The Asia-Pacific in the Age of Transnational Mobility

Description

A study of the challenges of community and identity in the evolving transnational migrant and ethnographic landscapes of the Asia Pacific in the era of social media.

The growing mobility of people within and into the Asia Pacific region has created environments of increasing diversity as nations become hosts to both permanent and temporary multicultural societies. How do we begin to gauge the impact of mobility and multiculturalism on individuals and groups in this diverse region today? The authors of The Asia Pacific in the Age of Transnational Mobility turn to social media as a tool of inquiry to map how mobile subjects and minorities articulate their sense of community and identity. The authors see social media as a platform that allows users to document and express their individual and collective identities, sometimes in restrictive communication environments, while providing a sense of belonging and agency. They present original empirical work that attempts to help readers understand how mobile subjects who circulate in the Asia Pacific create a sense of community for themselves and articulate their ethnic, ideological and national identities.

List of figures and tables; Acknowledgements; Notes on Contributors; Introduction; Section 1: Social Media, Mobility, Transience and Transnational Relationships; 1. Female Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong: A Case Study of Advocacy through Facebook and the Story of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih; 2. Media and Mobilities in Australia: A Case Study of Southeast Asian International Students’ Media Use for Well-Being; 3. Connecting and Re-Connecting with Vietnam: Migration, Vietnamese Overseas Communities and Social Media; 4. Liking It, Not Loving It: International Students in Singapore and Their Navigation of Everyday Life in Transience; Section 2: Social Media and Existing Multicultural Relationships in a Controlled Communication Environment.; 5. Is ‘Allah Just for Muslims’?: Religion, Indigenization and Boundaries in Malaysia; 6. Ethnic Minorities in the Multi-Ethnic Heritage in Melaka: Reconstructing Dutch Eurasian and Chitty Melaka Identites through Facebook; 7. Nostalgia and Memory: Remembering the Malayan Communist Revolution in the Online Age; 8. New and Traditional Media in Malaysia: Conflicting Choices for Seeking Useful and Trusted Information in Everyday Life; Index.

Sujets

• Communication studies
• Southeast Asia
• Social sciences

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783085941
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Asia-Pacific in the Age of Transnational Mobility
Anthem Southeast Asian Studies
In tandem with its increasing strategic and market importance amidst the dramatic growth of the neighbouring economies of both China and India, Southeast Asia’s own political, social and intellectual trajectories have challenged not only the expectations of policymakers and analysts alike, but also raised important new questions for academia. Not surprisingly, recent years have seen a dramatic growth in scholarship devoted to the region. The Anthem Southeast Asian Studies series is committed to offering a global audience the best of this new generation of original scholarship drawn from across the full range of academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Uniformly subject to rigorous editorial and production standards, our books are directed to academic libraries as well as to researchers, university students and other sophisticated audiences.

Series Editor
Michael W. Charney – School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK

Editorial Board
Barbara Andaya – University of Hawaii, USA
Anne Booth – School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK
Elizabeth Collins – Ohio University, USA
Kate Crosby – King’s College London, UK
Christopher Goscha – Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Eva-Lotta Hedman – London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK
Hong Liu – Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Akio Takahashi – Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, Japan
Kerry Ward – Rice University, USA
The Asia-Pacific in the Age of Transnational Mobility
The Search for Community and Identity on and through Social Media
Edited by Catherine Gomes
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2016
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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© 2016 Catherine Gomes editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gomes, Catherine Jean, editor. | Title: The Asia-Pacific in the age of transnational mobility: the search for community and identity on and through social media / edited by Catherine Gomes. Description: London: Anthem Press, 2016. | Series: Anthem Southeast Asian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016042402| ISBN 9781783085927 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 1783085924 (hardback: paper) Subjects: LCSH: Online social networks–Asia–Case studies. | Online social networks–Pacific Area–Case studies. | Social media–Asia–Case studies. | Social media–Pacific Area–Case studies. | Transnationalism–Social aspects–Asia–Case studies. | Transnationalism–Social aspects–Pacific Area–Case studies. Classification: LCC HM742 .A85 2016 | DDC 302.30285095–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042402

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-592-7 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-592-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Catherine Gomes
Part 1. SOCIAL MEDIA, MOBILITY, TRANSIENCE AND TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS
Chapter 1. Female Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong: A Case Study of Advocacy through Facebook and the Story of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih
Panizza Allmark and Irfan Wahyudi
Chapter 2. Media and Mobilities in Australia: A Case Study of Southeast Asian International Students’ Media Use for Well-Being
Joshua Wong and Larissa Hjorth
Chapter 3. Connecting and Reconnecting with Vietnam: Migration, Vietnamese Overseas Communities and Social Media
Cate Gribble and Ly Thi Tran
Chapter 4. Liking It, Not Loving It: International Students in Singapore and Their Navigation of Everyday Life in Transience
Catherine Gomes
Part 2. SOCIAL MEDIA AND EXISTING MULTICULTURAL RELATIONSHIPS IN A CONTROLLED COMMUNICATION ENVIRONMENT
Chapter 5. Is ‘Allah Just for Muslims’? Religion, Indigenization and Boundaries in Malaysia
Susan Leong
Chapter 6. Ethnic Minorities and Multi-ethnic Heritage in Melaka: Reconstructing Dutch Eurasian and Chitty Melaka Identities through Facebook
Loo Hong Chuang and Floris Müller
Chapter 7. Nostalgia and Memory: Remembering the Malayan Communist Revolution in the Online Age
Jason Sze Chieh Ng
Chapter 8. New and Traditional Media in Malaysia: Conflicting Choices for Seeking Useful and Trusted Information in Everyday Life
Sandra Hanchard
Notes on Contributors
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURES
2.1 Picture diary of Karen, female Malaysian undergraduate, showing websites and apps she uses
5.1 Protester outside Malaysia’s Federal Court
8.1 Comparison between usefulness and trustworthiness of media sources
TABLES
4.1 Demographics of participating international students studying in Singapore
4.2 Social media use of participating international students studying in Singapore
8.1 Percentage of users who identified media types as ‘useful’ sources of information
8.2 Percentage of users who identified media types as ‘trusted’ sources of information
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the Australian Research Council for providing me with the time and space to work on this project while I was a Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship (DECRA) awardee in 2013–2016. This book is an outcome of the research I did during the fellowship. I am also appreciative of the support Tej P. S. Sood, Katy Miller, Brian Stone, Vincent Rajan and the production team from Anthem Press provided throughout the duration of this project. I am also grateful for the supportive comments and helpful feedback from the three anonymous reviewers of this collection. Their insights help lift this book to pioneering levels. Thanks also go out to Jonathan Tan, Cirila P. Limpangog and Katie Grichting who helped with advice on various chapters in this collection. I am incredibly indebted to Drew Roberts for the invaluable eagle-eyed editorial and proofreading work.
I would like to especially thank Panizza Allmark, Irfan Wahyudi, Larissa Hjorth, Joshua Wong, Cate Gribble, Ly Thi Tran, Susan Leong, Loo Hong-Chuang, Floris Müller, Jason Sze Chieh Ng and Sandra Harchard, who worked tirelessly to produce cutting-edge research for this collection.
No writing and editorial project would be accomplished without the patience of the closest of those around us. Thank you, Andrew Newlands, for putting up with my constant typing, and thank you, little Sally, for keeping me company whenever I was lost in a sea of words on my screen.
INTRODUCTION
Catherine Gomes
In his graphic memoir The Kampong Boy (1979), Mohammad Noor Khalid – otherwise better known as Lat, Malaysia’s most popular cartoonist – features his experiences growing up in a Malay-Muslim kampong (village) in the rural state of Perak on the Peninsular Malaysia in the 1950s. Lat’s memoir is a whimsical ride through the misadventures of a young Muslim boy as he gets into trouble at school, plays with friends in the forbidden tin mines near his kampong , and faces circumcision as part of his religious obligation. Besides being highly entertaining and humorous, Lat’s memoir also provides us with a nostalgic account of the strong ties that exist within a kampong community, where people minded each other’s business and provided communal support when needed. The Kampong Boy highlights the significance that community has in determining an individual’s everyday life. The impact of the kampong communal identity on Lat the protagonist and Lat the author is also present in the sequels, Town Boy (1981) and Kampong Boy: Yesterday and Today (1993). Community, and identifying with community, are very much part of a person’s life but there are limits to this, too, as Graham Day articulates in his book Community and Everyday Life :

[Community] refers to those things which people have in common, which bind them together, and give them a sense of belonging with one another. […] But as soon as one tries to specify more firmly what these common bonds are, how they arise, and how they can be sustained, the problems begin. We would not be social beings if we did not feel some sense of identification and solidarity with others around us and share in their experiences and expectations; yet there are limits to how far we can empathize with every one of them, or feel obligated towards them, or look to them for succour and support. As humans, we are boundary-drawing animals, and we erect barriers between ourselv