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This chapter explores how Colombian and Dominican children of immigrants living in New York City negotiate multiple identities, selves, cultures, and histories within transnational social fields. Children of immigrants grow up in the midst of multiple cultures and juggle an array of cultural norms, values, and expectations of their parents’ culture and those of mainstream “American” culture, while they maintain transnational ties to the home country of their parents. This chapter is based on a mixed-methods secondary analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data collected on Dominican and Colombian young adult children of immigrants (ages 18 to 32) living in New York City by the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York study (ISGMNY) in 1998–2000 (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, & Waters, 2004). The author argues that children of immigrants navigate multiple identities as a result of their experiences of growing up within transnational social fields shaped by their parents’ home country and the United States. Second, children of immigrants embrace and feel at ease with the complexity and ambiguity inherent in their border-crossing lives. Third, children of immigrants construct and manage their personal and social identities by comparing and contrasting their multiple cultural repertoires without juxtaposing them as oppositional dichotomies. Using a transnational perspective allows us to approach the study of migration and its impact on people’s lives with a lens of continuity and recognizes migration as a family project and as a process of transition and change where migrants maintain connection between their pasts, presents, and futures through subsequent generations.

Young people’s sense of being Palestinian and belonging to a national community was produced through everyday practices that unfolded across transnational social fields, constituting an informal citizenship education. These identifications were bound up with an independence movement, co-constructing a sense of self, a notion of a people, and a relationship with an imagined national community. This chapter illustrates the range of practices through which this sense of belonging was produced. For example, after the Oslo Accords, many mothers moved back to Palestine in order to afford the children a cultural, linguistic, religious, and national education. In the U.S., most families lived in a tight-knit Palestinian community, routinely spoke Arabic and socialized together, worked to send remittances to family members in the Middle East, watched Arabic media, and participated in political advocacy for justice and peace in Palestine. Through these communal practices, Palestinian American youth developed a sense of belonging to a Palestinian national imaginary. The meaning and parameters of this imagined community were constructed in relation to three themes: connection to a particular land experienced as an intimate, moral space; a (contested) notion of cultural authenticity; and a sense of Palestinian identity as inextricably linked with suffering and sacrifice.

The international Red Cross movement emerged at a period of rising nationalism in politics and culture, and yet the movement spread across borders with considerable ease. This chapter examines how the cultural structures and the organizational logics of the Red Cross to the international disseminated between the 1860s to the 1890s. It shows that processes of cultural production and of translation of meanings across national contexts mediated the transition from social movement to a broad social field. In particular, the first large-scale achievement of the movement - the Geneva Convention - afforded numerous parties in different nations with the language to problematize and criticize belligerents’ conduct, to classify specific populations as neutral or vulnerable, and to formalize the role of volunteer humanitarians. The chapter demonstrates that the growth of the transnational humanitarian field was facilitated by the resonance of its meaning structures with patriotic sentiments that were prevalent across late-nineteenth-century Europe and beyond.

Although there is ongoing popular and academic interest in the ways globalization shapes contemporary social life, scholars know little about transnational organizations or how they influence members’ everyday lives and experiences on the ground. Even less is known about these processes within transnational religious organizations. This chapter explores the relationships between US and Congolese Catholic sisters who belong to the transnational Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, asking how members work together across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and economic development. Drawing on transnational social field and transnational network approaches, it considers the extent to which members orient their lives to both local and transnational communities. Social scientists have noted that the “center of gravity” within the Catholic Church is shifting from Europe and North America to Asia, Africa, and South America. In the wake of the Vatican II renewal process among religious orders, the number of Catholic sisters globally began a steep and rapid decline. Today Africa is one of only two continents in the world where women’s religious vocations continue to grow. This chapter considers what these transformations mean from the standpoint of women in the Global South.

Chapter 6 focuses on the connections between IT and the middle class, exploring processes of class consolidation and reshuffling that have been set in motion by the advent of the software outsourcing industry. Viewing ‘middle-classness’ as a meaningful social identity, it explores several dimensions of class restructuring in post-liberalization India, especially the reworking of the intersections between class, caste, gender, and work. The fracturing of the middle class has produced diverse dissonances and disjunctures, which frame the mobility strategies of actors and contestations over social value. After describing the social composition of the IT workforce, the chapter examines the strategies of class distinction deployed by IT professionals, who form a visible fraction of the ‘new middle class’. It also traces the diverse lives of ‘Indian culture’ and middle class identity as mobile IT professionals pursue their projects of self-development and social mobility in a transnational social field.

Chapter 2 is the first theoretical chapter developing the contours of the theory of socio-spatial positionality and how it applies to the four types of diaspora entrepreneurs—Broker, Local, Distant, and Reserved. They operate in transnational social fields, simultaneously embedded in different global contexts. The chapter builds on diaspora-, host-land-, and home-land-centric theories and further integrates three streams of thought that have not been in conversation with one another. First, it reimagines transnational social fields from a socio-spatial positionality perspective, considering earlier work in International Political Sociology. Secondly, it draws on scholarship on fragile and weak states in IR, especially on de facto states, and discusses their place in the international system and the rationales through which they engage diasporas abroad. Third, the chapter consults relational theories in IR, demonstrating that durable interactions among actors in international politics form structures spanning borders. These theories are useful to think about configurations of socio-spatial linkages of the four types of diaspora entrepreneurs, at the core of the typology. The chapter then lays out the socio-spatial positionality approach and its major features—relativity, power, fluidity, and perception—while delving deeper into the individual level of analysis. The four types of diaspora entrepreneurs have different socio-spatial positionalities at the intersection of various global contexts that empower them differently to pursue homeland-oriented goals. The chapter ends with a discussion about structure and agency in diaspora mobilizations.

This chapter and the following Chapter 5 are interconnected as they both discuss Albanian diaspora mobilizations. This chapter lays out political dynamics in the Albanian transnational social field and presents the profiles of the four types of diaspora entrepreneurs that operate within it. Incomplete nation-building and state-building processes have left Albanians scattered throughout the Balkans since the early twentieth century, where they currently live as either majorities or minorities. Weak state capacities of Kosovo alongside those of adjacent fragile states, as well as problematic treatment of Albanians where they are minorities, most notably North Macedonia and Serbia, have created dynamics conducive for Albanians to emigrate from the region and mobilize in the diaspora. Kosovo’s independence was a goal not simply for Albanians from Kosovo but was widespread among other diaspora Albanians until the 2008 independence. Albanians socialized with each other in the diaspora, irrespective of their original homeland, thereby forging bonds and seeking Kosovo’s statehood through a transnational social field perspective. More recently, another field-wide idea has emerged, of an ‘Albanian space’ formed through the EU integration of Balkan states with Albanian populations. This chapter presents data on migration in the Albanian field, in the Balkans and globally, and specifies the individual profiles of Albanian diaspora entrepreneurs.