Mobilities

ISSN: 1745-0101 (Print) 1745-011X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmob20

Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility, Connection,

Emotion

David Conradson & Deirdre Mckay

To cite this article: David Conradson & Deirdre Mckay (2007) Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility,
Connection, Emotion, Mobilities, 2:2, 167-174, DOI: 10.1080/17450100701381524

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Published online: 05 Jul 2007.

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Mobilities
Vol. 2, No. 2, 167–174, July 2007

Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility,

Connection, Emotion

DAVID CONRADSON* & DEIRDRE MCKAY**

*School of Geography, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK, **Department of Human Geography,
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia

KEY WORDS: subjectivity, transnational migration, mobility, translocality, emotion, affect

When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things
stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it
feels, and it feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic
connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately
summons the other? (Massumi, 2002, p.1)

This special issue is concerned with the complex forms of subjectivity and feeling that
emerge through geographical mobility. The mobility of particular interest is that
which spans national borders, specifically in the sense of transnational migration,
with its dynamics of departure, circulation and extended social networks. In
examining the subjectivities that emerge through such movement, our starting point
is the now relatively widespread understanding of the self as a relational
achievement. From this perspective who we are derives in part from the multiple
connections we have to other people, events and things, whether these are
geographically close or distant, located in the present or past. This constellation
of others may influence us in diverse ways, acting via physical encounter and somatic
internalisation, in response to the power of images and narratives, and through the
operation of memory and desire. The everyday mannerisms that characterise a
person – their rhythms of speech, bodily comportment and taste preferences – are
testament to such influences, while also highlighting the complex interplay between
inheritance and environment. We can also observe that some events and relational
connections have enduring impacts upon the self, such as the resonance of
educational opportunity or perhaps the grief of a personal loss. Others touch us only
fleetingly, however, and are quickly absorbed in the passing flow of life, seemingly
forgotten. Selfhood is thus always a hybrid achievement, emerging out of a diverse

Correspondence Address: David Conradson, School of Geography, University of Southampton,

Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK. Email: d.conradson@soton.ac.uk

1745-0101 Print/1745-011X Online/07/020167–08 # 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17450100701381524
168 D. Conradson & D. McKay

range of connections, only a fraction of which are consciously registered at any one
time.
Many of the events and communities that shape our senses of self are connected to
particular places. It is not difficult to think of work, friendship and family in these
spatialised terms, for each of these forms of sociality is typically associated with a
series of identifiable locations. As geographers have long recognised, place thus plays
a major role in the ongoing constitution of identity (Bondi et al., 2002; Cresswell,
2004; Pile & Thrift, 1995). In turn, because places generally represent relatively stable
constellations of social, material and natural entities, our movement between settings
is also a significant influence upon subjectivity. Geographical mobility inevitably
changes the relations we have with emplaced configurations of people and events,
while at the same time bringing us into contact with new and different ecologies of
place (Conradson, 2005). For transnational migrants, the relational effects of
mobility may be particularly significant. A person might choose, for example, to
exchange a sense of community and reciprocity in a village setting for the economic
opportunity yet relative anonymity of a major city. In the process, their selves will be
shaped by new relations in the destination setting, as well as through the distance
obtained from those that characterise the sending context. Mobility thus provides
opportunities for new forms of subjectivity and emotion to emerge, whether broadly
positive or negative (Sheller & Urry, 2006).
In thinking through the dynamics of mobile subjectivities, we find much of value
in Appadurai’s (1996) notion of translocality. Appadurai coined the term trans-
locality to describe the ways in which emplaced communities become extended, via
the geographical mobility of their inhabitants, across particular sending and
destination contexts (see also Appadurai, 1995). Social communities that were once
relatively localised become internationalised. A translocality is thus a place whose
social architecture and relational topologies have been refigured on a transnational
basis (cf. Faist, 2000; Vertovec, 1999). At the same time, the term recognises that
localities continue to be important as sources of meaning and identity for mobile
subjects; at the level of human experience, the distinctiveness of place is retained
rather than eroded by global migration flows.
Extending this idea, we employ the term translocal subjectivities to describe the
multiply-located senses of self amongst those who inhabit transnational social fields.
There are three elements worth elucidating here. First, we understand translocal
subjectivities as emerging through both geographical mobility and multiple forms of
ongoing emplacement. In contrast to accounts of unproblematic movement by
somehow disembodied subjects, the notion of translocal subjectivity takes seriously
the fidelity and commitment that most transnational migrants continue to feel
towards family, friends and community in particular locations. At the same time, it
recognises that the maintenance of these affiliations may be emotionally and
materially intensive (Larsen et al., 2006). Transnational networks can be harnessed
to transmit money, objects, expressions of love and support from abroad, but the
typical transnational migrant will also want to physically return to particular places.
As Urry (2000) has noted, such meetings have become a key problematic of highly
mobile lives. How do we achieve physical co-presence at important social occasions
such as weddings, births and funerals, when they are spread across disparate
locations? And how might we manage the complex economies of obligation and guilt
 Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility, Connection, Emotion 169

that accompany attendance or non-attendance at such events? Negotiating such

quandaries is central to the performance of translocal subjectivity.
A second element of our conception of translocal subjectivity is that the formation
of migrant selfhood is usually more closely related to localities within nations than to
nation-states.1 So while a person may be considered ‘Australian’ in certain social
negotiations or interactions, and indeed understand themselves as such when in
foreign settings, their principal loci of relational affiliation are likely to be specific
people and places within Australia rather than to a more abstract construction of
nationhood. National citizenship, we would argue, is typically a second-order
framing of identity that comes to the fore when dealing with immigration officials,
employers and relative strangers in international settings. A Filipina nurse working in
the United Kingdom, for example, is likely to continue to identify with and maintain
emotional affiliations to family and friends in her home village. While she will be a
‘Filipina’ to her UK co-workers and patients, among her nursing colleagues from the
Philippines she will more likely be known as a person from a particular locality,
named by village and province. At the level of everyday experience, we believe it thus
makes as much sense to think of trans-local as trans-national subjectivities.
Thirdly, the emotional and affective states that accompany mobility are a key
dimension of translocal subjectivities. Alongside research on the economic
dimensions of skilled migration, feminist scholarship has highlighted the
significant emotional labour that typically underpins households characterised
by international mobility (e.g. Chamberlain & Leydesdorff, 2004; Dwyer 2002;
Waters, 2006; Ley & Kobayashi, 2005; Walton-Roberts & Pratt, 2005; Yeoh et al.,
2005). This research has underlined the multiple ways in which long-distance
social networks are also cultural and emotional fields, constructed through
processes of consociality, evaluation and constraint, as part of what Lee and
LiPuma (2002) have described as a ‘culture of circulation’. Although not a major
focus, a similar interest in the ‘felt’ dimensions of mobility is discernible in some
earlier migration studies work. Fielding (1992) writes of the excitement and
challenges of international mobility, for instance, as well as its potential for
inducing disturbing senses of rupture, loss and even failure.
Our approach to the felt dimensions of translocal subjectivities is informed by
these arguments, while also drawing on recent research into the geographies and
anthropology of emotions. Scholars in the field of emotional geographies have
sought to explicate the complex range of feelings that emerge as a consequence of
dwelling within and movement through places (Davidson et al., 2005; Anderson &
Smith, 2001). The happiness, sadness, frustration, excitement and ambivalence
that accompany emplacement and mobility are central to social life, shaping our
experiences of the world and relations with others. Recent anthropological
research on emotion has covered related territory, while also highlighting the
complex intersections between emotion and culture in different settings
(Boellstorff & Linquist, 2004; Good, 2004). Strong debate has arisen over the
relative merits of the universalist versus culturally specific approaches to emotion
in this work (see Lutz & White, 1986; Leavitt, 1996; Milton, 2005). Although
emotion has often been elided in materialist or quantitative analyses of social life,
these geographical and anthropological studies provide strong arguments for its
central importance.
170 D. Conradson & D. McKay

The notion of affect, and its relation to emotion, is a further important element
of these discussions (e.g. Thrift, 2004; Probyn, 2004). One understanding of affect,
informed by the work of Deleuze and Spinoza, is as an embodied, physiological
state that emerges through relational encounter (Thrift, 2004; Massumi, 2002). In
this view, social interaction and movement are generators of particular affects,
whether through engagements with the environment or other people. Affect can
also be understood as a form of embodied cognition or thinking, a processual
engagement with the world that is ‘often indirect and non-reflective, but [that
constitutes] thinking all the same’ (Thrift, 2004, p.60). Adopting a genetic–
physiological perspective, some scholars suggest we can identify anger, fear,
sadness, disgust, enjoyment, and interest as affects common to all cultures (see
Thrift, 2004, p.64). Emotions are then often understood as the conscious
perception of particular affects, with the naming and interpretation of such
experiences mediated by specific vocabularies and cultural formations (Leavitt,
1996, p.515). In Anglo-American contexts, a knot in one’s stomach may thus be
felt as nervousness, while a lightness of heart as happiness. The English language
terms ‘rage’, ‘shame’, ‘melancholy’ and ‘elation’ point to particular bodily affects,
while at the same time reflecting specific social and cultural interpretations of
them (see Probyn, 2004).
If affect emerges through embodied encounter, it is not difficult to see how
transnational mobility may be implicated in the generation of particular affective
states, whether broadly positive or negative. For scholars of transnationalism, this
raises the challenge of producing intercultural and cross-cultural accounts of
emotion and intimacy. An important foundational step for an intercultural
theorisation of affect, as appropriate to a consideration of translocal subjectivity,
is to recognise the potential variation in local interpretations of affective states (see
McKay, 2005; Tolia-Kelly, 2006). This is a point made by linguist Anna Wierzbicka
(2004), who cautions us against underestimating the role of language in shaping
emotional experience and its interpretation. She offers the example of grief,
contrasting the ‘Anglo’ cultural perspective, which some theorists have presumed to
be universal, with the complexities of this emotion in other languages and cultural
settings. Wierzbicka maintains that different vocabularies of emotion can make a
difference to people’s emotional experiences (2004, p.579), and warns against
assuming that another culture’s categories of experience are adequately described by
the emotion-words available in the English lexicon (2004, p.80).

The Feeling of Movement: Four Explorations of Translocal Subjectivity

Working with this range of theoretical insights, this special issue brings together four
explorations of translocal subjectivities. The papers span a diverse range of empirical
contexts, moving from Southeast Asia to Saudi Arabia to London. In each of the papers,
the balance between mobility and emplacement varies, with different dynamics of
emotion and affect accordingly emerging.
We start in southeast Asia, where Deirdre McKay examines the experiences of
Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong and their relations with family members in
the Philippines. Here mobility provides various material opportunities but at the
same time is accompanied by complex dynamics of obligation, longing and
 Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility, Connection, Emotion 171

connection. The life of the Filipina migrant worker in Hong Kong is thus shaped by
an emotional geography that interweaves economic success ‘abroad’ with intimacies
at home. This translocal sphere of feelings emerges through mobility and, in turn,
produces distinctive translocal subjectivities for migrants and their families.
McKay’s paper demonstrates how emotion offers us a lens through which to
theorise such subjectivities, moving beyond the narratives of exploitation that
characterise ‘care chains’ accounts of Filipino migration. By considering emotions
cross-culturally, the analysis also challenges the ethnocentric assumptions of nuclear
family forms and universal emotions that underpin some work on care chains and
dependency-driven models of migration.
Huang and Yeoh pick up these themes of obligation, shame and inequalities of
power in the context of Singapore, where they examine relations between domestic
workers and their employers. Here mobility has been undertaken to access a world of
financial and material opportunity, to move beyond the confines of village life. But
in home environments where there is little surveillance of the behaviour of domestic
employers, a striking form of power imbalance emerges. The authors discuss a
number of cases in which domestic maids have been abused, their bodies subject to
various forms of harm and then subsequent legal dispute. While domestic work is
commonly understood to be a trade-off between personal freedoms and economic
gain, these findings signal a dramatic rupture of this implicit contract.
Continuing this focus on female migrant workers, Silvey then explores the
experiences of Indonesian women employed in Saudi Arabia. Her paper highlights
the emotional vocabularies and religious constructs that are deployed in efforts to
mobilise and direct their transnational labour migration. She identifies fear, disgust
and love as key emotions in the women’s experience as migrant workers, and then
uses these emotions to enter into a discussion of the broader geopolitical relations
linking Indonesia with Saudi Arabia. In examining the interplay between
transnational mobility and religion, the paper offers rich insights into the influence
of Islamic belief upon the conduct and experiences of migrant Indonesian women.
Moving to the United Kingdom, Conradson and Latham explore the various
attractions that London holds for skilled migrants from New Zealand. Within the
New Zealand tradition of the ‘Overseas Experience’, travel to the United Kingdom
has long been valued as much for its self-enhancement possibilities as for its career
progression potential. Alongside the emphasis traditionally placed upon labour
market dynamics in accounts of skilled migration, a way of thinking through the
value placed upon these experiential dimensions of a city’s attractiveness is therefore
needed. Recent work on notions of affect in human geography is mobilised to this
end, focusing in particular on the affective possibilities that migrants may perceive
to be associated with new destination settings. In bringing theorisations of affect to
bear on a particular form of transnational migration, the paper contributes to
broader debates regarding the more than economic dimensions of mobile
subjectivities.

Conclusion
In assembling this selection of papers, our principal aim has been to extend existing
work on transnational mobility through a focus on the felt, embodied states that
172 D. Conradson & D. McKay

accompany such movement. Far from being a secondary or unimportant dimension

of mobility, we argue that affect and emotion are central aspects of international
migration. The papers demonstrate the importance of self-understanding and
personhood for migrants, while also highlighting how dynamics of feeling impinge
upon where we belong and with whom. In our view, research into mobile
subjectivities has much to gain from a closer consideration of the dynamics of
affect and emotional connection.
In different ways, the papers also highlight the connections between the
economic and emotional realms. In Huang and Yeoh’s work, for instance, it is
impossible to fully understand the abuse that some domestic workers experience
without recourse to their position in a regional transnational labour market.
While the dynamics of global capitalism are highly significant for transnational
subjects, the analyses developed by McKay and by Conradson and Latham also
demonstrate the importance of less obviously economic forms of valuation in
migrant connections to family, friends and particular places. The emotional and
affective realm should thus not be considered secondary to economic life, or as
somehow divorced from the material realities of production and consumption. As
the papers demonstrate, feelings may act to enhance and secure particular forms
of transnational labour mobility, whilst also disrupting or undermining capitalist
economic logic.
To research transnational emotions also raises the challenge of how to
adequately understand and write about the affective dynamics of people who
inhabit different cultures than our own. Too many discussions of migrants in
populist and some academic literature have universalised English-language or
western categories of emotion in order to make arguments about experiences of
exploitation, alienation and marginalisation. But what if a person’s cultural frame
of reference is entirely different? The papers here show how cultural, social,
religious and gender-based differences influence the coding of affects as emotions,
and demonstrate that such differences matter in important ways for the
performance of translocal subjectivities.

Acknowledgements
The editors are grateful to Sandra Davenport at the Australian National University
for copyediting the papers and to Pennie Drinkall for editorial assistance and
guidance.

Notes
1. This extension of Appadurai’s notion of translocality is similar to the argument that Velayutham
and Wise (2005) make in their work on translocal villages, where they privilege the local as the
primary domain of experience with the national following as a second-order consideration.

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