affects, as well as the social, economic and cultural politics that undergird these practices, which are invested in the ‘doing’ of transnational networks, connections and relationships. While some scholars have argued that traditional sites of intimacy such as that of family and marriage are undergoing challenges from a wider set of affiliations that can now be considered intimate, geographers and migration scholars have also documented the resilience of family ties in the maintenance of emotional proximity between migrants and those who are ‘left behind’ (Parreñas, 2005; Yeoh et al., 2005; Pratt, 2009). These entanglements are further complicated by the rapid changes in technologies of communication and transport. In addressing this aspect of how contemporary intimacies are transformed, Valentine (2006) notes that transnational practices in making contact, maintaining co-presence, and coordinating household arrangements have already begun to change; and these shifting practices both reflect and constitute the spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of intimate relationships. 23 2.3.4 The Social (Re)production of Everyday Life In centering students at the heart of the everyday, quotidian, and transnational geographies of education migration, geographers have expounded on the power of space and place in producing, differentiating, and maintaining the socio-interactions and relations of these young people on the move. Whether these are discussed through their class-travelling aspirations, youthful impulses, changing subject positions and identities, or the connectivities and ties that bind them with people and places afar, there is a strong underlying concern with how these bodies learn to labour (c.f. Willis, 1977) across space and time. Firstly, labour here is taken to be all forms of embodied and affective work. As this thesis will ensue, migrant bodies have to adjust to new socio-cultural environments; invent ways of establishing and maintaining relationships with families, friends and other important members in their lives; negotiate transitional and transnational identities and subject positions; and attend to their own aspirations. Secondly, as suggested by Katz’s (2004: x) conceptualization that “social reproduction embodies the whole jumble of cultural forms and practices that constitute and create everyday life and the meanings by which people understand themselves in the world”, it is important to understand these body-works and labour as central to the social (re)production of student migrants’ everyday lives. Hitherto, what we have witnessed is a dominant emphasis on the multiple ways in which spaces are complicit in the social ordering of everyday life across migration, education, and transnational space. Yet, geographer Allan Pred (1981: 10, emphasis in original) has argued “the details of social reproduction, individual socialization, and structuration are constantly spelled out by the intersection of particular individual paths with particular institutional projects occurring at specfic temporal and spatial locations”. It follows that social 24 reproduction is both a spatial and temporal affair. Indeed, one of the key theoretical abstractions I have tried to highlight above (Section 2.3.1-2.3.3) is that of ‘time’. Inspired by feminist scholars’ earlier work on women’s experiences of time-space, as well as recent geographical debates on the temporal character of space and spatial character of time (Massey, 2005; May and Thrift, 2004), I am interested in reflecting on, and making clear, how ‘time’ is also complicit in the production of student migrants’ intimate lives. Central to this argument is Henri Lefebvre’s (1991; 2004) work on rhythmanalysis, which builds on the idea that time-space interaction undergirds everyday processes through repetitions of ‘linear’ and ‘rhythmic’ times. He argues that the body inhabits the spaces between the self and society as well as lives out their different temporalities; and it is through this interaction between bodies, space, and time that social reproduction takes place. Reflecting on Lefebvre’s work on rhythmanalysis, Simonsen (2005) writes that the concept of ‘rhythms’ “can be defined as movement and differences in repetition, as the interweaving of concrete times, but it always implies a relation of time to space or place”. It is this underscoring of the differences in repetition, relationality across multiple ‘times’, and the deep implications between ‘time’ and ‘space’ that will form the basis for me to examine student migration as an arena for the making, maintenance, and resistance of the routinizing effects of globalizing education spaces. 2.4 Unfolding Cartographies of Time This section leads to a discussion of ‘time’ as a “socially constructed medium” and which is “not a self-evident category against which the world can be measured” (Crang, 2011: 331). Hence, there is a need to make clear the ways in which time is folded into the everyday fabric of social life. In the history of 25 geographical thought, there has been several scriptings of the ‘cartographies’ of time1. To name but a few significant examples, historical geographer Darby (1962) studied the histories of places through what he called the ‘comparative statistics’ to conceptualize space through slices of time; Hagerstrand’s (1975; 1982) notion of time-geography as an analysis of people’s everyday geographies mapped across a finite budget of time and defined geometric space; and Harvey’s (1989; 1990) celebrated idea of time-accelerating vis-a-vis space-diminishing in the face of globalizing information communication technologies and practices. Several geographers have also revisited philosophical writings (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Heidegger, 1978; Grosz, 1995) that emphasize time as subjective and experiential to more fully explicate the fluidities and multiplicities of time and temporality, making it apparent that there are many registers at which time is experienced, practiced, and materialized. In the last decade, human geography has witnessed a renewed and explicit interest in engaging with notions of time and temporality (see Crang, 2011; Jones, 2004; Massey, 2005; May and Thrift, 2001). These works not only collectively argue that space and time should not be separated in the study of geographical imaginations, practices and materialities, they also give evidence to how “time-space effects can operate contemporaneously at a variety of different scales” (c.f. Jarvis et al., 2011: 520-521). In the following, I broadly sketch out three ways in which spatio-temporal operations and effects have been apprehended in existing scholarly works – (i) past, present, and future trajectories; (ii) rhythmic and power geometries; and (iii) affective and felt textures. 1 I borrowed this phrase from the title of a book by Rosenberg and Grafton (2010), Cartographies of Time, which features a genealogy of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States since 1450s. I borrow the phrase to denote the multiple ways in which time is imagined, measured, and represented. 26 2.4.1 Trajectories The first approach centers on time as experienced through the temporal horizons of past, present and future, where the past is constituted through the saturation and diffusion of memories, the present as the immediate experience of reality, and the future as the distant routes mapped onto time. In Ahmed et al.’s (2003: 9) writing on transnational migration and diaspora, they argue that migrants are in an on-going process of “creating both pasts and futures through inhabiting the grounds of the present”. This perspective not only demands us to view transnational migrants’ feelings of grounding and uprooting as products of power relations framed in socio-cultural differences and political-economic regimes, but more importantly points towards the power of imaginations that can transform ‘staying put’ into a process of being “situated yet mobile” (Smith 2011: 181). Through this, they show that transnational lives are constituted through the thick and thin social relations forged in a “multi-local life-world” (Vertovec 2001: 578), and these life-worlds cut across spaces and times to present complex positions and encounters that produce, reshape and/or maintain social identities. Viewing time as trajectories not only draws attention to the ways in which localized experiences and mobilities are constituted by social foldings of pasts, presents and futures, but also gives weight to the human experience of time. This approach underlines the fact that the formation of subjective experiences, identities and practices are not bounded in place or time, but possess the capacity to be mobile and dynamic across individual lifecourse or even as the bodies producing them inhabit the ‘here and now’. This also parallels many contemporary insights on migratory mobilities that recognize identities are not fixed in particular space/times, but draw upon them to become realized (Crouch, 2010) through what Gregory (2004: 27 28) calls the “imaginative geography” of “migrant horizons”. 2.4.2 Geometries The second approach draws our attention to how bodies “are technologies of space and time, the routinization of certain specific spatial and temporal practices” (Mendieta, 2002: 182). This relationship between time and biopolitics returns us to the centrality of bodies and embodiment in thinking about how bodies become ‘technologized’ to reproduce space and time (Lefebvre, 2004). This view of timegeometries ties in closely to the spatialization of time, one in which time is seen as interlocking grids of relations, technologies and strategies aimed at the control of time and colonization of the future. For instance in Ennew’s (1994: 126) critique of the “timetabling effect” of the “curricularization”, or “scholarization”, of children’s lives, she argues the ‘tyranny of time’ has meant that young people are plunged into the rhythms of cultural ordering across different scales and regimes. Indeed, education spaces (such as university campuses, schools or even nurseries) have become central to this temporal regime. This, as she argued, has profound impacts on the ways in which young people use other times such as ‘free time’ and ‘play time’, become timeconscious adults, and develop temporal reflexivities that may reinforce and/or challenge the normative architecture of time. While temporal schedules structure everyday lives, Crang (2001: 194) also adds that people are not just “moving through space-time but making it”. This contribution is crucial as it highlights the role of agency that can work against the fixing power of time-spaces, and instead reveals their incoherence through examining the practices that go into making and sustaining them. In this view, studies on children and young people’s use of time in everyday spaces have alerted us to the 28 innovative and sometimes surprising ways in which time-spaces can be negotiated (Harker, 2005; Thomson, 2005). Valentine and Hughes’ (2012) work on internet gambling has also shown that individuals’ familiarity with family routines can be mobilized to create pockets of time-spaces which allow non-permissable activities to take place even within the intimate space of the home. 2.4.3 Textures Lastly, as much as time is experienced through the idiom of discourses and the materiality of practices, it is also sensed and felt. As Highmore (2010: 88) astutely points out, it is “clear that time doesn’t simply exist as a uniform pattern that follows the regular beats of a ticking clock. The common saying that ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ recognizes that experiential time doesn’t follow the standardized time of clocks”. In this way, the felt experience of time constitutes an intimate way of knowing time in which feelings of duration such as pacing, slowing, accelerating and waiting are produced in relation to the changing circumstances experienced across different sites and scales. For example in her writing on women’s experiences of waiting, Gray (2011) argues that waiting is not simply a feeling of time as suspended, but can also be an active process that significantly shapes life projects. This perspective shows how feelings about temporality can actively reshape subjectivities and practices in the face of growing concerns surrounding the rise of ‘affective technologies’ in manipulating emotions and temporalities (Thrift, 2004). Paralleling this effort to foreground the role of agency in human experience of time, Flaherty (2010: 34) also argues that agency is located across the spectrum of temporalities we encounter on an everyday basis. She cites examples of how feelings, or ‘textures’, of time are constantly manipulated; such as when we feel that “time is 29 passing too slowly, we speed it up; and (less frequently) when time is passing too quickly, we slow it down”. Finally, Highmore (2010: 96) also observes that “affective states such as anger, frustration, happiness, resentment, bitterness, laughter and guilt do more than slow down or speed up time. In one sense they could all be seen as intensifying a sense of time… but these intensities have their peculiar durations”. Consider how transnational emotional attachments and affiliations can intensify at particular moments (for example when looking at photographs of family members) and dissipate as migrant time-spaces become saturated with the labour of work; or how happiness can expand time while guilt can prolong it. All these senses and sensibilities of time can influence the experiences, practices, and even the actual mobilities of migrants as their notions of ‘visit’ and ‘return’ are influenced in the process. 2.4.4 Time, Space, and Geographies of Student Migration Brooks and Waters (2011: 114) argue that there is a need “for an overtly geographical perspective on international student mobility”. This means that international student migration has to be viewed as a process that is spatially differentiated and uneven; that the movement and mobility of some students is relationally implicated in the non-movement and immobility of others; and that students themselves are embodied individuals who traverse places and obstacles to build networks, accumulate capital, and develop intimate social relations with both the ‘familiar’ and the ‘strange’. I build on this geographical perspective by conceptualizing ‘space’ as integrally time-space (Massey, 1992). Foregrounding time alongside space reminds us that migration is a process inherently about the movement over/in space and time (c.f. Cresswell, 2006); that temporality punctuates our cross- 30 border rhythms as well as affects our capacities to navigate a world in motion (see Cwerner, 2001). Just as space is multifarious in its character, time is multiply experienced, interpreted, and articulated; and this has implications for the geographies of transnational student migration. First, I suggest that if time is configured into the analysis of the ‘intimate' geographies of student migration, the politics and socio-spatial relations involved in governing and sustaining everyday life become more complex. For instance, the labour of making time for school, family, work and play; the rhythm and frequency of maintaining ties across borders by gift and/or remittance-sending migrants; constructing futurity of work, marriage and setting up a family; negotiating when to visit and/or return ‘home' - all these imaginative and material relations operate contemporaneously to specific rhythms, routines and timetables that cross-cut with cultural, institutional, economic, and embodied politics. Second, I argue that "time is essential to the cultivation of our relationships" (Flaherty, 2010: 109), and co-presences are often created through both spatial and temporal practices. In addition, as much as time/space can be mobilized to create feelings of togetherness, the intimate knowledge of everyday routines can also be exploited by individuals to create pockets of secretive spaces and emotional distances (Valentine and Hughes, 2012). For Deborah Thien (2005: 192), intimacy has a "distinct socio-spatial character" that "assumes a distance covered, a space traversed to achieve a desired familiarity with another". She also notes how intimacies can be conducted through intimacy-as-proximity as well as intimacy-as-distance, with the latter being a more flexible way of doing intimacy and already widely documented in the literature on transnational migration. Yet, this emphasis on spatiality as a primordial for conceptualizing intimacy can only at best be partial and indeed, the 31 argument that temporalities such as duration, speed, frequency, and timing can be mobilized to convey social messages about intimacy has long been made (Zerubavel, 1987). 2.5 Concluding Comments As Horton and Kraftl (2006: 72-83) provoke, there is “much more to say about the ways in which the everyday might be conceptualized”, and one way is for geographers working with young people to “critique and expand various conceptualisations of growing up, going on, and the practices of timing and spacing”. Time has largely been an a priori in extant studies of migration processes and regimes, and rarely raised as a theoretical moment that demands scholarly attention. This chapter has sought to re-assert ‘time’ as one of the many key modalities to examine transnational migration experiences by foregrounding a constellation of temporalities as crucial to understanding migration processes. Adapting Crouch’s (2010: 70-71) writing in Flirting with Space, transnational spaces can be seen as “space[s] of heterogeneous temporalities and rhythms of clock time and work hours, seasons, timetables, emotions and our own time or times; calm, hectic, dense or superficial in mixtures”. In this thesis, I deploy the terms ‘time’ and ‘space’ as discrete entities even though scholars such as May and Thrift (2001) have argued for a perspective of ‘TimeSpace’ (without the ‘–hyphen’) to insist on their co-existence. I am less concerned with the ontological construct of ‘time’ and ‘space’ than to make clear how these two abstractions, when held in tension as mutually constituted and operative, can unfold space through time and time through space. In another words, the study of ‘time’ can actually mean quite little unless we embed its temporal effects into the 32 spatial configurations of everyday life. Similarly, the study of ‘space’ can potentially gain much more from the social studies of ‘time’ and be cognizant that space is only realized through the coming together of social relations and practices that are embedded in their respective temporal patterns. Following the theoretical intersections elucidated in this chapter, I seek to nuance current understanding of transnational student migration through exploring these spatialities and temporalities that make up the everyday life. 33 3.1 Introduction This chapter provides a contextual framing to the rationale and strategies involved in the making of Singapore’s higher education landscape. Specifically, it focuses on how the nation-state harnesses education as a pathway to overcome the limits of resources by internationalizing its spaces of education. In Section 3.2, I present the rationale for Singapore’s mobilization of education as part of the national strategy to boost its economy and transform the city into a ‘Global Schoolhouse’. This is followed by a focused discussion in Section 3.3 on the vested interest by both the public and private education sectors in promoting and sustaining Singapore as education hub in (Southeast) Asia. In concluding, I suggest that locating Southeast Asian students in the specificities of immigration and education policies provides a sharper analytical context to understand their experiences of as young students and migrants. 3.2 Education for Internationalization and Global Aspirations Singapore is an excellent example of how education is mobilized to propel the city-state onto the global stage alongside building a nation of globally-oriented subjects. A key milestone in shaping Singapore’s higher education landscape is the introduction of a policy of internationalization outlined in the Strategic Economic Plan in 1991 (Ministry of Trade and Industry, 1991). Two major areas identified in the plan for sustained attention are to enhance the existing pool of ‘human resources’ and to transform the city-state into a ‘global city’. Recognizing that the new-born nation’s only resource that could be relied on was its human capital, there was a strong focus on ‘upgrading’ the ‘nation’ through education and simultaneously attracting talent from around the world to augment the local labour force. Against the 34 backdrop of an urgency to boost the nation-state’s economy and to develop a competitive advantage in the region, a commitment was made in the mid-1960s to upgrade human capital through state investment in education and vocational training (Bercuson, 1995). At the same time, with the guidelines set out in the 1991 Economic Plan for Singapore to become an international learning centre, a significant expansion of post-secondary institutions such as polytechnics and universities was underway (Gopinathan, 1997). In 2002, the ‘Global Schoolhouse’ blueprint was started to increase intake of international students. An initiative involving multiple government agencies – the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), SPRING Singapore, International Enterprise Singapore, the Council for Private Education, and the Ministry of Education (MOE) – called Singapore Education was launched in 2003 to actualize this blueprint. Part of this project not only builds upon the earlier efforts undertaken by state agencies to invite reputable overseas universities to set up branch campuses in Singapore, private education institutions are also ever more encouraged to stay competitive in the US$2.2 trillion global international student market here (The Straits Times, 17 Jul 2010). This has led to the dubbing of Singapore as one of the ‘emerging contenders’ (alongside China and Malaysia) in the world market for international students in higher education (Verbik and Lasanowski, 2007). In 2005, there were approximately 66,000 foreign students in Singapore. The long-term target is to host 150,000 foreign students by 2015, thence creating 22,000 jobs and increasing the education sector’s contribution to the gross domestic product from 1.9% to 5% (The Business Times, 21 May 2008). The ‘Global Schoolhouse’ project is indeed a well-calculated investment to build a “network of foreign alumni who not only graduate from the universities but also, 35 would have lived and worked in Singapore” (Sanderson, 2002: 94). Although the number of international students dropped from 95,000 to 91,500 between 2009 and 2010 when the recession dug in (The Straits Times, 11 Nov 2010), there is no doubt that Singapore continues to attract and draw in large volumes of foreigners annually, especially at the university level. In a speech addressed to hundreds of university students, academics and public observers at a ministerial forum, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (2009) reminded his audience that attracting young talented individuals from different parts of the world is not only paramount to raising Singapore’s educational standards, but also “create[s] a more stimulating environment which will benefit” the local students as well as “provide opportunities for Singaporeans to build networks, [and] to prepare them to operate all over Asia”. Roping in examples of top western universities, he described the state of Singapore’s higher education landscape with especial attention to universities: Universities are a microcosm of society. There are many international students in our universities and I think it is the right thing for us to do because it is critical to the universities that we bring in international students. If you look at the outstanding world class universities, Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, they all have a significant proportion of international students, especially postgraduates. They gather the best talent from around the world, they create a cosmopolitan campus environment which promotes cross-cultural learning and exchange of ideas and learning to get along with one another, learning about the world. As the Prime Minister (2010) reiterates in his National Day message to Singaporeans, “without an inflow [of foreign talent], over time, our economy and society will lose vibrancy, our citizens will enjoy fewer opportunities and our shining red dot will grow dimmer”. On one level, this is a rhetoric that seeks to assuage the increasing 36 ambivalence felt by Singaporeans towards incoming waves of foreign talent. On another level, this reiteration reflects the unwavering economic imperative embedded in Singapore’s astute mobilization of education as a vehicle to achieve its global aspirations as well as remaining competitive in the global economy. 3.3 Singapore as Education Hub in (Southeast) Asia While the key aim of the ‘Global Schoolhouse’ project is to transform Singapore into a global arena recognized for its high-quality education and with students from all over the world, Asian countries, especially China and India, remain the key sources of foreign students. Furthermore, Singapore is also not a ‘new’ destination for education in the Southeast Asian region as it has long attracted foreign students from Malaysia and Indonesia (Yeoh and Lin, 2012). Indeed, it is instructive to note that since the turn of the century, Singapore’s efforts to internationalize its education landscape is also beginning to draw on the ASEAN regional ties. By 2009, Myanmar and Vietnam have rose to the top to join China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia as the top source countries of international students in Singapore (The Straits Times, 17 Apr 2009). Although this geographical reach can be viewed as an outcome of the political-economic strategy to strengthen Singapore’s position in region, there is also an agenda to promote the city-state’s education landscape as combining “the best of global knowledge with the wisdom of Asian insights” (Singapore Education, 2011). In this way, Singapore is marketed as a unique destination distinguished from the rest of the top universities, as a destination of “educational excellence” that is well-connected to other parts of the world on the one hand, and being boasted as a “multicultural nation” capable of rubbing against Asian competitors such as Japan and Korea to become an education hub in Asia on the other 37 hand (Singapore Education, 2011). One of the key mechanisms through which a sustained stream of foreign students from the region is drawn to Singapore is the government administered ASEAN scholarship scheme. The scholarship, particularly with a emissary slogan ‘Nurturing Young Minds’ (see Figure 3.1), was introduced with the aim of attracting young people from within the region who are of ASEAN nationalities, except Singaporeans – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, The Philippines and Vietnam – to receive their education in Singapore. With the exception of Brunei and Malaysia in which the scholarship is tenable for 6 years beginning from Secondary One, the earliest education level individuals of other ASEAN nationalities are eligible to apply for the scholarship is Secondary Three (Ministry of Education, 2011b). Students who enter Singapore to study via this route have to cease their scholarships once they finish their pre-university education (Junior College), after which they will be required to apply for a separate ASEAN scholarship specifically for undergraduate studies at one of the four local publicautonomous universities – National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore Management University (SMU) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)2 – if they wish to continue education in Singapore. 2 In addition the three local universities (NUS, NTU and SMU) that have established a level of reputation in both the local and international contexts, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) was introduced in 2008 to the local university landscape with a core focus on tertiary education in the science and technology. Its first intake of students was in April 2012. 38 Figure 3.1: ASEAN Scholarship, Nurturing Young Minds Apart from the sustained effort of internationalizing Singapore’s education landscape through the ASEAN scholarship scheme, Singaporean schools and private education agencies are also actively recruiting top students from the region such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar. One of the fastest growing private higher education institutions, Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) Global Education, tops the league amongst many private education providers in Singapore (The Straits Times, 17 Jul 2009). The main reason cited for this phenomenal growth was the active recruitment of international students since 2004 when the institution underwent a restructuring. Recognizing how ‘going international’ can bring about such catalytic impact on the growth of education companies, other institutions such as the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) have also joined in the chase for more foreign students to gain a larger share of the education pie. Specifically in recent years, NAFA has “been marketing aggressively to South-east Asian nations” as the “obvious choice for arts research and training in the region” (The Straits Times, 20 Jan 2010). While international students who came to Singapore for education through the 39 ASEAN scholarship are not subjected to any bond, these students will also come under the Tuition Grant Scheme which requires non-Singaporean students to be contractually obliged to work for Singapore-based companies for 3 years upon graduation. The Tuition Grant Scheme was introduced in 1980 with the aim of subsidizing tertiary education in Singapore, and this is open to both local and foreign students enrolled in full-time diploma and undergraduate courses at selected institutions.3 This means that the period of stay in Singapore for most of these foreign students is not only bound to the number of years their education takes to complete, but also extends beyond. Eventually, some of these foreign students may decide to stay and work in Singapore under work permits after their 3-year contract, or even become permanent residents of the country. In fact, this is part of the strategic calculations made by the government in the bid to compete for young ‘talent’ to supplement Singapore’s workforce as well as enhancing the city-state’s prominence on the global stage (Sanderson, 2002). 3.4 Conclusion This chapter has provided a broad overview of Singapore’s higher education landscape with especial attention to the emergence of a particular post-independence education system, its emphasis on internationalization and more recently, the aspiration of placing the city-state onto the global arena through the imagination of Singapore as a premier education hub and ‘Global Schoolhouse’. I have shown that while the process of internationalizing the education landscape requires a globallyoriented approach, there remains a vested interest by both the public and private 3 These institutions include the four local universities, five polytechnics, Institutes of Technical Education, two local colleges for the arts (LASELLE College of the Arts and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts), and the Singapore Institute of Technology. 40 education sectors in sustaining a steady inflow of international students from the Asian region. Specifically, the ASEAN nations constitute an important group of source countries for Singapore’s higher education landscape to thrive and expand. While tensions in the social fabric manifested in the ‘local-foreigner’ debate have already surfaced (see Chapter 1.2), the Singapore education landscape will continue to be weaved through a diverse profile of young students from different nationalities. It is against this contextual background that the nuances on how international students make sense of their presence and purpose as education migrants in Singapore can be thrown into sharper relief. 41 4.1 Introduction Doing research is an iterative and messy process – from designing the project and entering the ‘field’ to processing the information and representing them (Massey, 2004). All these activities have their particular durations and spatial extents which culminate at the ‘decision time’ to organize our work (Clark, 2004). In another words, as much as research can be seen as an ongoing process, one that pursues the constantly evolving worlds, ‘space’ and ‘time’ are co-implicated in the ways geographical knowledge is apprehended and produced. As feminist geographers have cautioned us, the discursive and material times/spaces that we work with are themselves products of certain ontological and epistemological assumptions we make about the structures, processes, and subjects of our study (see Haraway, 1991; Moss, 2002; Bondi et al., 2002). This not only points towards the ‘situated’ and ‘interpretive’ nature of knowledge construction, but also forces us to consider our own positionalities, subjectivities, and the politics that we bring to the process of doing research (Rose, 1997). This chapter charts out the methodological route undertaken in my study by critically reflecting on the politics of knowledge production through two interrelated research moments – the assembling of subjects, and the methods deployed. 4.2 Assembling Research Subjects: Listening to Whose Voices? As I have noted earlier in the thesis (see Chapters 1 and 2), the main aim of this study is to attend to the experiences and narratives of young student migrants in the globalizing spaces of education. In this section, I further reflect on the politics of inclusion and exclusion involved in the selection of those ‘voices’ that will be represented here. In reviewing the literature on geographies of young people and 42 international student migration, there is an overwhelming dominance of the AngloAmerican experiences. While narratives are beginning to emerge from the East Asian context, most of them center on student mobilities from sending places such as South Korea and Hong Kong to destinations in the ‘west’. Even in these studies, there is a tendency for scholars to focus on specific ethnic subjects, for instance Korean Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese students who migrate to the U.S. and Canada. Insofar the framing of research subjects in this manner can provide a detailed understanding of how nationality and ethnicity constitute migratory experiences, this representation appears to privilege certain ethno-familial discourses at the epistemological level. My study on student migrants eschews such a way of framing the research subjects in two ways. First, I am interested in representing the voices of Southeast Asian students in light of their sheer volume and presence in Singapore’s higher education landscape (see Chapter 3) to add ‘flesh’ to the intra-regional stories of student migration. Second, I recruited a total of 30 international students between the age of 19 and 25 from Southeast Asia, and from different nationalities and ethnicities, through snow-balling. These students were in full-time studies at Institutes of Higher Learning and private schools offering degree and postgraduate diploma courses, which form Singapore’s higher education landscape. In doing so, I am able to consider the role of nationality, ethnicity, gender and other axes of difference as intersected and co-constitutive in the production of their experiences and practices. I summarize the profile of the research respondents in Table 4.1 to provide a general portrait of their biographical backgrounds and personalities, thereby giving ‘life’ and character to their voices. All the participants have also given informed consent on the use of their real names. 43 Name Scholarship Cardus No Vanessa Yes Steven Yes Andrew Yes Amadea Yes Kelvin Yes Aulia Yes Aditya Yes Brief Biographical Description A 20 year-old Indonesian-Singapore permanent resident. Currently, he is studying electrical engineering in a polytechnic. He is a secondary school friend of Vanessa. Cardus has been in Singapore for 5 years. He is currently dating a Singaporean girl whom he met in school. A 20 year-old Indonesian-Singapore permanent resident. Currently, she is studying social sciences in a public-autonomous university. She is a secondary school friend of Cardus. Vanessa is dating a boy who is one year younger than her and serving National Service. A 19 year-old Indonesian studying music in an arts institute. He is a friend of Aditya, who came from his hometown and studied music too. He is also acquainted with Andrew. Steven often talks to me online about his insecurity with his academic performance in school. A 20 year-old Indonesian studying social sciences in a public-autonomous university. He is acquainted with Steven through mutual Indonesian friends. I met Andrew 3 times for coffee before the repeat interview session. Thereafter, he started his internship and became too busy to meet. A 21 year-old Indonesian studying sciences in a publicautonomous university. She has been in Singapore since 15 years old to study in a local secondary school. A 23 year-old Indonesian studying art in a publicautonomous university. He views himself as an ‘activist’ and strongly believes in bringing art to the community. I have attended two of his art exhibitions. Apart from dedicating his time to performance art, Kelvin enjoys reading manga in the spare time. A 23 year-old Indonesian studying sciences in a publicautonomous university. Aulia left Malang in 2003 to study in Singapore and has a girlfriend who is currently in Indonesia. One of the concerns for Aulia is for him to find a manageable way to balance his time spent on maintaining his relationships with both family and girlfriend. A 19 year-old Indonesian studying music in an arts institute. He is a friend of Steven from the arts institute. He has since graduated and moved to London for graduate study in music. Aditya has been described by Steven as a ‘genius in violin’. Due to his departure for London, I only had the chance to talk to him briefly via internet for the repeat interview. 44 Name Scholarship Shuming Yes Tara No Johnny Yes Terry Yes Arch Yes Muriel Yes Janelle Yes Eunice Yes Ivan Yes Brief Biographical Description A 21 year-old Malaysian studying social sciences in a public-autonomous university. She is one of the first few international students who contacted me to express interest in my research. She will be graduating in 2 years’ time and shares that she has plans to further her study. A 23 year-old Malaysian studying sciences in a publicautonomous university. I managed to conduct two interviews with her, but do not maintain strong contact with her. A 25 year-old Malaysian graduate student in a publicautonomous university. Johnny is a relatively shy person and seemed to be hesitant in sharing his stories initially. However, I met him for 2 more times and he gradually opened himself up. A 22 year-old Malaysian studying computer sciences in a public-autonomous university. He is a social media enthusiast and blogs frequently. He also has great interest in photography and this can be observed from his Facebook photo albums. A 22 year-old Malaysian studying real estate in a public-autonomous university. He came to Singapore for university education under the ASEAN scholarship. He appears to be a very confident person. A 25 year-old Filipino studying social sciences in a public-autonomous university. She is a very ‘happy’ person and finds it important to enjoy life. She has a boyfriend who lives in the Netherlands. Muriel appears to place her family at the centre of her life and has high respect for her parents. A 19 year-old Filipino studying social sciences in a public-autonomous university. She befriended Eunice through the ASEAN scholarship orientation programme. Janelle is a new student at the university and is beginning to find university life much more competitive than in Junior College. A 19 year-old Filipino studying sciences in a publicautonomous university. She is a friend of Janelle. Eunice appears to be a very confident girl and takes pride in her ability to communicate and write well in English as compared to many other Singaporeans she has encountered. A 23 year-old Filipino Chinese studying engineering in a public-autonomous university. He is also a Hong Kong permanent resident as his father is a Hong Kong citizen. During both interviews, Ivan makes comments about the importance of being well-groomed to present a respectable image. As he claims, shorts and slippers are not part of his wardrobe! 45 Name Scholarship Hazel No Joshua Yes Fay No Nang Yes Wynn No Diane No Kim Yes Ruby Yes Brief Biographical Description A 25 year-old Myanmarese studying management in a private university. She has been in Singapore for 10 years and speaks fluent English and Mandarin. Hazel is also a newly wed to a Singaporean man in his early 30s. A 24 year-old Myanmarese studying Engineering in a public-autonomous university. He came to Singapore at the age of 15 through a scholarship. Joshua will be graduating after a year and hopes to obtain permanent residence in the next 5 years. A 21 year-old Myanmarese studying in a private university. She is an active person who helps out in community work. She also volunteers at a tuition centre to help other foreign students who are new to Singapore and learning English. A 25 year-old Myanmarese who recently graduated from a public-autonomous university. She has been in Singapore for 10 years and appears to be confident person. Nang also seems to be a globally-oriented person who aims to go abroad after completing her work bond in Singapore. A 20 year-old Myanmarese studying in a private university. She is not under any scholarship and hence has to work part time in order to fund her living expenses in Singapore. Wynn is rather quiet and did not seem to be able to articulate her thoughts very well. A 22 year-old Myanmarese studying in a private university. She is a friend of Wynn and I first met Diane together with Wynn. Diane seems like a shy girl but is very willing to help. She seems to be very close to Wynn and often acts as the contact person between Wynn and me. A 23 year-old Vietnamese studying in a publicautonomous university. My second interview with Kim is conducted online and she seems to be more expressive in the second interview. In the first interview, Kim was very quiet and often provides short answers to my questions. A 23 year-old Vietnamese studying business in a public-autonomous university. She is a very petite girl who appears to be shy. However in talking to her, she presents herself as a confident person who is ready to grab hold of opportunities to succeed in life. Ruby revealed that she used to be very shy but learned that if she wants to go far, she has to be more vocal and proactive. 46 Name Scholarship Truong An No Anh Yes Emily Yes David Yes Jun No Brief Biographical Description A 22 year-old Vietnamese who studied business in a private university. He was a quiet boy who did not talk much during the interview. has since returned to Vietnam upon completion of his degree. Truong An and I still maintain contact with each other on Facebook and we chat occasionally. A 25 year-old Vietnamese who studied sciences in a public-autonomous university. She has since graduated and is currently working in a Singapore-registered company. A 24 year-old Vietnamese who studied business in a public-autonomous university. She has since graduated and started work. Emily is engaged to another Vietnamese man whom she knew in Singapore. She is a family-oriented person who often mentions that she misses her family, both during interviews and on Facebook. She has already purchased a house in Vietnam and has plans to return with her fiancé. A 21 year-old Vietnamese studying in a publicautonomous university. He appears to be academic and career oriented, and emphasized the importance of spending his time wisely. A 23 year-old Vietnamese Chinese studying media design in an arts institute. He is a friendly and helpful person who is not shy to share about his personal life. However, when I asked for his permission to use some of the details from the interviews, he expressed hesitance. Table 4.1: Profile of Respondents (All information provided is correct as of June 2012) In delivering the thesis, I have decided to draw on a limited number of examples from the overall sample size of 30 respondents. In doing so, I was able to focus on the richness of individual biographies and stories rather than inundating the empirical chapters with a large amount of quotes from different respondents. I have also mobilized the stories of some student migrants multiple times so as to present different dimensions of their lives. This, to me, is a more ‘humanizing’ way of interpreting and telling stories as opposed to presenting data as ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’. 47 4.3 Methodological Techniques This section discusses the multi-method triangulation approach that I have deployed in order to apprehend the multiple time/space stories and practices surrounding student migrants’ everyday lives. Although only qualitative methods are used, I concur with Hesse-Biber’s (2012: 139) argument that ‘triangulation’ should not be a “validity tool” between quantitative and qualitative findings, but instead be “used in a purposeful manner” that “requires a degree of reflexivity with regard to the specific rationale for how triangulation is being used, and how its praxis is in the service of the research problem”. In addition to deploying methods that aim to extract stories from student migrants, I also kept a research diary that documents personal reflections on specific moments and encounters in the process of doing research and fieldwork. 4.3.1 Biographical Interviews A total of 30 interviews focusing on the biographical stories of young student migrants were conducted in English between March 2011 and January 2012. Each interview lasted approximately 1.5 hours, and was audio-recorded for subsequent transcribing. As Worth (2009) writes, “stories about one’s life experiences immediately [sic] invoke the participant’s sense of time, as they use narrative to construct their past, present and future”. Indeed, in asking the student migrants to share with me stories about their motivations to study abroad, their current lifestyles, and future plans, these young people are orientated to reflect on the different temporal horizons of their lives. In addition, because narratives are embedded in temporality and subject to “a ‘spiral movement’ of constant interpretation and reinterpretation” (Lawler, 2011: 251), I conducted a set of repeat interviews towards the end of my 48 fieldwork period with 12 of the students. I was unable to meet the remaining 18 respondents due to competing time schedules and the temporal constraints arising from my research plan. In conducting the repeat interviews, I was able to ‘encounter’ the ways in which student migrants construct narratives about their lives after a period of time. Based on my research, the majority of the stories collected from repeat interviews reconfirm student migrants’ motivations and plans for the future, therefore revealing a degree of consistency in the interview stories. However, this does not mean their narratives always cohere along a singular logic. For instance, there is evidence of how perceptions about a place are constructed and re-interpreted vis-à-vis changing subject positions (see Table 4.2): 49 Excerpt from Interview with Ruby on 24 May 20114 Yi’En: So after you graduate and finish your bond of 3 years working in Singapore, will you go back to Vietnam to work? Ruby: No. Because the salary in Vietnam is not high enough according to my expectation. It’s not much for a degree at all. Let’s say when you go back Vietnam, for my education level, I can get a job at say around 700 USD. That is only like 900 plus Singapore dollars. It’s very difficult for you to get a 1,000 USD job right at the beginning. So the salary, the starting pay here [in Singapore] is better. And since I am here already, I don’t want to go back to where I started. If not why come here in the first place. I can just go to a Vietnamese university, right? [Approximately 1 hour later towards the end of the 1.5 hour interview] Yi’En: So let’s talk about your future plans. You said you don’t wish to go back Vietnam? Then you want to get PR and stay in Singapore, or go somewhere else? Ruby: Actually I want to stay here for a longer time. But my family misses me. And my fiancé wants to go back Vietnam and start a business because it’s easier there. So after discussion, we decide to go back after a few years. Actually we have already bought a house back in Vietnam, so we will definitely be going back. Money can always be earned, but family is not always there. Observations and Reflections from Research Diary, 24 May 2011 In my interview with Ruby, there seems to be two different logics used to justify her migratory trajectories. First, in the aspect of work, she articulates Vietnam as a sending place that is not worth going back to because of the lower salary. She also seems to construct Vietnam as a place ‘behind time’ as revealed in her words “back to where I started”. There is a sense that Vietnam is constructed as a place ‘left behind’ in time and hence returning to it means moving backward in her idea of social mobility. However, towards the end of the interview when we chatted about her future plans, a different logic is articulated to explain her definite plan in going back to Vietnam. This is contradicting to her earlier words where she said that she would not go back to Vietnam to work. In this case, it is because of the draw of family and under the influence of her fiancé that Ruby is set on returning to Vietnam. What strikes me as interesting is that the two logics are mobilized to justify her ‘departure’ and ‘returning’. The former logic seems to be about social mobility – she wants to earn more money and accumulate social capital. The latter logic is about human intimacy – the ties that bind become the reason for her to return. Table 4.2: Observations and Reflections from Research Diary, 24 May 2011 4 These excerpts will be flagged out for more in-depth analysis and discussion in Chapters 5.3.1 and 5.4.1. 50 4.3.2 Solicited Diaries and Weblogs Morrison (2011) pointed out that solicited diaries have the potential to provide more nuanced insight into the going-on of everyday life in two ways. First, unlike interviews that provide stories arising from the interactions in that specific timespace, solicited diaries are able to provide a longitudinal perspective to the changing emotional complexities and practices. Second, these diaries also allow for contemplation, flexibility, and multiplicity in the process of documenting daily activities and reflections. It seemed strange to me, though, that most of the scholars who have discussed in depth about solicited diaries portray the activity of soliciting these diaries un-problematically. Morrison (2011: 2), for example, writes that her respondents “do not have children, are educated, work mostly in full-time paid employment… They had the freedom and ability to spend time writing and reflecting in their diaries”. In my research, it is precisely the longitudinal nature of diaries that became an obstacle for the successful implementation of this method. For those who did not wish to participate in writing, they felt that the process is time-consuming and they are not used to keeping diaries. In the case of those who agreed to write, however, things did not go on smoothly (see Table 4.3): 51 Observations and Reflections from Research Diary, 19 July 2011 A few minutes ago, I messaged a few of my respondents who had offered to help me with keeping diaries as part of my research methodology. A couple of them replied and said that I would be happy with their journals because they wrote a lot; another two of them said they have not really kept up with updating the journals. Below are two of the replies I received: Vanessa: It’s quite difficult to keep a journal. Used to do it a long time ago but since junior college I lost my ability to write consistently. Wish I could’ve written more though, because they busy days were more fun to write about than the lazy days, but less time to write about also. Shuming: The journal’s going fine. I have to catch up on last week’s reflection though, been busy at work! First, it was becoming clear that diary writing was indeed taking up a portion of their time; and while some of them manage to ‘keep up’ with updating the journal, there are also others who could not find time to do it. Second, the journal itself seems to have entered the assemblage of practices and materialities that co-produce these young student migrants’ management of time-spaces (between work, school, leisure, and writing). By this, I mean that the journal as a material entity becomes part of the schedules and timetables they negotiate on an everyday basis. Furthermore, it is obvious that the journal itself demands a certain rhythm in their daily routines as they find themselves having to “catch up” and “write consistently”. Table 4.3: Observations and Reflections from Research Diary, 19 July 2011 In light of the constraints pointed out above, I only managed to collect back 6 diaries out of a total of 12 that I have administered based on their informed consent to participate in this method. There were also 2 other respondents who voluntarily gave me the link address to their weblogs. To them, weblogs are a form of online diary and serves the same purpose as the physical copies of diaries I provide for the respondents. One common observation from both ‘offline’ and ‘online’ solicited diaries is that their production diaries is a negotiated process between the researcher and the writer since the participants of this exercise are fully aware of the purpose of 52 writing (Meth, 2003). Hence, the diary is a reflection of the reflexive writing since the writer is well aware of the research aims. This is reflected in how my name is mentioned in their diary entries as if I am the intended ‘audience’, as well as an explicit acknowledgement that I am the solicitor of the diaries (see Plate 4.1). Plate 4.1: Page from a solicited diary with explicit acknowledgement that the author is both a ‘character’ and solicitor of the diary 53 4.3.3 Online Chat Finally, I want to briefly say something about ‘online chat’ as a technique emerging from the research process. Many of my respondents are fairly active on virtual networking platforms and we remain in contact with each other on Facebook. The amount of talk, observations, and conversations taking place over Facebook resembles what Hines (2000) call the ‘virtual ethnography’. This is akin to doing ethnographic research on the virtual site, and in this sense the ‘field’ takes on a different spatial and temporal character. While critics of virtual ethnography have criticized the technique as blurring the private-public boundaries that respondents may establish between their ‘researched’ and ‘private’ lives, and the allegation that researchers may indulge in ‘virtual flâneurism’ (Friedberg, 1998), it is instructive to note that in adding these respondents as Facebook ‘friends’5, they are able to exercise control over the amount of information I can see through the privacy settings. I also obtained informed consent prior to using any materials from online conversations and photographs. One observation I made about ‘online chat’ is that these respondents are more casual and informal than interviews. This suggests that the spaces in which conversations take place matter. Here, the respondents appear to find comfort behind ‘screens’ rather than having to be concerned with the bodily presentation of the self. 4.4 Concluding Comments As Low and Barnett (2000: 59) suggest, human geographers need to think ‘conjuncturally’ by “shuttling back and forth between different temporal frames or scales to capture the distinctive character of processes which appear to inhabit the 5 Facebook ‘friends’ are individuals who have mutually agreed to connect with each other on Facebook, hence allowing both parties to view information on their profiles, updates, and postings. A ‘friend’ request is at first initiated and the other party can either accept or reject the request. 54 ‘same’ moment in time”. If we acknowledge that our knowledges are situated in particular times and spaces, then there is also a need to recognize that people are able to reflect upon and mobilize their experiences of time and space to construct performances and narratives of the self. This is important to note not so much because researchers should be wary of their respondents, but rather to render significance and fuller appreciation for the shifting ways in which young people construct narratives about their own “multiple temporal orientations and geographies” (Leyshon cited in Langevang, 2007). This chapter has reflected on the ‘assembling’ and ‘apprehending’ techniques adopted in my research, thus presenting a more complex picture behind the production a geographical knowledge that seeks to attend to young people’s voices from and about different time/spaces. 55 5.1 Introduction This chapter places young student migrants’ experiences of mobility at the center of discussion by assembling their narratives to tell stories of youth, transition, and futurity. Underlying these narratives are young people’s personal understandings of their histories, current situations, and future possibilities. My aim is to build on Holdsworth’s (2009: 1857) conceptualization of student mobility as “intricately linked with projects of the self and transitions to adulthood” by unpacking how experiences of education and migration shape student migrants’ articulation of individual biographies. I argue that these biographies are closely intertwined with their intimate experiences of time and space in relation to different scales, sites, and subjects. As Valentine (2003: 39) points out, transition is a process that is “not just woven into the temporal fabric of our lives”, but is “also bound up with much wider geographies and structures”. I demonstrate this by showing the ways in which student migrants speak about their transition through a variety of spatio-temporalities operating as ‘trajectories’, ‘geometries’, and ‘textures’ (see Chapter 2). Through these time-space vignettes, I show that ‘transition’ across space and time is variably experienced and negotiated by the student migrants. In the process, I also highlight how their experiences are not only shaped by gender, nationality and socio-economic backgrounds, but also individual personalities and propensities to socialize and adjust to new environments. In Section 5.2, I present student migrants’ stories of education migration by focusing on how they articulate decisions and determination to travel elsewhere for education, and the ways in which they negotiate pathways to do so. I argue that these young people construct their stories of ‘going away’ through the rhythm of youth and anticipation of time-spaces hitherto uncharted. Section 5.3 continues by focusing on 56 student migrants’ daily negotiations with the accelerated pace of life in Singapore. I examine the contradictory feelings of speed and slowness experienced by different student migrants, and discuss how they negotiate and cope with these feelings across scales and places. Finally, I draw attention to the significant ways in which student migrants articulate orientations into the future in Section 5.4. 5.2 ‘Going Away’ for Change and Continuity Existing literature on education migration often portrays student migrants as part of larger mobility projects strategized and steered by adult parents. Critiques have shown that this representation of student migrants tends to simplify them as disembodied individuals who have little say in migration decisions. However, through my interactions with the student migrants, I notice that these young people are ambitious and forward-looking individuals who exhibit differentiated degrees of agency in desiring to experience new places, lifestyles, and education pathways. This section demonstrates how student migrants construct their stories of ‘going away’ to study abroad as arising from “the pull of new possibilities and rewards”, “the push of discontent”, or simply from a perceived need to “move toward a felt sense of possibility and hope” (Marsella and Ring, 2003: 9). For many young student migrants, their decisions to go abroad for education are often articulated as a reflexive project of the self where ‘going away’ is viewed as a significant moment for change in their lives – one that is predicated on the fact that they are leaving behind places they were not happy about, and moving ‘elsewhere’ that promises better opportunities. This observation reinforces Jones’ (2000) finding that the ability to move from one place to another is a key way for young people to move up the social ladder, or at least avoid moving downward the social hierarchy. A 57 change in location and place-experience constitutes an important part of these young people’s sense of mobility. This observation is also found in Hinton’s (2011: 27) study of student migration that the mobility associated with ‘going away’ is perceived as a “chance to pursue new opportunities in different locations while facilitating the transition to adulthood”. Indeed, student migrants often articulate their motivations and decisions to migrate as ‘breaking’ away from their (then) present lives. As Rosenthal (2000) argues, moments of change, or ‘breaks’, do not always signal discontinuity but instead constitutes the condition for temporal continuity. Drawing on this view of time, I show that these young people spatially dis-locate themselves by ‘going away’ in order to construct a sense of continuity in the process of growing up. In 20 year-old Indonesian Cardus’s story, the decision to ‘go away’ clearly reveals a sense of discontent with his present situation in configuring his desire to experience a different education pathway. For him, the decision to ‘go away’ was a carefully calculated project: Since secondary school [back in Indonesia], I decided Indonesia is not the best place for me to study. My aim is Canada, but not so easy. My family’s financial background is not capable to bring me to Canada, so Singapore is the best my family can afford. For Cardus, his intention to continue post-secondary education outside Indonesia was made known to his parents well ahead of time. Since he did not receive any scholarship, Singapore became the next best option because it was more affordable as compared to Canada. Despite this, his father still had qualms about sending Cardus abroad due to the financial cost involved until his mother managed to persuade him. The actualization of Cardus’s migration was a result of the parents’ subsequent 58 recognition that there is a possibility for the family to migrate after Cardus has settled down in Singapore, reflecting characteristics of the ‘parachute kids’ found in Waters’s (2003) study on East Asian family migration strategies. Although Cardus was the one who initiated the idea of ‘going away’ for education, the weighing of the cost and benefit involved in migration cannot be divorced from the futures of the other family members as “seemingly personal decisions are taken in relation to life trajectories, needs and understandings of others who lead their lives in connection” (Horschelmann, 2011: 379). In contrast to Cardus’s well-calculated project to ‘go away’, 23 year-old Filipino student Muriel recounts her decision to come to Singapore as one that resulted from a chance opportunity presented by a scholarship. The acquirement of a scholarship plays a crucial role in the orientation of these young people’s migration routes. At least three quarters of my respondents first came to Singapore for education with one. Without a scholarship, their parents would not have agreed to their migration due to the hefty sum of tuition fees and living expenses needed to send their children abroad. For Muriel, the impulse to go abroad at the age of 15 was even stronger when such opportunities arise: I guess for me it [the scholarship] was more of an opportunity. I didn’t even know where Singapore was! I even thought they had snow. But the prospect of being somewhere else at the point of time was attractive. I mean because either I go straight to college at that point of time, or I go to another country, do something fun, I mean do something else, like something new. I prefer that. I guess at that age you really don't know what you want. And then when opportunities present themselves, and you have to make a choice, I guess I ended up with that. And my parents, I mean even if they didn’t want to, they were quite supportive. Indeed, many of my respondents articulate their stories of ‘going away’ as an agerelated mobility where one has to make a decision on whether to continue with their 59 present way of life or make a distinct ‘break’ from it. As Evans (2008) notes, the youthful stage of an individual’s lifecourse is often a time when the impulse to migrate becomes intensified. In Muriel’s words, this is stage in her life when “being somewhere else”, trying “something new”, and doing “something fun” is made possible by both her mobility and external opportunities. For student migrants such as Muriel, migration was less of a purposeful journey to fulfill educational aspirations than an opportunity to ‘go away’ from home into a time and space hitherto uncharted to explore new possibilities and lifestyles. Although the stories of Cardus and Muriel appear to be optimistic, or even triumphant accounts of ‘going away’, one of my respondents6 viewed ‘going away’ to study in Singapore as an escape from his home country. He shared with me that he has been struggling with his sexual identity for a long time. While he told me that he is “OK with dating girls”, he “always had a liking for guys since young”. However, he continued to date girls back in his home country due to the pressure of living in an environment where “everyone seems to know everyone”. His words here are very revealing of the immense pressure brought by what Foucault (1975) calls the ‘disciplining of the self’. This is not to say that there are no governing forces acting from outside the ‘self’, such as moral expectations and intergenerational values arising from the family and larger community. Rather, the effects of the disciplinary powers surrounding non-heterosexual orientations are so pervasive that they operate through ‘presence’, or the surveillance of ‘everyone’, instead of being enacted by specific groups of people. In order to escape away from this swelling atmosphere of surveillance and discomfort, he decided to ‘go away’ from his home country. In his 6 Although this respondent has given informed consent on the use of his name, I have not used his name in this section as he also requested for his sexual orientation to be kept confidential. 60 own words, it is an act of exasperation, one that is perceived to be a ‘need’ rather than an ‘option’: I think that time I needed a break and go to a place where people don’t know me, and I don’t know people. It’s better than staying back there. I couldn’t take it anymore. And since I was about to enter university, so I just go. At least I come here [Singapore], I feel more free to be myself. In ‘going away’, this respondent was actively trying to disconnect himself from an environment where his “nonnormative sexuality is often tantamount to spatial displacement” (Puar et al., 2003: 386). It is also ironic that the spatial proximity and intimate knowledge he shared with the people in his community of origin had such a negative impact on his emotional and mental well-being. Yet, this episode is also reflective of Gorman-Murray’s (2009: 444) argument that “queer migration is predicated on bodily desires and emotions, including yearning to test new sexual identities, practices and ways of being”. For this respondent, ‘going away’ was an opportunity to leave behind the negative emotional baggage, and to move on to a new chapter in life where he can be himself. Although ‘going away’ is achieved through (and leads to) different routes, it is perceived as a significant moment where moving elsewhere is a timely action in the project of transition. However, even as their journey into new time-spaces means that a greater sense of mobility is experienced, there are other temporal textures that simultaneously operate in the configuration of their everyday geographies. 5.3 Politics of Pace, Speed, and Slowness This section focuses on student migrants’ everyday experiences of time through the lens of pacing, speeding and slowing across different sites and scales. In 61 Hubbard and Lilley’s (2004) study on urban modernity, they propose an understanding of the acceleration of city life through a ‘politics of pace’ which distinguishes speed and slowness as a relational characterization of social life. They argue that there are individuals who navigate the high-speed spaces of flows with relative ease, and there are also those whose mobilities are slowed down in the process. There are yet others who resist the increased pace of life through conscious acts of slowing down. I elucidate this argument by showing how cities are seen as travelling at different speeds, some ahead of others, in the young people’s construction of places where they can pursue their aspirations. I also demonstrate how rhythms of life vary across these places, each embodying its own normative culture of speed and slowness. In examining how student migrants negotiate these asynchronous time-spaces, a range of issues surrounding education, career, family, friendship and romance emerge as intimately connected to their lives. This section not only foregrounds the irregular temporal geographies of transition across borders, but also the uneven rhythms of growing up for young people. 5.3.1 Catching Up with the ‘Global’ Even as the higher education landscape is globalizing, it is not a uniform process. In the face of marketing and recruitment strategies, people make differentiated choices that are inflected through a calculative logic that categorizes places (across the scales of institutions, cities, and countries) in a hierarchical manner. As the ‘going away’ stories shared by the student migrants reveal, the geographical imagination of Singapore remains highly embedded in a hierarchical topography of cities. While the assumption that cities are organized along a singular spatio-temporal trajectory has been the subject of critique (Massey, 2005; Robinson, 2006), such an 62 imaginary continues to influence the ways in which ‘ordinary’ student migrants articulate their geographies of migration and mobility. In the words of Ivan, a 23-year old Filipino: I think the general consensus amongst us was regardless of the school we go to, it would be better than anything we have in the Philippines. So we’re like getting something better, we don’t care how much better; it’s just better, the environment, the life. I guess it’s the same for many international students. Ivan’s description of Singapore as a “better” place not just in terms of education, but also the lifestyles and social environments, is a pervasive belief held by the young student migrants. Such an overtone in how they talk about Singapore is often juxtaposed with the discontent they express towards the countries they come from, and these are often seen as lacking in the quality of life Singapore promises. This imagined geography of difference mirrors the idea that certain places lag behind others, and hence there is a need to catch up with them (Power, 2003). Indeed, these young people plot Singapore’s education landscape ‘ahead’ of others within the proximity of the Southeast Asian region. By pursuing their studies in Singapore, they view themselves as actively ‘catching up’ with global spaces and times in three interrelated instances. The first instance is the immediate aim of many student migrants – to obtain a Singapore-conferred qualification. But as much as the value of the overseas qualification is often associated with socio-economic mobility, it is not always parallel to what Waters (2006: 179) describes as “a more valuable form of cultural capital”. Ruby, a 23 year-old Vietnamese, explains: Because the salary in Vietnam is not high enough according to my expectation. It’s not much for a degree at all. Let’s say when you go back Vietnam, for my education level, I can get a job at say around 700 63 USD. That is only like 900 plus Singapore dollars. It’s very difficult for you to get a 1,000 USD job right at the beginning. Student migrants from Vietnam, Myanmar, The Philippines, and to a lesser extent Indonesia, have all expressed reluctance to seek paid work in their home countries (but this does not mean that they do not plan to return, see Section 5.4.1). In their opinion, the overseas qualification is of little economic value when placed in the context of their home countries. Even if the qualification is obtained from an overseas institution, it is only more valuable when these young people actively practice the ‘placing of capital’ (Cook, 2011) in geographical locations where higher economic value can be extracted from it. Furthermore, Ruby also refers to her stay in Singapore as having placed her in a position ‘ahead’ and hence it makes no sense for her to ‘return’ to Vietnam for paid work: So the salary, the starting pay here [in Singapore] is better. And since I am here already, I don’t want to go back to where I started. If not why come here in the first place. I can just go to a Vietnamese university, right? The second instance in how student migrants exhibit a ‘catching up’ mindset is reflected in their geographical imagination of Singapore as a springboard to launch them onto the global stage. These migrants are largely unsatisfied with the rhythm of development in their home countries and view their migration to Singapore as a leap into another time-space, where they can speed up their journeys towards the global stage. For 20 year-old Cardus, his description of the aspiration to become globallyoriented emerges in the image of a ‘globetrotter’ who is able to navigate “around the globe”: 64 The education system there [in Indonesia] is not to my satisfaction. The social, the political environment there also not good. So I intended to continue on further my studies in Singapore in hopes that Singapore will be a transit for me to go even further around the globe. As Ruby’s and Cardus’s narratives suggest, the place of education and work matters in how student migrants perceive the availability of opportunities and networks to become globally-oriented. In the last instance, the construction of ‘time’ as capital is also an important way in how they attempt to ‘catch up’ with global rhythms for some others. As Nang, a 25 year-old Myanmarese who just graduated from a local university, shares: After all, I spend so many years in Singapore, about 3 years secondary school, 2 years college, then 4 years university. Plus I work for 3 years in Singapore under the tuition grant bond, total more than 10 years here. I think it shouldn’t be a problem if I want to obtain a PR to stay here and work. Even if I want to go to somewhere else, with my experience, number of years here, I think not as issue also. According to Nang, it is not just the place but also the time spent in Singapore that is deemed valuable in preparing her for the global workplace. Several other migrants also quantify the value of their ‘overseas experience’ through the number of years spent abroad, alongside the range of activities that would have strengthened their personal portfolios by the time they are ready go elsewhere. Yet, there are also others who hope that the number of years spent studying and working in Singapore would validate their ‘loyalty’ to Singapore and hence smoothen their application process to become permanent residents in the city-state. The acquirement of a permanent residence status provides student migrants with a heightened sense of socio-economic stability in that Singaporean employers will be more willing to employ them. Instead of accumulating capital over time, these young people tend to view the accumulation 65 of ‘time’ itself as a form of capital that will provide access to places where they can realize their mobility projects. The stories above draw attention to how ‘global’ rhythms filtrate into everyday spaces, shaping student migrants’ aspirations to receive higher quality education, earn more money, and cultivate a cosmopolitan character that prepares them for the global stage. Here, Singapore is constructed as a ‘springboard’ for them to scale places that are hitherto deemed out of reach. In the next section, I elaborate on the ways in which the process of ‘catching up’ is intimately tied to, and played out as, ‘local’ spaces and times. 5.3.2 Slowing Down ‘Local’ Rhythms While the previous section reveals how young student migrants are able to map out strategies in the bid to ‘catch up’ with global times and spaces, on the flipside of these narratives are the everyday biographies of how they negotiate “global competitiveness” and the corollary “speeded-up present” (Clegg, 2010: 350) that has now colonized their daily routines. Many student migrants felt that they had to catch up with the level of competition in Singapore. Ruby’s story is indicative of the concerns that many other young migrants face in my research. The 23 year-old Vietnamese told me candidly her experience in university: The environment here in Singapore is competitive. When I came to Singapore, I knew that you guys were very, very competitive. So then my life change in the sense like I stay up very late, just like you guys. Because I see my Singaporean friends go to bed at like 2am. Then I always see a lot of them in the library. So that’s why I feel it’s very competitive. Back in Vietnam, I usually sleep at 12am. I didn’t stay up late. One striking observation is that while Singaporean students often view their 66 international peers as a ‘threat’ in terms of the large amount of time they spend on studying, the opposite can also be true. In Ruby’s opinion, she has to stay up late and catch up with her revision only because she felt compelled by the competitive atmosphere created by the Singaporean students. Not only has her daily timetable been extended due to later bedtimes, its routinization has also produced an acceleration of time: And because of that, you know everyday you wake up, go for classes, then come back rest, study, then sleep, time pass by very quickly. Before you know it, first year of university over. Sometimes I feel like I got no social life. And the pace of life here is so much faster than in Vietnam. There you can slack. But here you cannot. Here you slack and you need to pay for it. Ruby’s lamentation that her ‘social life’ has been lost is intimately tied to the intense ‘scholarization’ of her daily life, which consists of repetitive acts surrounding schoolwork instead of leisure. She also actively contrast the culture of speed back in Vietnam as providing room for ‘slacking’ while any attempt to so in Singapore would be at a cost that one has to pay at a later stage, such as not being able to compete with peers. Here, Ruby appears to be caught between the immediate concern of having to perform academically so as not to ‘lose out’, but at the same time reminisces a ‘slower’ life of Vietnam. In order to subvert the dominance of speed in her daily timespace geographies, Ruby arrange to meet up with her Vietnamese friends on a weekly basis to spend more time outside school on leisure activities such as hanging out, watching movies, and shopping. In this way, she is able to recuperate ‘social life’ into her speeded-up life in Singapore, or what Parkins (2004: 364) calls “to live slowly” by considering “the pleasure or at least the purpose of each task” rather than mindlessly repeating her daily routines. She also further revealed to me that it is 67 important to seek a balance between school and social life in order to expand her social networks and widen her job opportunities after graduation: It is very important. If I don’t have fun and keep studying, I will be cooped up in the library all day. I won’t make any friends here and even if I do well in my studies, I will not go far. Because I learn that socializing and networking is very important to get me jobs, not just results. My general observation is that the process of ‘catching up’ certainly causes anxieties for student migrants who, at different moments in their lives, felt as if they cannot cope with the pace of life in Singapore. However, most of them are able to find ways to counter this through actively talking to friends, or even paying visits to the school counselors (as revealed by a few of my respondents). Apart from the prominence of friendship in how student migrants ‘slow down’ local rhythms and the speed of living and studying in Singapore, the family also plays a role in helping them become self-driven and motivated: There’s this driving force also. I’m outside my own country, out of my own comfort zone, all alone right? Then if I don’t do well in studies, what else can I do right? If my parents invested money and send me off it’s like a responsibility for me to show them some results. In Cardus’s words above, it is an intersection of multiple considerations such as the economic cost borne by the parents, their expectations from the children, and the student migrants’ own sense of responsibility – which becomes even more pronounced in a different space with a different temporal culture – that serves as the “driving force” for them. While the ‘home’ and ‘family’ is previously associated with undesired surveillance (as suggested in Section 5.2 and later in Section 5.3.3), it is drawn upon here as a source of strength, or at least a reminder of their purpose and 68 role as student migrants who are trying to make their mark in foreign lands. In this context, student migrants’ relationships with the family are re-interpreted as ‘responsibility’ (something they should do) rather than as ‘obligation’ (something they have to do). On the one hand, this observation challenges the dominant discourse about young people’s mobility as increasingly disconnected from the family as the face of a more individualistic society (c.f. Giddens, 1992). On the other hand, it also reveals how relations of intimacy are malleable and contingent upon changing circumstances in people’s lives. 5.3.3 Settling In and Disruptions Even as every student migrant is capable of coping with and adjusting to the rhythms of life in Singapore at his or her own pace, this does not mean that they settle into the normative spatio-temporal regime coherently. Kell and Vogl (2007: 209) has identified the “first three months” phase “to be the most difficult for [Indonesian] students in terms of settling into life” in Australia. This finding can also be found in the student migrants that I have interviewed. Generally, they take a few months to adjust their time-space routines, habits, and performances of identities. However, this claim is at best generalizing their transition across places through a bounded notion of time and space as it assumes that student migrant experiences of ‘settling in’ can be stabilized through a prolonged period of time spent in the host destinations. On the contrary, I argue that the process of ‘settling into life’ is on-going and susceptible to intermittent disruptions through mobile practices such as visiting home. To demonstrate this, I draw on 21 year-old Vanessa’s story through her journal entry on 27 June 2011 (Plate 5.1): 69 Plate 5.1: Vignette from Vanessa’s journal entry on 27 June 20117 Vanessa recounted her visit back to Indonesia as not very different from her previous visits. However, she felt emotionally disturbed when facing the moment of returning to Singapore. She explained that “it’s like having to keep readjusting to two different lives” – she feels like an “independent girl” who is able to organize her daily activities in Singapore, yet she becomes a “sheltered girl” whose needs are taken care of by her parents in Indonesia. It is neither a reluctance to leave her family and comfort of the home nor an unwillingness to return to Singapore that is bothering Vanessa. Instead, it is the juncture of transition between two different lifestyles and everyday routines that was affecting her mood. She clarified this disruption in her second interview with me: Sometimes I feel like when I go, then I come back here, is like being thrown back and forth into different cities, then you know somehow I feel like identity crisis, need to change back. It’s like go back there is a very different routine. 7 Transcript: My trip to Indonesia was pretty much a usual one. [smiley face] When I was about to go back to Singapore, I had that hatred again. I hate changing from being in Jakarta to being in Singapore and vice versa. It’s like having to keep readjusting to 2 different lives, as an independent girl who has to buy every single meal herself to being a sheltered girl in a family who provides her with everything she needs. […] 70 This feeling of “being thrown back and forth” is not entirely different from observations made by scholars about the simultaneous positions, identities, and practices that many transnational migrants negotiate on a daily basis. However, the divergence in my argument is that such negotiations are not only implicated in sociospatial relations stretching across places, but also mediated through temporalities. Nevertheless, not all student migrants experience disruptions as “being thrown back and forth” across two places with contradicting temporalities. Some of them allow themselves to ‘settle into’, or what Ahmed (2006: 160) might call “sink into”, the normative rhythms of life in Singapore. This has cultivated in them a ‘voice’ that denounces the relevance and desirability of the places where they come from. For example, 23 year-old Ivan describes his reluctance in returning to the Philippines as he finds the ‘lack’ of speed there intolerable: Back to Philippines, I don’t think so. The way it’s turning out, not a good idea to go back. Like Singapore has made me more efficient I supposed, where I’m very on the task, like this has to be done, and very low tolerance for incompetence. Ivan illustrates his frustration with the ‘inefficiency’ of his home country by drawing on his encounters with visiting the bank, which is one of the three other examples he cited in order to justify the different competency level Philippines is at in relation to Singapore: Banks here [in Singapore] the counters are like go, go, go. There [the Philippines] you can be stuck in the bank for like half an hour to 2 hours, just waiting for your turn. There are like 4 counters, only one counter is open, the rest are like sitting there talking. If you're going to do that, please don’t show me you're sitting there. I feel that there's this lack of common sense when it comes to presentation of your work. Work for them is a very relaxed thing. 71 An interesting observation from Ivan’s narrative is his appreciation of Singapore as a place “in which speed itself becomes a value” for evaluating the quality of social life (Cwerner, 2004: 72). This is in stark contrast to Ruby’s earlier lamentation about the fast-paced life in Singapore, leaving her little room to find time for leisure. In this case, Ivan clearly draws on the value of speed to articulate himself as an efficient individual who has the drive and energy to compete in a global workforce. He also acknowledged that this is not an a priori personality of his, but one that is made through his inhabiting Singapore’s time-space routines. The speed at which Singapore is experienced becomes a hallmark of competency and efficiency, and these are seen as good qualities to be absorbed and inherited by the body. In contrast, the Philippines is marked by the descriptors of ‘slow’, ‘incompetent’, and ‘unproductive’. Ivan added that his plan upon graduation was to migrate to Hong Kong for work especially since the pace of life there is similar to Singapore’s. The narratives shown in this section demonstrate that student migrants’ negotiations with the rhythms, speeds and paces of ‘settling down’ are not only contingent upon one’s ability to reconcile asynchronous time-spaces, but also their subjective valuation of time and space. In the next section, I turn to discuss student migrants’ stories about their futures with particular emphasis on the different geographies produced by their own logics of time. 5.4 Orientations towards Elusive Futures Futurity is elusive precisely because there is a sense of openness about it. However, even as the future is always opened to changes, people orientate into the future by delineating different temporal horizons in which they can project themselves as inhabitants of that space (Ahmed, 2006). In Worth’s (2009) work on 72 youth transitions, she draws on the concept of ‘futurity’ to demonstrate how young people understand and articulate the future in different ways. She reminds that it is crucial to bear in mind that these multiple constructions of futures are always embodied and connected to broader geographies of constraints and opportunities. In this last section of the chapter, I highlight three significant ways in which student migrants from my research orientate their futures. First, future is home-oriented where student migrants see themselves returning home eventually. Second, future is orientated towards work. Third, future is associated with its openness and negotiated through taking ‘one step at a time’. I argue that while these young people are able to articulate pathways into the future, some with more certainty than others, most of them admit that the future is unpredictable and susceptible to changes. I suggest that such reflexivity is not a product of chance and is instead acquired through the process of education migration. 5.4.1 Going Home, But Not So Soon The notion of ‘going home’ is as important as ‘going away’ in student migrants’ experiences of transition. As Collins (2009: 840) has already pointed out, a significant aspect of transnational student mobility “in the lives of individual migrants is the movement away from places conceived to be ‘home’”. The first way in which student migrants orientate their futures is towards their home countries. Existing studies on transnational migration have consistently argued that ‘home’ is not a place where you leave behind as affective ties, home-making practices, and prospects of return feature strongly in connecting migrants and their homelands (Ahmed et al., 2003). It is important to point out that the student migrants from my research constantly refer to “home” as the cities where they used to reside, or their 73 home countries. Their places of accommodation in Singapore, on the other hand, are differentiated through the use of “hostel”, “apartment” and “hall”. This suggests that instead of the multi-sited morphology of home as documented in some migrants’ lives (Asis et al., 2004), the geography of ‘home’ for these student migrants is a very specific one. Although many student migrants initially discuss their futures in terms of their career plans, a number of them also reveal desires to go back home. However, when I asked when that is going to happen, their replies are often vague. For 24 year-old Emily, she is clear in what she hopes to achieve in Singapore – “work”, “earn”, and “save” are often articulated as actions to be taken as part of their plans for the future. However, they are less clear on the duration of their intended stay in Singapore, and even more uncertain about the timing of return: I want to go home to Vietnam eventually. I need to stay here for 3 years to work. Then I will want to continue to work here and earn more money and save up because the salary here is better also. But I will go back because I miss my family. They also miss me. Just not so soon. In contrast to Emily’s elusiveness, a more defined mapping of the future is to be found in the narrative of Ruby, who is also a Vietnamese. For her, returning is a definite and clear path that is already underway. She plans to stay in Singapore for about 5 years before she returns home with her Vietnamese fiancé. She also explained that this was a decision that is already in the process of being actualized as they have jointly purchased a house in Vietnam that will be ready for them to move in 5 years later. She also acknowledged that she would have preferred to stay in Singapore for a longer period of time if it was not for her fiancé’s proposal to return: 74 Actually I want to stay here for a longer time. But my family misses me. And my fiancé wants to go back Vietnam and start a business because it’s easier there. So after discussion, we decide to go back after a few years. Actually we have already bought a house back in Vietnam, so we will definitely be going back. Ruby’s plan on returning to Vietnam is a result of her negotiation across several considerations, namely the economic prospects in Vietnam, the cost of giving up a career in Singapore, and the intimate obligations at the site of the family. She shared that the discussion she had with the fiancé surrounded the issue of money and livelihood upon returning to Vietnam. Most notably, they were confident that they would be able to live a comfortable life even if they return to Vietnam by starting their own business with the savings accumulated over the 5 years from working in Singapore. While it cannot be denied that their decision to return is inflected through a version of social hope that is largely about the aspiration to travel across classes (Beuret, 2010), the realm of intimacy also played an important role. According to Ruby, “money can always be earned, but family is not always there”. This is indicative that the intimate bond of the family had a powerful hold over Ruby’s eventual commitment to return to Vietnam. In here, returning is not so much conceptualized as slowing down or taking a step backward in her pursuit of social mobility (as seen in Ivan’s narrative in Section 5.3.3). Instead, it is constitutive of her way to ‘get on’ in life by migrating back home, re-joining her family, and recognizing that there are also hopeful opportunities in the sending place, especially in the aspect of entrepreneurialism8. 8 It must be noted that there is also a geography to entrepreneurial opportunities. The possibility of starting a business and sustaining a ‘comfortable’ lifestyle varies across where the ‘origin’ is located. For instance, the prospects, level of competition and risks vary across countries and places of ‘return’ such as rural villages or cities. This points towards an acknowledgement of the more complex geographies of ‘return’ that can be involved, but which cannot be fully explicated in this thesis. 75 5.4.2 3-Year-Bond: A Future Planned? Whether student migrants from my research are recipients of a scholarship or not, all of them are under the Tuition Grant Scheme (see Chapter 3.3). Hence, they are required to work for any Singapore-registered company for 3 years upon graduation. There is a general sense that the student migrants view this contractual arrangement positively, especially since many of them project their future towards concerns with paid work. These young people felt that the important task upon graduation is to secure a job and start earning a stable income. To them, this is an ‘immediate future’ which is a natural progression since they do not have to actively plan for it. Instead, the future is viewed as already planned for them, as 22 year-old Malaysian Arch’s narrative demonstrates: Once I graduate, most importantly is to find a job. You know we have to serve the 3 years bond right? Under the Tuition Grant. The thing is, need to get a job and start earning money. Actually my future is kind of like already planned for because of this. The 3-year bond also appears to be more important for some student migrants who do not hold a scholarship, as they view themselves occupying a less advantageous position when competing for employment in Singapore’s labour market. However, they tend to manage their feelings of insecurity as ‘less competitive’ job seekers by rationalizing the 3-year bond as a structure in place, or a vehicle, that facilitates their access to paid work: My future, after graduation, is more or less planned already because of the 3 years bond, which is good also. Especially like I don’t have a 76 scholarship, then imagine if there is no bond, I don’t think I can compete with other international job applicants. Because I can work with a Singapore-registered company, although I still have to find the company and go through interviews everything myself, at least with a local degree should not be a problem. It doesn’t make sense if the contract requires me to work for 3 years, but nobody wants to hire me right? In the case of 24 year-old Malaysian Tara, as shown above, she feels that she would be able to find employment even though she is relatively less competitive as compared to her international peers who are scholarship recipients. Her speculation is that since she has to fulfill the 3 year-bond, “it doesn’t make sense” if she was not able to find a job. Although this speculation can be tenuous since there is no formal guarantee that all international students under the Tuition Grant Scheme would be employed upon graduation, it is a significant way in how these student migrants try to make sense of their future. Hence, although these student migrants perceive their future to be “already planned for” due to the bond, the fact that speculations are still involved in articulating their futures reflect some degree of uncertainty. Indeed, there is a great deal of rationalization going on as these young people confront a future that they themselves acknowledge can never be stable. 5.4.3 A Step at a Time Whether it is a future that is well mapped out by individual student migrants, or a future that is left to the temporal structuring of the bond, there is a sense that the present is what matters for them. The present is viewed a more ‘concrete’ space in which strategies and tangible actions can be made. This is not to suggest that they are ignorant or refuse to face up to the challenges that the elusiveness of futurity brings (as seen in Sections 5.4.1 & 5.4.2). Instead, I argue that the overt emphasis on the present is a conscious strategy to counter the “anxieties in an unpredictable, open 77 future” (Worth, 2009: 1055), as clearly illustrated by 22 year-old Arch: I don’t think there is a need to plan so much for the future. We need to plan, but things change and we cannot predict. So I think it’s more important to focus on my studies now. When I graduate and work, then I focus on work. Just take one step at a time, and see what will come. Taking “one step at a time” is a common strategy adopted by the student migrants in managing the elusiveness of the future. Indeed, futurity is imaginary space that is always opened and in the process of becoming (Grosz, 1999), or articulated by Arch as a space “we cannot predict”. Rather than actively taming and prescribing fixed pathways into the future, the student migrants from my research tend to acknowledge its openness. They also embrace this sense of openness because they view themselves as youthful individuals whose futures are marked by expansive horizons. Even Ruby’s articulation of futurity, which appears to be the most concrete and exact amongst all my respondents, is punctuated with a similar perspective: But my plans can change. Maybe not 5 years, maybe more. This one need to wait and see next time when I work, and he [the fiancé] work, what the employer wants. We are still young, maybe will have other opportunities, when they come, we can adjust the plans. 5 years is how we plan for now. In adopting a ‘step-by-step’ approach towards their future, the student migrants are also in a process of moving-and-waiting. Here, waiting is not seen as a temporal state of slowness or suspension, it is an active component in the process of one’s strategy and plan to become mobile (Gray, 2011). Waiting, in this sense, is a productive temporal state. It is through waiting that these young people assess the circumstances they are in and focus on making the most out of present situations. And then there is moving as the next step in which they take actions, such as taking up 78 opportunities and making adjustments to their plans. This means that they would grab hold of opportunities when presented to them and re-orientate their futures. Indeed, this appears to be not very dissimilar from the stories they tell about making timely decisions and taking up opportunities to go away for new experiences and possibilities when they first decided to leave their home countries to further their education (see Section 5.2). 5.5 Concluding Comments This chapter begins with the understanding that education and migration intersect to produce specific stories about student migrants growing up on the move. In framing these stories through the lens of ‘transition’, I foreground student migrants’ intimate experiences of growing up as embodied and implicated in a range of times and spaces. The spatio-temporal geographies of transition – be it moving away and back, moving with and against, or moving forward – constantly operate across temporal ‘trajectories’, where student migrants’ stories about going abroad for studying are rooted in their individual histories, future aspirations, and the present negotiations; temporal ‘geometries’ which produce specific constraints and pathways for them to follow; and ‘textures’ of time in which these young people’s experiences of new environments are intricately tied up to feelings about the speed and pace of life in Singapore. This brings to attention the ways in which intimate subjectivities and identities are constantly produced and shaped in relation to a variety of sites, scales, and subjects. As I have shown across the chapter, these include the gendering/queering of mobilities in/across different places and times; negotiations with feelings of catching up, belongings, and settling in; and the changing 79 interactions between socio-economic backgrounds, age, and interpersonal relationships. In juxtaposing student migrants’ narratives of youth, transition, and futurity, this chapter sheds light on how everyday temporalities are differentially experienced, felt and negotiated in the present as well as across pasts and futures. In addition, there is also a clear sense that these young people are reflexive individuals who deploy a method of “temporal calculus” (Flaherty, 2010: 88) in assessing these temporalities through geographically-specific ways to inform their decisions, choices and plans. This spatio-temporal reflexivity reveals these young people to be actively “living in the present and making the most of the time they have” (Skelton, 2002: 105). 80 6.1 Introduction In reflecting on the place of personal lives in a late modern and globalizing world, Plummer (2001) opines that “although globalization is well recognized and much discussed, very few studies ever talk about the connections of this process to intimate life”. Intimate life here refers to the range of personal relationships and practices that provide individuals with some form of intimacy – be it care, attention, companionship, or pleasure and trust. As discussed in Chapter 2.3.3, the networks, connections, and ties that are enacted through migration are increasingly becoming more diversified and flexible. In the face of changing technologies of communication and transport, time and space are reconfigured, thereby producing new meanings and practices that sustain intimate lives across borders. In the previous chapter, I focused on student migrants’ spatio-temporal experiences of education migration by examining stories about mobility, transition, and growing up as constitutive of their subject formations. As suggested in several accounts I have shared thus far, as much as their subjectivities, identities and practices are shaped by the ‘here and now’ of localities, they are also referenced and produced through the intimate stories emerging from places and people living apart. This chapter turns to make some critical observations about the transnational practices involved in the production and maintenance of intimacies across borders; and in particular the ways in which ‘transnational familyhood’ is negotiated alongside other forms of social relationships (for a brief review of literature on transnational families, see Chapter 2.3.3). Instead of taking these intimacies as stable relationships, I argue that the extent of ‘being’ intimate, the emotional commitments involved, and the feelings of close-ness are contingently and temporarily produced through different modes of connection and communication (Bingham, 1996). 81 I begin by sharing, in Section 6.2, an individual student migrant’s reflection on his experience with maintaining cross-border ties and connections with family, friends, and girlfriend. His story will introduce some of the key dynamics surrounding the geographies of intimacy and how personal relationships are constantly made and re-made through changing socio-spatial and temporal demands. In Section 6.3, I expound on these constellations of practices, subjects, and relations by examining the politics and realities of mediated intimacies in their specific sites. I argue that information and communication technologies not only mediate the social reproduction of intimate ties through time and space, but also participate in the production of these spatialities, temporalities and intimacies. Lastly, Section 6.4 departs from the focus on mediated intimacies to question why in an age of heightened transnational connectivity, the corporeal act of travelling and visiting home still persists in the way people bridge distances and enact proximities. 6.2 The Times and Spaces of Intimacies: the Story/Strategy of Aulia Born and raised in Malang, the second largest city in the province of East Java, Indonesia, Aulia left his home in 2003 to study in Singapore. He was 15 years old then. His education in Singapore is made possible by a range of scholarships that supported his study from secondary school to college and then university. He was in his last year of undergraduate study in 2011 when I first got acquainted with him. According to Aulia, the family consisting of his parents and two elder sisters is very tight-knit. In a similar fashion to the stories told by other student migrants, his motivation to migrate for education is largely propelled by a strategic deployment of ‘temporal calculus’ – he explained that the earlier he starts receiving his education in Singapore, the easier it is for him to secure a place in a local university. This is not an 82 unfounded logic since the Singapore-based education credentials would have added value to his application for scholarships and university entrance. At that point of time, Aulia was determined to excel in his study, get into a good university, secure a stable job, and earn an income that is able to improve the lives of his family back home: That time I was very motivated. I told myself I must work hard and do well, if not for myself, then at least for my family. I wanted to give them a better life. Plus I’m the only son in my family, so all the more I have to work hard. Although Aulia has been pursuing his education in Singapore for 8 years, he remains in contact with friends back in Indonesia. He commented that “high school is the place when one makes the most lasting friendship”, but he also missed the first 2 years of the high school phase. He felt that these 2 years are time lost for him to develop meaningful friendships with peers in Singapore. His experience of the interactions that took place in his earlier years was described as “lack of common experiences” and “lack of sense of community and bonding where a group of people goes through something together”. This, he believed, has led him to place more faith in his Indonesian friends, who he acknowledged have “helped [him] pass through the first 2 to 4 years in Singapore”. Being in a close relationship with the friends in Indonesia also meant that the friendship bonds forged with them became increasingly stronger and more intimate. One of his close friends eventually got into a relationship with Aulia in 2010, and they have been in a long-distance relationship since then. He shared with me: 83 She is working as a civil servant in Jakarta [capital city of Indonesia]. I will either SMS (short message service) text her or use Google Talk9 to keep in contact. I don’t use Skype because the internet connection on her side is not very stable. I’m used to long-distance relationship already, because my student life goes into a rhythm, and my girlfriend’s work life also goes into a rhythm, so our relationship not very affected. Plus there is no time difference between Singapore and Indonesia, so it’s very easy for us to talk to each other almost every day. Despite living apart from each other, Aulia felt that geographical distance did not affect his relationship with his girlfriend. He attributed this to how they have become adjusted and occupied by the demands of school and work over time, which served to ‘distract’ them from each other’s corporeal absence. Furthermore, they are still able to sustain communication on a frequent basis due to the availability of information and communication technologies tools as well as the absence of time difference between Singapore and Indonesia. On the other hand, Aulia confessed that since the beginning of college education (2 years after his arrival in Singapore), the frequency of contact with his parents has decreased dramatically: I don’t really keep in contact with my parents after the first 2 years, after I have more or less settled down. They know my plans through my sister. I used to tell things to my mum, but I am now closer to her [the sister]. It’s easier to communicate with my sister through Facebook, SMS, and Google. My mum does not use a handphone, so it’s difficult to find her because whenever I call home, she is busy or not around. I guess we’re used to it. I don’t miss home when I am here. But when I go back to visit my family every year, I feel at home. While ICT tools have provided opportunities for proximities to be built across physical distance, these proximities are not enacted in a uniform manner. For instance, although Aulia’s long-distance relationship with his girlfriend is perceived 9 GoogleTalk is a chat application which allows its users to exchange instant messages, make free long distance calls, and conduct audio conferencing that allows multiple uses to chat at once. 84 to be steadfast, he also described his changing relationship with the family, and more specifically with his mother and elder sister. Here, Aulia felt that he has grown closer to his sister due to the relative ease of communicating with her through the use of ICT tools as compared to the mother who is unfamiliar with such tools. It is also instructive to point out that Aulia referred to his mother (instead of father or other siblings) when talking about his attempt to call home. This appears to reflect at least two things. First, it suggests a degree of close-ness that Aulia shares with his mother, and which has now been replaced by the sister as he is “now closer to her”. Second, it can also be taken to echo the assumption about women’s ‘place’ and expected presence in the domestic spaces of the home and family (Domosh, 1998). Yet, this disruption in family dynamics does not pose a threat to the intimate affiliation Aulia feels for his family and home, prominently enshrined in his words, “when I go back to visit my family every year, I feel at home”. Aulia also went on to contrast the relationship he shares with his family and girlfriend, almost as if he wanted to clarify the stark difference in the frequency and level of communication involved in the maintenance of relationships between his family and girlfriend. He continued: But for girlfriend, it’s a different relationship. For family, it’s like a secure relationship; for girlfriend it’s something that needs to be nurtured, it’s ongoing. The basis of relationship is different, so it makes more sense to make more contact with my girlfriend. After all, I have known my family all my life, and I only know her for such a short time. I want to make it work. This narrative is very revealing of the labour and work involved in the fostering and maintenance of intimacies. Aulia perceives his relationship with the family as more “secure” than the one he shares with his girlfriend, therefore more nurturance and 85 attention has to be given to the latter. According to Aulia, the family is a set of ‘stable’ relations built on the foundation of blood-ties and the sands of time. Since ‘time’ here is taken to be the vessel through which social relationships become crystallized and intimate, then time is seen as a key element in the (re)production of intimacies.10 Indeed, as Aulia acknowledges, there is a need to actively invest time in the making of his relationship with the girlfriend as it is still an incomplete and “ongoing” project. Aulia’s story tells of the complex geographies of intimacy that every student migrant faces in his or her education migration journeys. Of course, these stories are highly individual and differentiated according to the specific histories, family narratives and personalities that cut across differences such as gender, class, nationality, and ethnicity. But this is not to say that a biography like Aulia’s cannot speak to broader connections of space, time, social relations and practices. Instead, his story draws attention to how there is no one fixed way in which transnational linkages are enacted and performed; that the interactions and practices that work to maintain and reproduce intimate ties are contingently shaped accordingly to the changing demands of space and time by different subjects and events. 6.3 Doing Intimacy I: Information and Communication Technologies In Kitchin and Dodge’s (2011: 13) conceptualization of the relationship between software and everyday life, they argue for a critical recognition that our lives are not only intimately tied to and mediated by socio-technical practices, but that they 10 This observation also responds to Massey’s (2005: 37-48) critique in For Space that time has too often been taken to mean ‘process’ and ‘change’, while space implies ‘structure’ and ‘foreclosure’. It is suggested here that time can also be imagined as a channel through which structures come into effect to sediment and stabilize social relations. 86 also “[alter] the conditions through which society, space, and time, and thus spatiality, are produced”. Of course, this is not a novel claim since the existing literature in migration studies has widely documented the sustained use of communication tools such as mobile phones to maintain communication and foster intimate ties across different places and times (Wilding, 2006; Fong et al., 2010). However, Southerton (2003: 23) has cautioned that “it is not how much people ‘do’ but the contexts in which they ‘do them’ that affects” the ways that people experience, evaluate, and make adjustments to transnational practices. While there is a consensus that practices matter in the making of spatial connections, I also wonder if the focus on transnational acts and practices is enough to help us understand the ways in which intimacies sometimes appear to be diluted or thickened at different time-space contexts (as suggested in 6.2). This concern resembles Valentine’s (2008b) question on the nature of encounters and how socio-spatial dynamics shape ‘meaningful contact’ within shared spaces. Therefore, rather than simply accepting that transnational intimacies are maintained through a variety of ICT tools, I view these intimacies as mediated through the tools. 11 In this section, I am interested in how each ICT tool puts forward “certain forms of usage” through its material properties and functions (Fuchs, 2005: 190). I suggest that this conceptualization nuances our understanding of the ways in which intimate relationships are arranged and constituted by particular bodies, meanings, practices, and materialities co-existing in space and time. I organize the 11 The original focus of my research was not on how technologies mediate crossborder intimacies. However, I subsequently observed that for these young people, practices of intimacy emerge from the “daily routines” and “private moments” in which the use of ICT tools appears to be “banal, ordinary, [and] part of their daily life” (Meunier, 2010: 38). A discussion on these spaces offers a nuance understanding in how transnational intimacies are produced and negotiated. 87 empirical details about student migrants’ ways of contacting and communicating with families, friends and lovers according to the usage of ICT tools – mobile phones, audio-visual platforms, and social networking site. This allows me to systematically interrogate the specific spatial and temporal implications involved in the production and mediation of transnational intimacies. 6.3.1 “Ya da ya da”: the Banal Politics of Calling Home According to my respondents, mobile phones are almost indispensable as the primary mode of communicating and maintaining cross-border relations with the family. Student migrants talk about the usage of mobile phones through two essential functions – calling and text messaging12. Even though the practice of calling home appears to be a matter of dial-and-call, there is more work involved, such as the labour of finding a common schedule to make sure that both parties have the ‘free time’ to talk. All my respondents claim that they are in a better position to call home rather than having the family members call them. This is because they believed that it is easier for them to arrange for a ‘common time’ between Singapore and their homes. For instance, 20 year-old Indonesian Andrew explains: I am the one who takes initiative to call back so I can have better control of my time. It makes sense also because I know when they would be busy because I am so used to their routine; but they don’t know about mine because now I am in a different place with different routine. For these young people, being in another place with a different temporal culture empowers them with the knowledge of ‘place beyond place’ and ‘time beyond time’ 12 Although two functions are selected for discussion here, I also acknowledge that mobile phones have become comprehensive communication tools that include a range of functions: Media Message Service, internet, e-mails, video-calls etc. (Kellerman, 2006: 100). 88 (c.f. Massey, 2005). While the experience of being in another place broadens student migrants’ horizons and enables them to gain a multi-local view of the cultures of time, Andrew’s narrative also suggests a reproduction of the binaristic view of ‘migrants/’stayers’ versus ‘change’/’fixity’. This can be inferred from his perception that his own daily routine has undergone a change while that of his family members remained the same. Yet, the work of coordinating schedules and finding a ‘common time’ represents the very initial layer of a complex folding of politics surrounding student migrants’ communication with their family members. For instance, Joshua, a 24 yearold Myanmarese clarified that It’s one thing to say when you call back home, but it’s another thing to say what you talk about. Every time I call home it’s for a while, it’s not just to save money, but I also don’t have much to talk about. Just say ‘Hello, I’m fine’, ‘school is manageable’, then hang up. For Joshua, there is a marked difference between the act of calling home and the content of the call. His own experience of calling to talk with his family appears to reflect the banality of what can be considered as ‘routinized talk’. This means that the work of creating conversation with another person has become so regular and repetitive that Joshua began to find it monotonous and lack of meaningful interaction. In a similar fashion, 24 year-old Ivan also found calling home a routine that has gradually lost its purpose, which is to converse with the family. Over time, Ivan switched to text messaging his mother instead of calling: We used to talk a lot more, like update each other about our lives. After some time you realize there isn’t much to say. I was just like saying, ‘ya, I’m OK’, that kind of thing. So I reduce the number of times I call back to once per month. Texting back is easier because it’s faster also. So I 89 prefer to text her [the mother] once a week. As Thompson and Cupples point out (2008: 100), “text message is a comfortable, easy and effective means of communication for young people”. In my study, text messaging is also generally valued for the ‘ease’ and ‘speed’ at which messages can be relayed via a more compact and smaller space of words. But for Ivan, there is more than the swiftness of text messaging which appeals to him as a way of ‘talking’ to his mother. It is also perceived that text messaging restricts the amount of ‘routinized talk’ while still keeping a reasonable level of communication with his family back in the Philippines: When I call she always ask me about church and mass, whether I have been attending, ya da ya da, always the same old topic. When I text, her replies are usually short and sweet. I asked Ivan to tell me more about his reason for calling home once a month (while most other respondents do it weekly). He explained that calling home is no longer as interactive as it used to be, and that the primary aim of calling home is for his parents “to get information out from [him]”. He felt that there is minimal change in his everyday life if he were to update his parents on a weekly basis; while doing it on a monthly basis allows him to relate a greater variation of events and activities to his parents. He also added that the highly routinized time-space geographies of his parents have created a predictability that negates his sense of exigency to call home. He confidently demonstrate this knowledge in detail: For my family, I guess you can call intuition. I pretty much know what they are doing and that they are doing well. Like right now my dad, the time now, he's having snacks right now, he's probably sitting in his office looking at the stock market, or looking at the computer, online. 90 My mum would probably be in Kumon teaching centre, maybe scolding the kids. Since I know what they’re doing, no point in calling back also. Here, routines play an important role in sedimenting and producing Ivan’s knowledge and familiarity surrounding his family’s daily activities, and to some extent, wellbeing. While such perceived predictability, familiarity, and knowledge about the parents’ everyday lives can reflect a degree of comfort and closeness that student migrants feel towards their family, it is also useful to bear in mind political theorist Hannah Arendt’s (cited in Billig, 1995: 7) caution that “banality is not synonymous with harmlessness”. As suggested in the above narratives, there is a mounting tension between ‘keeping contact’ and ‘communicating’ as modes of maintaining transnational intimacy with the family. Very often, text messaging is seen as a ‘quick fix’ that replaces the act of calling and talking at length. Although the former still enable student migrants to remain in contact with their families, thus reflecting Thomas and Cupples’ (2008: 95) argument that text messaging need not “destroy proximal contact”, there is also evidence of a shift in how these young people prioritize and invest time/effort into maintaining ties with their parents back home. 6.3.2 Skype: Virtual Co-Presence and the Intimacy of Bodies With the advent of more complex communication technologies, the channels through which distant lives can be connected and be brought to proximity are becoming ever more ‘lively’. The way in which social messages are relayed to one another is no longer limited to the instantaneous travel of texts, sounds and images (as found in most mobile technologies), but rather how these elements are integrated into ‘real-time’ communication to mimic the realities of social interaction. Audio-visual communication tools such as Skype has gained popularity in recent years amongst 91 many young migrants who possess the skills and knowledge to use them (Bates and Komito, 2012). For my respondents, Skype is particularly attractive as a communication tool because it is firstly ‘free of charge’ in that they do not have to pay for its actual usage – all they need is an access to internet; and secondly, it allows for multiple users to connect and interact with each other in a single space/time. For 23 year-old Filipino, Muriel, Skyping is integral to the production of family time and creating a feeling of togetherness. In the title of a photo-album she has created to store the images of her Skype sessions, it is written: “A family that Skypes together, stays together!” She also shared with me that because her family members are dispersed across different locations, it is paramount for the entire family consisting of her father and mother (in the United States), elder brother (in the Philippines), and elder sister (in Vietnam) to spend time together at least once every week (see Plate 6.1). Skype provides an opportunity for her and the other family members residing in different time-spaces to come together, albeit temporarily and virtually, into a common space and time to ‘listen’, ‘talk’, ‘watch’, or even ‘do nothing’. The key aim is for them to soak in the presence of one another: We usually Skype and do a conference call because we can use multiple webcams. We will talk about anything, sometimes my parents will ask me about my studies, whether I am coping well. Because I used to complain to them how stressful it is when I didn’t get good grades. They will listen to me, basically it’s just listening because they cannot do much also. Then we will see what each other are doing. Sometimes we just leave the webcams on and never do much. We do our own things and let the Skype runs. We just want to be there [on Skype] with each other. 92 Plate 6.1: Skype session on 22 May 2011 with elder brother and his daughter in the Philippines (top left), parents in U.S. (top right), elder sister in Vietnam (bottom left), Muriel in Singapore (bottom right) For Longhurst (2011: under review), Skyping is an interesting online practice for it stretches domestic spaces through the involvement of “‘real time’ interactions with ‘real bodies’”. This means that bodies are increasingly perceived as ‘real’ because of range of bodily actions, habits, and movements that can be apprehended through this form of ICT tool. This is particularly important for Muriel as she commented that “being able to see everyone in action is the only reason why [she] wake up early on Sundays” to Skype with her family. The idea that there are ‘actions’ involved in Skype sessions reflects a transformation in how mediated representations are produced and consumed; something that goes beyond text, images, and aural/oral traditions. I suggest that ‘movement’ is an important register in the mediation of intimacies by representing bodies as more ‘real’. This can be seen in how Muriel 93 talked about the ‘body’ and ‘actions’ of her niece in her Skyping experience (see Plate 6.2): My baby niece will be there too when we Skype. She will dance for everyone to see. My elder sister always asks her [the niece] to kiss everyone, and then she will go to the webcam and kiss the screen. So cute! Plate 6.2: Skype session on 6 March 2011 with mother (left), elder brother and his daughter (top right), elder sister asking for a kiss from the niece (bottom right), Muriel (bottom left) In this way, Skype can be considered, in the same way as Nigel Thrift has noted, to be one of “the kinds of technologies that we used in everyday life [that] has made it increasingly possible to track and trace movement and to frame the world as movement” (Merriman et al., 2012: 10). In Skype, the emotional proximity and feeling of togetherness shared by both Muriel and her family are heightened through bodily movements and actions, alongside ‘real-time’ textual and aural/oral 94 interactions. While bodies that appear on the computer screens are mediated bodies, this does not mean that they are any less ‘real’ or intimate for Muriel. Instead of viewing cyber-space/bodies and real-space/bodies as split entities, they are very much entangled and the boundaries blurred. Insofar that the use of Skype creates flexibility in how family members can come together into a common space/time, this does not mean that the standardized time of clocks is no longer relevant in the shaping of intimacies. On the contrary, it is precisely the rigidity of clock-time that constrains the schedule with which Muriel is able to Skype her family, thereby causing her to experience a conflict between ‘play time’ and ‘family time’. She recounted: We Skype every Sunday morning, I mean we try to because sometimes I oversleep, and this is the only time we can do it because of the time in Philippines, Vietnam and U.S. Sometimes I feel too tired or lazy to wake up early, you know, my friends and I will go out on Saturday nights till very late for drinks or what not. But I feel so guilty whenever that happens. Although ‘play time’ and ‘family time’ are not in direct clash with each other, the overlapping of these two sets of temporalities makes it difficult for Muriel to get ample rest and wake up in time for the weekly Skype session. Furthermore, this conflict is compounded by the emotional attachment and value Muriel places on ‘family time’ in light of her family history. She explained that her mother had initially moved to the United States to work so that she could support Muriel’s living expenses in Singapore. At a later stage, her father joined her to provide a supportive and companionate role. Muriel also recognized her father’s sacrifice, as he had to suffer from a dramatic decrease in his earnings with the work he was doing in the United States. In sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s (1997) study on the effects of ‘time 95 bind’ in women’s everyday life, she shows that emotional work is a key feature in the organization of work and family life. Here, I suggest that for young student migrants such as Muriel, a different spatiality is implicated in the emotional work required to manage family life – the spatiality of leisure and play. Apart from the doing of familial intimacy, Skype is also an important tool in the maintenance of Muriel’s romantic relationship with her boyfriend from the Netherlands. She highlighted that being able to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ her boyfriend is particularly important because they have only been together for nine months. This was the period of time the boyfriend stayed in Singapore during his exchange study in the university.13 Since then, he has returned to the Netherlands. Again, Skyping provides a space for Muriel to be co-present in ‘real-time’ with her boyfriend despite the difference in time and location. But in the context of this relationship, she also felt that the virtual co-presence enabled by Skype gives her an opportunity to make up for the ‘lost’ shared time in physical co-presence: To be able to spend time with him on Skype, talking to him and hearing his voice, it’s like we are making up for the amount of time that we could have spent with each other together, like physically together. Muriel’s experience of Skyping with both her family and boyfriend is very revealing of the ways in which audio-visual platforms can enhance communication between people; and create feelings of togetherness via the framing and apprehending of bodies, movements, and actions. However, while novel experiences of corporeal presence are produced vis-à-vis the creation of new (virtual) times and spaces, existing temporalities still operate in the everyday life. As shown in the narrative above, the coming together of these time-spaces can overlap and open up spaces of 13 This is correct as of the date of interview, 22 May 2011. 96 intimacy but also rub against each other to generate tensions and conflicts. 6.3.3 Facebook: an Online Transnational Diary In Collins’s (2009: 849) study on how personal homepages connect student migrants to their families and friends in South Korea, he notice that the practice of uploading/displaying photographs and exchanging messages on homepages “appears to constitute a form of online transnational diary that can be used to share information”. In my own research, the way in which student migrants talk about their use of Facebook14 also resembles this description. First and foremost, it must be clarified that student migrants’ main aim of using Facebook is not so much about maintaining existing social relationships than to expand their social networks by socializing (Madge et al., 2009). However, this is not to say that the migrants do not make use of it to connect with friends from their home countries. According to 20 year-old Steven, Facebook provides a convenient and quick way for him and his friends to update each other about their everyday lives from their multiple locations: My Indonesian friends, they are everywhere now, in different countries and cities, I also lost track sometimes. I say it’s the easiest and fastest way to update ourselves about each other’s lives. No need to arrange for a common time when all are available. We can just leave messages, or whoever is online then we will chat. They are working now, so they have different stories to tell, so it’s always interesting to see their updates, their photos. For Steven, it is not only difficult to keep track of all his friends’ whereabouts, but even more so to fix a “common time” across multiple people. Hence, a 14 Facebook is a well-known and popular social networking service and website in which users create personal profiles, connect with friends, exchange messages in ‘real-time’ or on profile pages, share photos, music, and a host of other services integrated into the system. 97 communication tool such as Skype is not a feasible option for student migrants to maintain their connections with friends. On the other hand, Facebook allows its users to view and reply to status updates, comments, photos, videos, and other information shared on their own and one another’s profiles in the form of an online archive containing a massive amount of personal information. In Beer and Burrows’ (2007) words, it is these “dynamic matrices of information through which people observe others, expand the network, make new ‘friends’, edit and update content, blog, remix, post, respond, share files, exhibit, tag and so on” that are especially useful for student migrants like Steven to maintain a level of connectivity with his multi-stranded friendship networks. Although the details posted on Facebook can be mundane and ordinary, for instance status updates like “I’m going to eat this and this. I am going to this place, that place” as cited by Steven, these little pieces of information accumulate into some sort of ‘thick description’ (c.f. Geertz, 1973) that contributes towards the building of familiarity and knowledge about each other. While there is a tendency to associate the usage of social networking sites with young people, which is not surprising given the embedded-ness of ICTs in young people’s daily lives (Livingstone, 2002; Henderson et al., 2002), a handful of my respondents told me that their parents have also started to set up their own profiles on Facebook. According to Holloway and Valentine (2003: 72-98), there are different strategies employed by both parents and children surrounding the surveillance of young people’s online activities. However, none of the student migrants whose parents have joined their Facebook networks expressed concern over parental surveillance, or the exposure of intimate information not meant for their eyes. This indifferent attitude towards the presence of parents in their Facebook networks both suggests and reflects their competence and resourcefulness in the use of social media 98 and ICT tools. As 22 year-old Malaysian Arch says: There is nothing to be scared of! Even if I add them on Facebook, I can still set the privacy settings. In fact, I group all my family into a category and give them limited access to my profile. The strategy adopted by Arch can also be found in the accounts of a few others. But as much as these young people prefer to have a sense of autonomy and privacy to their lives, there are also others such as Aulia and Muriel (see Sections 6.2 & 6.3.2) who prefer this way of connecting with their family members, whether they are the parents or siblings. For them, the presence of family on Facebook is a welcomed shift in that the work of doing transnational familial intimacy can potentially be made easier and faster. Nevertheless, it is also instructive to bear in mind that there are both beneficial and less optimistic impacts of Facebook on the quality of communication, nature of intimate affiliations, and emotional commitments which are not clear-cut and ripe for discussion at depth in this study. 6.4 Doing Intimacy II: the Persistence and Politics of ‘Visiting’ The emphasis of this chapter has hitherto been placed on how social interactions, subjectivities, and practices are mediated and reproduced through ICT tools. Indeed, socio-technical practices have enabled the re-embedding of spatiotemporally dis-embedded social relationships, thus facilitating the cultivation of intimacies across borders. Yet, Larsen et al. (2006) have also pointed out that despite the ease with which connections and ties can be maintained through virtual networks and meeting points, physical travel persists in the ways people overcome feelings of being-at-a-distance. Here, I share Mason’s (2004: 422, original emphasis) interest in asking what are some of the reasons that “require people physically to get together by 99 travelling across distances, and which can be conducted at a distance”. She argues that corporeal travel and proximity enable family and kinship narratives to be sustained by enabling people to ‘know’ each other through an ‘anticipation’ of visits and ‘doing things together’. This section takes ‘visiting’ as a form of embodied transnational practice that creates physical co-presence as one way in how people feel close to one another. As an embodied practice, there is labour involved in how “passages and projects” of physical travel “are co-ordinated in advance because people plan their activities and journeys” (Peters et al., 2010: 355). Apart from examining the work that goes into ‘visiting’, I also draw attention to how the spatialities of distance and proximity are co-implicated in the production of student migrants’ experiences of intimacy in home spaces. In particular, I argue that although shared physical time-spaces are central to the reason why student migrants regularly visit home, there are competing narratives that reveal a deeper politics to the practice of ‘visiting’. 6.4.1 The Reasons, Rhythms, and Work of Visiting Home One of the prominent observations about how my respondents talk about maintaining their relationship with the family is the subtle hint that the labour (and cost) of striving to be physically co-present with each other far exceeds the work put into forging virtual togetherness. Yet, all of my respondents make it a point to visit home twice a year during the term break in the months of June and December in order to spend time ‘in person’ with family. In particular, the Filipino respondents noted that December is the ‘logical’ time to go back home because that is the period which coincides with Christmas, a widely celebrated festive occasion in the Philippines. But this is not to suggest that the choice of timing in which they make 100 their trips back home is a freewheeling one. On the contrary, according to my respondents, the trips are highly structured through the institutional calendar of the universities. In Singapore, the educational institutions run on a bi-semester system where school breaks take place in June and December of the year, hence many student migrants view the term breaks as opportunities to visit. Apart from this normative routine of two visits per year, there are also some student migrants from the neighbouring Malaysia who make intermittent visits outside the term breaks, given the smaller geographical distance and ease of travel between Singapore and Malaysia. Johnny, a 25 year-old postgraduate student who left Kuala Lumpur for Singapore five years ago, recounted his routine for visiting home: I go back every 3 to 6 months. It depends on my schedule here, but it’s always during term break in June to August, and then the December one. But sometimes I also try to go back during long weekends, since it’s not that far away and takes about 5 hours by train, or only 1 hour by plane. But I usually take train because it’s cheaper. Although the regularity of student migrants’ visit is highly structured by the university’s timetable, the frequency of visiting is also contingent upon the geographical distance, time taken to travel, and the availability of affordable transportation. The latter set of factors opens up an opportunity for a different spatiotemporality to be performed vis-à-vis that of the university’s institutionalized regime. This allows student migrants to increase the frequency at which they can make trips back home. The work involved in ‘visiting’ is also more than negotiating the number of times to return home. Although student migrants revealed very few details about the preparation involved before they make the visit during interviews, this is something they do. I found evidence of these being mentioned across the diaries, weblogs, and 101 informal conversations intermittently. This observation is suggestive of how the process of ‘visiting’ home has become a routinized and banal practice, or in Butler’s (1990: 179) words, a set of “stylized repetition of acts”. This resonates with the point highlighted earlier in the beginning of this section that physical travels are like ‘passages’ where different acts come together to enable actual mobility to happen. These acts include planning for the trip, coordinating with family members and friends the dates of return, booking airplane tickets in advance so that the prices are lower (for those who require air travel to return home), or even the emotional anticipation surrounding the idea of going home. For instance, 21 year-old Vietnamese David shared that he finds the annual work of visiting tedious and timeconsuming: It is actually quite troublesome and takes up a lot of time. There are many things to do before flying back. I need to pack; buy the tickets earlier at least one or two months, if not last minute buy will be very expensive because it will be holiday period. Then I go back home I also want to meet my friends, so I usually will arrange with my close friends in Vietnam to make sure they are around, not in other cities. Coordination is an important aspect of the preparation involved in visiting home. Apart from coordinating the tasks that need to be performed prior to departing from Singapore, additional time and effort is also needed to make sure that the trip back to Vietnam enables David to meet up with both family and friends. Interestingly, David told me when we met in January 2012 that he had decided to stay in Singapore over the December holidays instead of going back to Vietnam: I found an internship which is very good for what I’m doing. Anyway, many of my friends told me they cannot go back also. Since I won’t see them, and I will be visiting my family this coming June, I decided to stay here and work. Save the time and earn some experience and money here. 102 From David’s narrative, it is clear that the “corporeal proximity” that makes “travel both necessary and desirable” (Urry, 2002: 255-256) is both fluid and negotiable. For some of the young people such as David, friendship plays an important role in shaping their planning and decision-making process. The knowledge that his friends would be absent during the visit in December, coupled with the presentation of an opportunity, has led to his re-evaluation of the situation at that point of time. For David, spending time in Singapore not only makes economical sense but also gives him a chance to build up his social capital in the form of work experience. Although David did not reveal what is it that is particularly motivating about spending time with friends back at home, 20 year-old Andrew’s narrative highlighted the desire to spend time on “fun things” and enjoying the time in Indonesia “to the fullest”: Usually I go back to hometown, I try to live it to the fullest, so I meet up with my very close friends. Then we can go out for the whole night, hang out at our usual spot. I really miss them, so when I go back I always meet up with them. Maybe in a sense all the fun things obviously friends can provide more fun than family. So if my friends are in Medan, there is extra motivation to go back. As Bowlby (2011: 612) writes, it is important for friends to “get together” as it helps to “facilitate embodied communication” and provides “an opportunity to share the embodied experience of a place or an event”. This is evident in Andrew’s description of how he spends his time whenever he returns to Indonesia for a visit. In other words, the doing of activities together is as much about the time spent together as the places the time is spent in. In making this interpretation, I am not saying that the family has lost its place within the forces that push and pull student migrants in 103 making decisions about visiting home. Rather, I am suggesting that a broader range of socio-spatialities is at play in configuring the process of negotiation by which student migrants imagine where the ‘best places’ to spend their time in are. 6.4.2 The Cultural Politics of Physical Co-Presence In this section, I problematize the idea that physical co-presence/proximity prompts people to go through the work of physically travelling and getting together. In the previous section, I established that student migrants view the opportunity to be able to spend time ‘in person’ with both families and friends as the significant motivation for them to visit home. Yet, physical co-presence is not always a motivation for visiting home. For some student migrants, the opportunity to lead distant lives away from home and in the ‘absence’ of their parents is key to how they can dodge from the obligations, responsibilities and surveillance typically associated with the family. They also feel a greater sense of freedom in terms of organizing their time-space geographies and activities according to personal preferences and desires. Here, I revisit 21 year-old Indonesian Vanessa’s experience (see Chapter 5.3.3) in order to flesh out how corporeal proximity need not necessarily reproduce social relations that have positive impacts on the well-being of young people. For Vanessa, ‘home’ in Indonesia takes on the meaning of excessive parental surveillance and restrictive time-space geography: I don’t want to go back Indonesia. If I go back, I cannot go out at night. At least here in Singapore I can go out at night because I usually meet my friends for dinners. But back in Indonesia, my parents won’t allow. They say it’s dangerous. Whenever Vanessa visits Indonesia, her parents pay additional attention to their 104 daughter’s time-space geographies because of the view that is it dangerous for young girls to stay out in the streets by themselves. Vanessa describes her parents as overly protective of her. While she admits that there is a degree of truth about the danger of hanging out at night, she also felt that the parents’ construction of ‘danger’ is clearly gendered. She explained that this is because the same set of restrictions is not placed on her younger brothers. In my second interview with Vanessa conducted on 30 November 2011, she confirmed this lack of freedom when recounting her recent trip back to Indonesia: When I go back also cannot do much because I cannot go out. My mum will not allow because she thinks it’s dangerous and unsafe. My brothers go home from school alone that kind, but maybe because I’m a girl, my mum don’t allow. Although Vanessa struggles with the alleged control exerted by the physical presence of her parents, it is instructive to point out that the story of increased parental surveillance on children is not unique to Vanessa. Many of my female respondents, regardless of nationalities, tell similar stories surrounding their parents’ heightened (or sometimes perceived as excessive) concern about them going out into the streets alone, especially at night. While some of them may feel that such a control over their personal geographies is uncalled for, others acknowledge that Singapore is indeed a safer place as compared to the cities they come from. However, it is not just the female respondents who face constraints in freedom to move; some of my male respondents also shared stories about being “trapped at home by parents” because of racial discrimination, or “color-coding”, as how 23 year-old Filipino Ivan articulates it. As Pain (2001) rightly pointed out, ‘fear’ is a complex construction arising from the differential intersection of age, gender, and race. For the male student migrants, 105 especially the Filipino and Indonesian Chinese, race takes centre-stage in the construction of fear in their everyday mobility back in home countries. To a large extent, these student migrants feel that being ‘away’ from the intimate gaze of their parents opens up a different set of time-spaces in which a greater range of mobilities can be performed. Such mobilities, no matter how banal they might appear to be, are often perceived as personal needs (Kellerman, 2006). These can be in the forms of going out at night, having the opportunity to make their own decisions on a daily basis, or simply negotiating their own spatio-temporal geographies in a manner that is unrestrained by parental police. In addition, although Urry (2002) has postulated that the physical co-presence/proximity achieved by the practice of ‘visiting’ makes traveling desirable for people, Vanessa’s story presents an alternative reading of the relationship between physical co-presence and visiting. 6.5 Concluding Comments This chapter has attended to the intimate lives of student migrants as produced in and through the spaces of intimacy that stretch across ‘home’ and Singapore. I began by presenting a student migrant biography to illustrate the entanglement of different people, practices, and emotional interactions in the making and re-making of transnational intimacy. Through this biography, I identified two significant ways in which student migrants negotiate distant and proximate lives across borders – the mobilization of information and communication technologies to create mediated connection, communication and presence; and the continuing practice of ‘visiting’ through corporeal travelling and ‘getting together’. In examining these two forms of transnational practice, I have shown that while connections and ties that bind are socially reproduced over space and time, the ways in which these relationships take 106 on meanings and operate vis-à-vis one another are in a constant flux. For instance, familial ties can take on a ‘routinized’ effect while spending time with friends and romantic partners are important sources of play and leisure; the exigency of doing embodied talk and communication is increasingly negated by the rhythm and ease with which mediated connections and proximities can be maintained; and the changing priorities accorded to physical distance and proximity are subjected to how individual experiences are shaped across different places and times. A significant part of this chapter has gone into the unpacking of how the ‘transnational family’ stands in relation to other forms of intimacies, and the role of friendship appears in various contexts as a challenge to the stability of the family. On the one hand, this sort of narrative may reflect the argument that modernity has restructured the spaces of intimacy in a way that that the family no longer represents the central organizing force of social relations (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1992). On the other hand, it will be too quick to assume that this reflects the weakening role of the ‘familial’ in the realms of intimacy. Firstly, this is because student migrants continue to visit their home countries on a regular basis in order to do ‘family time’ in the physical co-presence of one another (despite the competing narratives shown in Section 6.4.2). Secondly, the sense that familial relations are ‘more stable’ and hence require less attention, as shown in the narratives of Aulia and Ivan (see Sections 6.2 and 6.3.1 respectively), suggest that the ‘family’ continues to occupy the centre-stage in many student migrants’ lives. Therefore, instead of viewing these social relationships as stable entities rubbing against each other in order to become ‘intimate’, they are relational and mutually constitutive in their production. I suggest that transnational intimacies are sustained in and through the coordination and management of different social relationships, within their specific modes of spatio- 107 temporal (re)production. Student migrants are reflexive individuals who respond to the demands of space, time and other contingencies to ensure continuity and coherence in social reproduction – whether in the form of subjective well-being, personal identities, or people and relationships that matter to them. 108 7.1 Telling Student Migrant Stories Year 2012. I am now concluding my research on student migration, and this is a ‘revival’ of Andy’s story… Andy is now 23 years old. Over the last 2 years, I have had the opportunity to converse with him twice. Andy was able to find his current job within a week of his return with a bank located at Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He did not face any difficulty in re-connecting with his old friends and he went on to make new friends. He was exposed to new opportunities such as modelling for an online blog shop and travelling abroad for work trips. Through the updates and photographs on his Facebook, it can be said that Andy’s post-education life has been a lively journey. It also did not suggest a materialization of the insecurities he had felt about ‘returning’ prior to his departure from Singapore. Andy’s story has continued to unfold as one positive account of the ongoing geographies in which these young people’s lives are reproduced over time. Of course, there will also be narratives about discontent, disenchantment, or even regrets that deviate from Andy’s journey. But the point I want to get at is an explicit acknowledgement that stories of student migration continue to unfold over time, even as they become interpreted and conceptualized through other subject positions. And these are the kinds of geographies that I have not been able to write into this thesis. Hence as much as I have repeatedly proclaim the need to underline student migrants’ ‘voices’ as key to accessing the heart of education migration, I am forced to admit that my representation of them is necessarily partial and incomplete. Perhaps, in Crang’s (2002: 141) words, we ultimately cannot escape from the temporariness of representation where the “subjects of our work reappear as ghosts – haunting it – or as ruins and relics”. But this is not to say that these stories are mere representations; they are 109 represented “to gesture, orient, and to move” (Cameron, 2012: forthcoming). This thesis has gone straight to the heart of student migration and reflected on the contours of intimacy that make up student experiences. In placing young people at the heart of globalizing education spaces, we learn about the intimate accounts of student mobilities, transnational lives, and interpersonal relationships through their own interpretations and reflections. The thesis has strived to listen to, become acquainted with, and present the ‘voices’ of student migrants through a storyline surrounding the impulses, logics and strategies that underpin their experiences of migration and education. In a way, it is similar to Stewart’s (2007: 4) idea of how stories can be assembled to “fashion some form of address”, in my case, for a more critical appreciation of the geographies of student migration. In doing so, two main interventions are made. 7.2 Critical Interventions My first intervention takes a geographical approach that brings together ‘time’ and ‘space’ in analyzing the production of young people’s lives in the spaces of education migration. I have shown that by incorporating a temporal dimension to examine the geographies of student migration, we can start to conceptualize the flows, rhythms, and connections occurring at the ‘everyday’ transnational terrains of education migration in a way which critically acknowledges that global, institutional and personal geographies are always already mapped through temporality “as time moving fast or slow, a planned or unimaginable future, and time lost and re-gained” (Worth, 2009: 1057), as well as manifested “in the assembling of particular materials and bodies in time and space [which] expresses the crystallization of structural forces” (Jeffrey, 2010: 500). In addition, it should also be recognized that these 110 different articulations of time, as what I have called the trajectories, geometries, and textures of time in Chapter 2, are relationally and multiply implicated in student migrant lives. As migration scholar Cwerner (2001: 32) writes, apart from the acknowledgement that migration is a spatial process, [a] focus on the temporal experience of migrants can illuminate the nature of migration itself, its twists and turns, meanings and ambivalence, and the way that, in a diversity of ways, it dis-places and re-embeds people and communities around the world. (Cwerner, 2001: 32) Indeed, the stories I have assembled about student migration give evidence to this dynamic and contingent picture of student migration. In Chapter 5, I showed the student migrants’ experiences of transition and mobility as deeply implicated in the spatio-temporal idioms and practices surrounding ‘change and continuity’, ‘catching up and slowing down’, and ‘futurity’. These narratives not only reveal a complex ordering of their everyday life, they also reflect the formation of logics and calculus that are mobilized by these young people to weave a coherent story of their migration, even though they are sometimes ambivalent and tentative. Chapter 6, attended to the intimate lives of student migrants as produced in and through the cross-border spaces of intimacy that take into account a broader spectrum of social relations that they have to negotiate – family, friends and lovers. By examining the use of ICTs and practice of visiting as two distinct ways student migrants maintain social ties, I argued that the geographies of intimacy and interpersonal relationships are constantly made and re-made through changing socio-spatial and temporal demands in the student lives. My second intervention is a methodological one. Like Harding (1987: 3), I view methodology as “a theory and analysis of how research does or should 111 proceed”. By adding student narratives into this rendering of the globalizing education spaces, I have first and foremost tackled the problematic tendency of many existing studies to portray the globalization of education spaces as a disembodied phenomenon. More specifically, I was concerned with the question of how to bring the praxis of my methodological techniques to illustrate the situated and constructed nature of spatio-temporal geographies? I brought my conceptual framing of the timespace reproduction of student migrants’ everyday life to work by deploying three main methods – biographical interviews, solicited diaries and weblogs, and online chat – as discussed in Chapter 4. These techniques complemented (or ‘triangulated’) each other by providing different spatio-temporal contexts from which students can articulate their intimate experiences, as well as become tools to apprehend different kinds of spatio-temporal stories. For instance, journals and weblogs provide a timespace from which the students can articulate their feelings and emotions that might become too sensitive to talk about face-to-face; and they also help to document the mundane and often routinized rhythms of the students’ daily activities that get omitted in interviews. But as I have also pointed out, it is difficult to implement solicited diaries as a method because it demands a consistency and commitment from respondents that inevitably gets disrupted as their lives become saturated with other priorities and timetables. Therefore, maintaining contact and chatting with the students informally on Facebook generates an opportunity for me to ‘track’ the student lives in a more longitudinal manner than what the diaries have offered. 7.3 Education Mobilities, Social Reproduction, and Time-Space Against the backdrop of increasing emphasis on formal education, the ever tightening relationship between academic credentials and labour market, and global 112 competition for human capital valued for their ‘talent’, ‘brain’ and ‘skills’, education has emerged as a dominant channel through which young people move from one place to another. Physical and spatial mobility is key to many young people’s educational project in that it offers an opportunity for them to re-orientate their lives and to realize their aspirations. However, as Bourdieu (1990) rightly pointed out, this process is not a straightforward one and requires particular dispositions and habits to be acquired. In using a spatio-temporal perspective to analyze student migration, the regulatory role of time is brought to the foreground. For instance, we witnessed how some student migrants felt pressurized by the ‘fast-paced’ life in Singapore while others re-learn the value of time/speed and cultivate new habits and practices in order ‘catch up’ with the global inflation of academic credentials and competitiveness of labour markets. But at the same time, there is also evidence that some of these young people actively seek ways to disrupt the ‘tyranny of time’ by tapping into friendship support networks, thereby inventing new ways of experiencing time in a more positive manner (such as leisure and play time) (Chapters 5.3.2 & 5.3.3). Throughout both empirical chapters, I have demonstrated that educational mobilities, and the diverse transnational connectivities that they are refracted through, are highly differentiated and constantly (re)made through the changing configurations of time and space. In reflecting on the heterogeneity of the stories told by student migrants, I found it difficult to argue with certainty for any particular structural tendency in the social reproduction of ‘difference’ and ‘identity’. Nevertheless, I have shown that these subject positions do matter in producing highly specific topographies for individual student migrants. For instance, motivations to ‘go away’ are differentiated by positive and negative experiences of time and space associated with class, age and sexual orientation (across Chapter 5); and the desire for physical 113 co-presence with families ‘back home’ is complicated by perceptions of gendered constraints and the discovery of time-spaces outside parental surveillance (Chapter 6.4.2). Indeed, student migrant stories are often referenced and told through different elements of their identity and experience occurring at specific temporal and spatial locations. Finally, this thesis has also opened up a discussion on the intimate relationship between emotions and time. Despite the growing attention on the emotional geographies of migration (Parreñas, 2001; Huang and Yeoh, 2007; Wise and Velayutham, 2006), very little has been documented on how these intimate feelings and affects are negotiated vis-à-vis different ways of sensing time. As I have highlighted in the two empirical chapters, emotions play an important (albeit mundane) role in shaping the subjective dimension of temporal experience, and viceversa. For instance, the feeling of guilt from missing out on ‘family time’ can affect how one prioritizes individual time-table and activities between family and friends (Chapter 6.3.2); and the acceleration of time causes anxieties regarding ‘losing out’ to peers in school (Chapter 5.3.2). At the same time, emotional work – the management of emotions – becomes an important form of labour that student migrants have to perform and negotiate, especially in an attempt to maintain social relationships across different spatial locations. I have shown how some student migrants find it emotionally disturbing and tiring to oscillate between Singapore and return visits home; and that a great amount of emotional work is involved in mediating long distance intimacies through the constant negotiation and careful micro-management of time. As education takes on a different character, one that stretches across space and time especially in face of internationalization and transnationalization, there is an 114 increasing need to attend to the diverse experiences that emerge from these shifting time-spaces and their wide-ranging forms of power geometries. 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(1987) The language of time: toward a semiotics of temporality, The Sociological Quarterly, 28, 3, 343-356. 130 [...]... co-presence, and coordinating household arrangements have already begun to change; and these shifting practices both reflect and constitute the spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of intimate relationships 23 2.3.4 The Social (Re )production of Everyday Life In centering students at the heart of the everyday, quotidian, and transnational geographies of education migration, geographers have expounded on the. .. Student Migration Brooks and Waters (2011: 114) argue that there is a need “for an overtly geographical perspective on international student mobility” This means that international student migration has to be viewed as a process that is spatially differentiated and uneven; that the movement and mobility of some students is relationally implicated in the non-movement and immobility of others; and that students... photographs of family members) and dissipate as migrant time- spaces become saturated with the labour of work; or how happiness can expand time while guilt can prolong it All these senses and sensibilities of time can influence the experiences, practices, and even the actual mobilities of migrants as their notions of ‘visit’ and ‘return’ are influenced in the process 2.4.4 Time, Space, and Geographies of Student. .. understanding of transnational student migration through exploring these spatialities and temporalities that make up the everyday life 33 3.1 Introduction This chapter provides a contextual framing to the rationale and strategies involved in the making of Singapore’s higher education landscape Specifically, it focuses on how the nation-state harnesses education as a pathway to overcome the limits of resources... repetition, as the interweaving of concrete times, but it always implies a relation of time to space or place” It is this underscoring of the differences in repetition, relationality across multiple ‘times’, and the deep implications between time and space that will form the basis for me to examine student migration as an arena for the making, maintenance, and resistance of the routinizing effects of globalizing... interlocking grids of relations, technologies and strategies aimed at the control of time and colonization of the future For instance in Ennew’s (1994: 126) critique of the “timetabling effect” of the “curricularization”, or “scholarization”, of children’s lives, she argues the ‘tyranny of time has meant that young people are plunged into the rhythms of cultural ordering across different scales and regimes... Taken together, these studies suggest that even if migration appears to be one of the many events occurring in one’s lifecourse, the idea that there is a ‘right time to move (Metcalfe, 2006) reflects the assumptions that people make about their lives in the past, present, and future Whether these assumptions are figments of the mind or products of material relations, a close examination of the specific... emotional, and the non-representational to draw attention to the sociality and materiality of everyday life These include social relations and interactions, as well as the material cultures that constitute the social and cultural worlds that trans-migrants inhabit Here, the body is seen as a central site in which the styles of gender, race, nationality, sexuality and other differences are enacted, but at the. .. aspirations Secondly, as suggested by Katz’s (2004: x) conceptualization that “social reproduction embodies the whole jumble of cultural forms and practices that constitute and create everyday life and the meanings by which people understand themselves in the world”, it is important to understand these body-works and labour as central to the social (re )production of student migrants’ everyday lives Hitherto,... processes of migration through eating out in places that create an intimate sense of proximity to ‘home’ and feelings of familiarity In order to more fully understand the practices, meanings, and feelings that emerge from student migrants’ inhabitance of space and place, I suggest that the conceptual lens of transnationalism be critically inflected through the perspective that 11 student migrants inhabit the