Copyrighl Irish Joumal of Sociology ISSN 0791 6035 ..... Copyright of Irish Journal of Sociology is the property of Manchester University Press and its content ...
© Copyrighl Irish Joumal of Sociology ISSN 0791 6035 Vol. 19.2,2011.pp. 1-7
THEMED ARTICLES
Editor's introduction: What does it mean to say sociology is going transnational? BREDA GRAY Department of Sociology, University of Limerick
The transnational tum in the social sciences involves an important intervention in re-fVaming the study of contemporary social phenomena so that society is not always equated with the territorial nation-state. Recent scholarship in the social sciences is replete with conceptualisations that move towards more capacious spatio-temporal frames. For example, Manuel Castells (2009) emphasises the global reach of ^network society^ in which the 'space of flows' is replacing the 'space of place' and Anthony Giddens' (1990) work on globalisation identifies 'time-space distanciation' as lifting social relations from territorialised place and stretching them around the globe. Central to these theories is the view that social institutions and relations are rescaling in new configurations of local and global which are seen as mutually constitutive. The concept-metaphor of '^mobilities' is proposed by John Urry (2007) and others to capture the idea that cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information and ideas are circulating with increasing velocity and producing significant effects for all aspects of social life and subjectivity. The scale and speed of movement around the world and the diversity of mobility systems now in play are seen as giving rise to an emergent 'mobility complex' that forces the individual to exercise choice in everyday life (Urry 2007). Indeed, the 'mobilities paradigm' makes mobility a central focus of how the modem world might be best analysed (Hannam et al. 2006). Another example is Ulrick Beck's 'cosmopolitanisation thesis' which attempts to overcome what he calls 'methodological nationalism', or the takenfor-granted nation-state fVame of reference in the social sciences. Methodological nationalism is seen as working to affirm 'the political and legal grammar of national boundaries' (Beck 2007: 691), thus preventing engagement with 'a new dialectic of global and local questions that... can only be properly posed, debated and resolved in a transnational fVamework' (Beck 2002: 41). Beck observes that 'decisions taken within one territorial state significantly alter the situations of people living beyond the borders of that state. The same is tme of the decisions of companies, transnational enterprises, the communication
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and information flows of the intemet, the speculators of casino capitalism, supranational organizations, global risks, transnational public spheres etc.' (2007: 691 ). For Beck, a cosmopolitan outlook moves beyond the exclusivity of nation-state horizons via a consciousness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalisation and the potential for unity through difference. The analytical purchase of Transnational Studies is addressed in the interview with Peggy Levitt that follows this introduction. However, it is worth noting here that the transnational in Transnational Studies works as a lens rather than as a theoretical framework. In this sense, transnational approaches are more humble than those of globalisation or mobilities (Hannertz 2008). They allow for 'a creative interaction between different philosophies of knowledge - from positivism to postmodemism and from interpretivism to constructivism' (Khagram and Levitt 2008:12). The emphasis on flows is subservient in this literature to issues of simultaneous engagement or connection which produce changes in modes of living, identification processes and social institutions. Of course, as Levitt notes, transnationalism is not new, but the simultaneity and materiality that it signals are seen as taking new forms when technologically mediated flows enable the interplay of ideas, politics and culture across the local and global and the semi-itihabitance of multiple places at the same time. The recent economic 'crisis' in Ireland and globally is a reminder that capitalism does not work in terms of distinct national economies or within a progressive linear time-frame. In fact, the transnational workings of contemporary capitalism (even in crisis) propel a deepening, if uneven, integration of all countries into globalised systems of production, consumption and finance. As states attempt to hamess hypermobile transnational capital and other transnational resources in their own interests, those interests are necessarily shaped by and embedded in transnational processes and interdependencies. As such, state responses to the cunent 'crisis' involve forced negotiations with transnational institutions including, for example, the European Central Bank and the Intemational Monetary Fund, which focus on how optimum conditions might be created for re-integration into the global capitalist system (Robinson 2007). At the same time, these conditions of transnational interdependencies give rise to new assertions of specifically national interests and chauvinisms. Transnational circuits of accumulation, govemance and state-craft involve interdependencies and consequences that require critical sociological analyses. But so too do the recent revolutionary events in North Africa and in the Middle East where virtual connectedness and mobilisation via social network sites moved onto the streets partly in response to the local economic consequences of transnationally circulating neoliberalism. These protests and demonstrations, forged within an embryonic transnational public sphere, feed into recent critiques of Habermas's theory of the public sphere as tacitly assuming 'the frame of a bounded political community with its own territorial state' (Fraser 2007: 8). Nancy Fraser argues that the transnational flows of public political discourse
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and social movements in the twenty-first century are not matched by legitimate institutionalised transnational public powers which can be held accountable. However, the demonstrations and protests, increasingly known as the Arab Spring, have addressed states, supranational and transnational organisations, simultaneously calling all to account. In the case of the EU, which might be seen as an example of the transnational public power that Fraser calls for, she actually identifies the opposite problem, i.e. the absence of a 'genuinely European-wide public-sphere: [so that] debate is still national' (Fraser 2010). A good example of how the EU, a self-defined transnational institution and project, has worked to entrench nation-state public spheres is its response to the financial and Eurozone crises. As Fintan O'Toole argues, the EU response relies 'entirely on the cmdest form of nationalism'. With regard to Ireland's role, he notes that [t]he basic proposition is that 'the Irish' borrowed loads of money and 'the Irish' must pay it back National identity trumps everything else ... There's no such thing anymore as Irish money or German money or British money. There's just money, moving around the world in vast quantities ... It [the EU] can't revert to a crude, essentialist notion of national identity, while maintaining its own identity as a collective transnational project. (O'Toole 2011)
The stickiness of national identity is uneven across contexts. It is variously played down and reasserted in the workings of neoliberal global capitalism and is often subsumed into a form of evolutionary civilisationist thinking (Malik 2009) in EU immigration debates where the transnational 'idea of the Muslim' works to reaffirm a transnational Christian white Europe (Goldberg 2009; see Titley in this issue). Global fiows of capital, finance and knowledge alongside national and supranational migration policies overwhelmingly shape the directions and intensities of migration. Although connectivity and social networks between sending and receiving contexts have always been central to the study of migration, many migration scholars have tumed to transnationalism as a frame for rethinking the practices, experiences and subjectivities of migrants and subsequent generations as they relate to the space of flows (Portes et al. 1999; Levitt 2001). Much of this research examines how different categories of migrants either voluntarily or involuntarily adopt transnational livelihood strategies to live their lives in relation to myriad fiows and multiple place-based connections. Over the past twenty years, transnational politics have been most hotly debated in feminist scholarship. In fact, the relationship of gender to the 'scattered hegemonies' of global capitalism and patriarchal nationalisms and other regimes of power continues to be a matter of political and scholarly debate today (Grewal and Kaplan 1994: 17; see Reilly in this issue). Transnational feminist solidarity takes place around agendas such as women's human rights, anti-militarism, gendered immigration policies, equality, religious oppression, family law and reproductive rights and has been facilitated by the mobility of
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feminists and feminist ideas and politics afforded by some aspects of globalisation. However, gendered state citizenship regimes, as exemplified by the 2004 citizenship referendum in Ireland, are reminders of the ways in which some women's mobilities continue to be constrained by racist and nationalist notions of family and motherhood that dictate, for example, which mothers can give birth to Irish citizens. Despite the 'suspect citizen' status imposed on many immigrant mothers in Ireland today, migrant mothers adopt sophisticated transnational family strategies in making lives for themselves and their children in Ireland while maintaining attachments and relationships with family in their country of origin and elsewhere (see Ni Chatháin, in this issue). More generally, migrant women's networks are active in transforming the conditions of membership and belonging both within Ireland and transnationally (De Tona and Lentin 2011). The goal of this collection is to stage a conversation between those working on diverse topics from different theoretical perspectives but all of whom attend to the interdependencies of the global, local, regional and national and their changing dynamics. Although the transnational lens adopted in each case has a distinct focus, together they open up new questions about the study of social categories and processes - Ni Chatháin in relation to citizenship/membership, Titley on multicultural crisis, Reilly on feminism and human rights, Yeates on care labour and Gray and O'Sullivan Lago on the Catholic Church. Opening the collection, Siobhán Ni Chatháin examines the local and transnational negotiations of citizenship/membership by mothers of Irish citizens in the aftermath of the 2004 citizenship referendum in Ireland. While Waldinger and Fitzgerald suggest that 'those without citizenship live their lives without a sense of home never mind a transnational sense of home' (2004: 1188), Ni Chatháin identifies forms of home-making through everyday local and transnational practices that can change the horizons of membership for both mothers and children. Focusing on reproductive life as a central if much neglected aspect of transnational social science. Ni Chatháin argues that the transnational membership practices of these mothers are shaped by local state integration policies and associated requirements and duties rather than rights. Moreover, greater local integration is correlated in their accounts with expanded transnational practices of belonging. Caroline H. Bledsoe uses the term 'anchor babies' to refer to children who, by virtue of their birth on US soil, became the means by which their families staked a future claim on legal US residence (2004: 98). In the case of Ireland, Ni Chatháin describes a more ambiguous and contested local legislative context in which the mothers of citizen children stake claims to future belonging. The term 'transnational' problematises 'a purely locational politics of globallocal or center-periphery in favor of... the lines cutting across them' (Grewal and Kaplan 1994: 13). Such narrative lines of multicultural crisis are foregrounded in Gavan Titley's article which examines the 2009 Swiss referendum on minaret
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constmction as a heuristic devise in developing his argument. For Titley, the 'sticky grammar' of transnationalism is a 'pronounced culturalism'. Global events such as 9/11 and the murder of Theo Van Gogh are identified as creating opportunities for the transnational circulation of multicultural discontent which is in tum mediated and translated locally. This circulation of a transnationalised culture and indeed civilisationalism proceeds to link the domestic and the global in accretions of meaning. The transnational circulation of such 'recited tmths', instead of opening up or undoing nationalised and purist notions of life, culture and membership, actually have the effect of anchoring and reproducing these. Emphasising the affective impact of the idea of multiculturalism, Titley traces the circulation of diverse aversions to multiculturalism which in tum create the conditions for intensified politics of integration locally. Specifically, he focuses on how political agendas and transnationally networked media combine to mediate this crisis via techniques of linking, reciting and indexing. Through these techniques 'events there are infused with performative possibilities here'. The transnational infrastmcture of the UN and its human rights framework have facilitated transnational solidarity in the women's movement since the 1990s. Building on a commitment to 'critically (re)interpreting universal human rights, as part of the fabric of emancipatory forms of transnational feminism', Niamh Reilly's article engages closely with 'progressive' critics of feminist engagement with human rights. Addressing in tum 'anti-universalist' and 'praxis-oriented' critics, Reilly calls for a focus on 'doing women's human rights' as revelatory of the ways in which hegemonic pattems are deconstmcted in locally generated practice that can also change the global agenda. Such a focus enables Reilly to show how women's human rights activism, especially via the recognition of Violence Against Women (VAW) as a global human rights issue, involves an arrival at 'common differences' through emancipatory dialogic practice. As such, Reilly holds on to the universal as an effective transnational political devise that can be claimed or given content from 'previously excluded positions' in ways that can tmly destabilise tenacious power stmctures and relations. In her contribution, Nicola Yeates examines the historical circulation of care labour as provided by religious members of the Catholic Church. As such, her account both counters the inclination to locate care work within secular contexts and the tendency towards 'presentism' in the scholarship on transnationalism. Moreover, by centring religious contexts, ideas and practices of care, the notion of care itself is expanded here to include spiritual care. In unexpected ways, Yeates' review of the contribution of Irish women religious to the emergence of 'global care chains' supports postsecular arguments regarding the mutual constitution of the religious and secular. The redistribution of resources from poorer to richer countries in the transnational flows of care is addressed via an analysis of colonial and postcolonial relations. However, this discussion is nuanced by a focus on the multilayered and multidirectional transfers of ideas and care
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labour. Yeates's article provides historical evidence that challenges conventional nation-state based accounts of the modem welfare state and reveals the ways in which such inward-looking approaches obscure the transnational circulation ideas, practices and labour of care. Yeates' article highlights the multi-institutional and transnational foundations of the welfare state and ideas of care labour via her account of the transnationalised circulations of care labour organised by the Catholic Church. For their part, Breda Gray and Ria O'Sullivan Lago address the Catholic Church as a transnational institution via a study of migrant chaplains located within the Catholic Church in Ireland. As transnational mediators of religious ritual and practice between sending and receiving contexts for their migrant flock, the accounts of migrant chaplains offer unique insights into how this institution functions transnationally. A key finding is the uneven and contradictory positioning of migrant chaplains whose experiences suggest an unequal exchange of ideas, practices and resources across national borders. In order to theorise these unequal relations. Gray and O'Sullivan Lago bring Bourdieu's theoretical framework to bear on their analysis. Here the transnational religious field, as manifest in the Catholic Church, is seen as an arena of stmggle over the distribution of power often articulated here as between national churches as well as in relation to universal and national church goals. The effect is to produce sometimes conflicting and sometimes complementary codes of membership that in tum shape competition for both symbolic power and religious capital. So while Ulrick Beck suggests that universal Christianity '[b]oth as an image of humanity and as a mission ... elevates frontier-transcending to the status of a programme' (Beck 2010: 53), Gray and O'Sullivan Lago's findings suggest that although the 'doxa' of universal Catholicism enables the transcending of national boundaries in some circumstances, national and cultural boundaries are tenacious in shaping the lives of migrant chaplains in Ireland today. Transnational Studies, like many of the other conceptual approaches adopted in the social sciences in recent years, has been critiqued for a tendency towards conceptual conflation and ovemse, technological determinism, finding transnationalism everywhere and lack of clarity regarding trans what? (Vertovec 2009). This approach has also been accused of implicitly perpetuating an '"old versus new" dichotomous view of transportation and communication technology', a danger that extends to many sociological approaches to social change (Fitzgerald 2008: 166). For all its shortcomings, as Peggy Levitt suggests in the following interview, a conversation on transnationalism is under way with the interventions of many scholars enabling constant refinement. While acknowledging its limitations, Levitt characterises transnationalism as a kind of 'holding term' that enables this conversation to take place as social scientists struggle towards more adequate conceptual and ftaming devises.
Editor 's introduction
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