The Bourdieusian Toolbox
This concept, central to Pierre Bourdieu’s work, is defined as a systematic structure of durable and transposable dispositions that frame an individual's perceptions and actions.
What is habitus?
Proposed as a new umbrella term, this captures the movement of international migrants across more than one overseas destination with significant time spent in each.
What are multinational migrations?
During COVID-19, this occurred when unemployed migrants were forced to rely on financial support from families back home instead of sending money to them.
What is remittance (or dependency) reversal?
This group is defined as well-travelled and fluent in multiple cultures, yet they hold "low status" due to the restrictive visa instruments they must use to travel.
Who are the cosmopolitan working-class?
This term describes a "tormented habitus" bearing contradictions, often occurring when a migrant moves into a new field and becomes a "fish out of water".
What is habitus cleft?
These are "border regions" or "sites of international transport" where internal, international, and multinational migrants converge, stay, and move on.
What are migration hubs?
This was the specific name for the nationwide lockdown period in Singapore (April to June 2020) that confined many migrants to dormitories.
What was the "circuit breaker"?
Proposed by Abdelmalek Sayad, this term describes the experience of migrants who are not in the homeland but not fully "in" the host country.
What is double absence?
This specific phenomenon refers to the "notable time lag" that occurs between a migrant encountering a new field and the establishment of a modified habitus.
What is the hysteresis effect?
This pattern involves a multi-stage journey where migrants often use intermediate countries as "stepping stones" to accrue capital for their final destination.
What is stepwise migration?
Scholar Christian Lund uses this two-word phrase to describe "open moments" of rupture where opportunities and risks multiply and structural scaffolding is reconfigured.
What are "open moments"?
This term describes migrants who are low-status workers overseas but simultaneously upwardly mobile in their home countries because of their earnings.
What is contradictory class mobility?
This type of habitus allows transnational agents to strategically shift between different national fields and "comfortably manipulate" various forms of capital.
What is a chameleon habitus (or in-between habitus)?
This dimension of migration infrastructure includes state apparatuses, documentation procedures, and licensing that condition or facilitate mobility.
What is regulatory infrastructure
These structures influence how safe and settled an individual feels in a location and can instigate onward migration due to disenchantment or anxiety.
What are security or insecurity structures?
This embodied dimension of habitus includes an individual’s accent, dialect, posture, and taste, all of which bear the traces of their origin.
What is bodily hexis?