Australian Geographer, Vol. 39, No.

1,
pp. 17, March 2008

Guest Editorial*Comparative Analyses of

Transnationalism: a geographic contribution
to the field

KEVIN DUNN, University of New South Wales, Australia

Transnationalism
During the 1990s the term ‘transnationalism’ gained extensive currency as a way of
re-conceptualising migration and the incorporation of immigrants. The term rose
to prominence in the work of Portes and his collaborators (1999), but also from Ip
et al. (1997), Ong (1999), Pries (2001), Glick Schiller et al. (1992) and Basch et al.
(1994). There has latterly been a considerable contribution from geographers
including some in the UK (Crang et al. 2003), Canada (Ley & Kobayashi 2005;
Walton-Roberts 2005; Waters 2003), Singapore (Yeoh & Willis 2005) as well as in
Australia and New Zealand (Conradson & Latham 2005; Dunn 2005; Friesen et al.
2005; Voigt-Graf 2005).
The term ‘transnationalism’ has been defined in several related ways. It is
sometimes used to refer to specific activities associated with immigrant behaviours,
including short-term visits to countries of origin, remittances of monies, corre-
spondence, as well as the consumption of cultural products from societies of origin
and involvement in migrant community events (Basch et al. 1994). These are
mirrored by return flows that have been rather less studied, including return
remittances and visits by friends and relatives to the places immigrants now call
home. Transnationalism has also come to invoke a sense of the relations between
people and places that are geographically distant from one another (Vertovec 1999,
p. 447). More subtly, some have referred to what they call ‘transnationalism fields’,
which are forms of association and community that are multinational (Glick
Schiller et al. 1992, p. 2; Pries 2001). Finally, the term has also been used to
describe the senses of identity (subjectivity), allegiance and belonging of immi-
grants and their descendants. These identities can be dual (the hyphenated
identity) and sometimes multiple. In some circumstances people assert that they
are thoroughly international (a world citizen). Alternatively, a migrant may identify
solely with their country of origin, and this extra-national identification could itself
be considered a transnational subjectivity (see this issue; Zevallos). All of the above
aspects of transnationalism (flows, relations, social fields and identities) are
examined in the papers in this special issue.
Most of the papers in this issue engage with transnational acts, including visits
and communication, and they reflect on the links between such flows and

ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/08/010001-07 # 2008 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc.
DOI: 10.1080/00049180701877394
2 Guest Editorial

subjectivities (Dunn & Ip; Friesen; McAuliffe; Zevallos), whereas other papers in
this issue focus on the politics of subjectivity. This includes an examination of the
limits on migrants’ ability to identify as Australian, and speculations on the impacts
of particular policy settings and the implications for belonging (Clark; Zevallos).
The experiences of racism, and exposure to hierarchies of citizenship (in which
some cultural groups are assumed to be more Australian than others), demonstrate
that migrants’ sense of identity and level of belonging are not entirely of their own
choosing. Belonging is fundamentally tempered by the everyday cultural hier-
archies that pertain in a city or nation. Sense of belonging to Australia, and to the
Australian national space, is a fundamental indication of a person’s substantive
citizenship. Many of the authors in this issue reflect on the substantive implications
of transnationalism for citizenship, and on the future of national citizenship in a
transnational age (see Soysal 2000, 2001).
The concept of transnationalism allows a transcendence of traditional under-
standings about immigration. One traditional understanding of immigration
assumes a one-off unidirectional form of permanent mobility from a sending
society to a reception society, and that settlement would be permanent or at least of
a long duration. A second traditional expectation is that the immigrants’ origin
culture would dissipate as they take on the culture of the host national society
(Dunn 2005). The policy frameworks for this cultural change operationalised the
concept of assimilation and, later, that of integration. But international immigra-
tion has been shown to be strongly connected to other forms of ongoing mobility,
and there is not a straightforward process of cultural loss and cultural assimilation.
Transnationalism is a paradigmatic term that facilitates researchers to maintain a
holistic interest in all the mobilities and other links (such as communication) which
immigrants and their descendants undertake, and upon the multiple allegiances
and senses of belonging that they experience.

Comparative analyses
A series of commentators in the field of transnationalism research have identified or
advocated the need for comparative assessments of transnationalism. They have
suggested the utility of comparing similar groups in different countries (Portes et al.
1999, p. 233; Waldinger & Fitzgerald 2004, pp. 11912). However, only a handful
of scholars have demonstrated the insight that can be gained from such multi-
national analyses (McAuliffe 2005; Voigt-Graf 2002). The latter have tended to be
comparisons of similar cultural groups in different cities, often in different
countries. Others have reflected on the insights that are gained from research
with different cultural groups in the same spaces (Hiebert & Ley 2003, p. 13;
Vertovec 1999, p. 456; Yeoh & Willis 2005). Also, a handful of commentators have
argued the need for a more ‘translocal’ approach, in which the local emplacements
and attachments are more strongly analysed, rather than national-level attachments
and interactions (Velayutham & Wise 2005, p. 40). This could include the analysis
of ‘global localities’, such as neighbourhoods of migrant settlement, an example
being Friesen et al.’s (2005, pp. 3868) study of the New Zealand suburb of
Sandringham. In this research the emphasis might be upon how transnationalism
has impacted upon places, rather than the usual focus on how transnationalism has
affected the migrant. Broadly, this special issue responds to the above calls and
brings together five articles that use comparative analyses of transnationalism.
 Guest Editorial 3

There has been a tradition of comparative analyses within geography (Mikesell

1960). Comparative analyses had somewhat of a heyday in the 1950s and 1960s,
especially among historical geographers who were unpacking the processes and
impacts of colonisation. Favoured comparisons in Western geography included
regions within North America, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand (see
Meinig 1959; Price 1949). Comparative analyses draw attention to both spatial
variation and place. Comparisons can reveal how social and physical processes
impact unevenly across the planet. In addition, these variations demand an interest
in the nature of the places being compared. Historical geographer Marvin Mikesell
made reference to both of these benefits in his review of comparative research on
frontierward settlement in settler nations:
The aim of comparative study is to build a foundation for generalization
that extends beyond the particular conditions found in a given area at a
given time. . . . In addition to these general considerations there is much to
be gained from awareness of the social and economic conditions prevalent
on a given frontier. (Mikesell 1960, pp. 656)
Comparative analyses are a crucible in which structures (including social, economic
and migration processes) as well as context are both within the research foci. This,
then, is a fundamental advantage of comparative analyses.
Since the origins of migration theory there has been an interest in comparative
analyses. In the most abstract form this included the development of systems theory
and the establishment of ‘laws’ on migration processes and drivers (Lee 1966;
Ravenstein 1885; Zelinsky 1971). In recent decades there has been a modest
though very insightful body of comparative scholarship on immigration impacts in
Australia, Canada, and sometimes New Zealand. These works have examined
similarities and variations in immigration and settlement policy (Adelman et al.
1994; Hawkins 1991; Hiebert et al. 2003; Richmond & Zubrzycki 1980),
immigrant integration within labour markets (Richardson & Lester 2004) and
immigrant settlement patterns (Johnston et al. 2003, 2008; Forrest et al. 2003). A
series of collaborative works in the 1990s specifically contrasted immigration
impacts in the cities of Vancouver and Sydney, including settlement patterns
(Burnley & Hiebert 2001), multicultural policy at the municipal levels (Edgington
et al. 2001), media representations of migrants and migrant locales (Dunn &
Mahtani 2001), and the experiences of migrant women (Creese & Dowling 2001).
These works revealed the important effects of labour and housing markets and the
different ways of ‘managing cultural diversity’. The different cultural compositions
of cities and the varied settlement patterns of immigrants strongly influence
migrant fortunes and community relations. These comparative analyses draw
attention to the structural circumstances that help explain variations in the fortunes
of immigrants and their immediate descendants. It also has the benefit of providing
a much less insular report on the cultural and economic fabric of a nation, putting
experiences and circumstances into an international perspective, providing a sense
for better policy practice, and benchmarks for improved integration and commu-
nity relations.
The most obvious angst in comparative analyses has concerned the match
between analogues. Clearly, some care ought be taken in the selection of cases.
Most often, critics of comparative analyses draw attention to the lack of objective
standards of comparability, or to contrasts in data or indicators used for each case.
4 Guest Editorial

One way to address this concern is to aspire to using very similar data or
methodology in each place or social field. But this is not always possible, nor
necessarily desirable. Methodologies and approaches need to be tailored to suit a
given research site or transnational field. For example, in their analyses of racism in
Sydney and Vancouver, geographers in each of those cities decided that it was
essential to alter the wording of the questions used in their telephone surveys. The
operationalising of the same indicators (recognition of racism, concern about
cultural diversity, etc.) required wording that was comprehensible to the local
setting and vernacular (Hiebert et al. 2003). Mikesell (1960, p. 74) came to the
view that a detailed understanding of the context of both cases in a comparative
analysis was a superior priority to using precisely similar data. Knowledge of
context is shorthand for an in-depth understanding of the place and people found
within that setting (Mikesell 1960, p. 63). In transnational research this would
require a detailed understanding of the people within the transnational spaces being
examined or a detailed understanding of the history, context and composition of
the two groups being compared. Clearly, there have to be epistemological trade-offs
in comparative research. Some of the papers in this special issue are able to use very
similar data and indicators across groups and places. Others, while lacking that
ability, for good reasons, demonstrate a strong and detailed knowledge of the local
circumstances of each of their analogues. It is also interesting to note the
methodological diversity of the papers in this issue. The authors have analysed
data from large telephone surveys, from official statistics of arrivals and departures,
from stock-takes of community media, in-depth interviews as well as ethnographic
observations.

Geography and transnationalism

Transnationalism refers to many processes and relations with which geographers
have an immediate connection. These include mobility across space, impacts upon
the landscape from such mobility, the relation between culture and place, as well as
identity and more especially belonging. The McAuliffe and the Dunn and Ip
articles in this issue demonstrate the way in which transnationalism is locally
embedded. The nature of transnationalism is dramatically affected by place, to
which there has been too little attention paid (Crang et al. 2003, pp. 4412). The
transnationalism of the same cultural group in two different cities or nations is
refracted through local effects, including, though not confined to: the history of
migration in that place, recent immigration, government programs and policies for
migrant settlement, housing markets, migrant community cultural infrastructures,
and the (un)evenness of citizenship. McAuliffe, and Dunn and Ip argue that the
transnationalism of migrants and their descendants has important impacts on cities
(such as the effects just listed) which then feed into the locally embedded
manifestation of transnationalism.
Recent corrections within the field of transnationalism research have acknowl-
edged the continued stickiness of place, the continued friction of distance, the
potency of nation-states, and the need for grounded observations and empirics.
These acknowledgements all reinforce geography’s affiliation with this emergent
field. There is a clear role for the approaches and skills of geographers. Mitchell
states it thus: ‘It is geographical context, and thus geography as a discipline that is
 Guest Editorial 5

best placed to force the literal and the epistemological understandings of

transnationalism to cohere’ (Mitchell 1997, p. 110).
However, it should be noted that half of the authors in this special issue are not
geographers. The comparative assessments of Zevallos and of Clark focus much
more on the contrasting and similar experiences of transnationalism across different
cultural groups. The same can be said of the geographers McAuliffe and Friesen,
whose articles look at variations in transnationalism within a given cultural group,
including variations across religion and class. Along with the paper by Zevallos,
these scholars draw attention to the dangers of making generalisations about the
transnationalism of migrants from a given national and ethnic origin. And just as
immigration is expressed unevenly across gender (Fincher 1997; Yeoh & Huang
1998) so is transnationalism (see Zevallos). Nonetheless, it was from a geographic
event that this collection was assembled*the International Geographical Union
2006 Brisbane Regional Conference. It was from that geography meeting that a call
for reports on comparative analyses was made. For the reasons acknowledged
above, comparative analysis is a geographic predilection that has productively
generated this collection, which is offered as a geographic contribution to the
emergent field of transnationalism studies.

Acknowledgements
All the contributors to this special issue are indebted to Emeritus Professor Ian
Burnley for his incisive and constructive review comments. In his role as Guest
Reviewer he also provided me with insights regarding commonalities and
divergences in the papers of this collection.

Correspondence: Associate Professor Kevin M. Dunn, School of Biological, Earth

and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052,
Australia. E-mail: k.dunn@unsw.edu.au

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