One out of every seven people in the world today is on the move, voluntarily and involuntarily, within countries and between them. More and more people belong to several communities at once and yet the social contract between state and citizen is still bounded by questions of nationality. Where will the cultural building blocks come from with which we can imagine a different kind of nation, and different kinds of institutions, that better reflect this reality? This book looks at the potential role of international music competitions, beauty magazines, elite social clubs, and religious movements, among others, as potential breeding grounds for the creation of global citizenship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This book examines return mobilities to and from ancestral homelands of the second generation and beyond. It presents cutting-edge empirical research framed within the mobilities, transnational and return migration/diaspora paradigms on a trans/local and global scale. The book is unique in presenting not only a variety of return movements, including short-term visits and longer-term return migrations, but also circulatory movements within transnational social fields while engaging with notions of 'home', belonging, identity and generation. The individual contributions range widely over different ethnic, national, regional and global settings, including Europe, North America, the Caribbean, the Gulf and Africa. The result is a remapping of the conceptualisation of 'diaspora' and of the role of successive generations in the diasporic experience, as well as a nuancing of the concepts of return migration and transnationalism by their extension to the second and subsequent generations of 'immigrants'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.

One out of every seven people in the world today is on the move, voluntarily and involuntarily, within countries and between them. More and more people belong to several communities at once and yet the social contract between state and citizen is still bounded by questions of nationality. Where will the cultural building blocks come from with which we can imagine a different kind of nation, and different kinds of institutions, that better reflect this reality? This book looks at the potential role of international music competitions, beauty magazines, elite social clubs, and religious movements, among others, as potential breeding grounds for the creation of global citizenship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

In recent years, 'transnationalism' has become a key analytical concept across the social sciences. While theoretical approaches to the study of global social phenomena have traditionally focused on the nation-state as the central defining framework, transnational studies views social experience as a complex and dynamic product of multiple regional, ethnic, and institutional identities. Far from being static or bounded by national borders, social, political, and economic forces operate on supra-national, trans-regional, and trans-local scales and scopes. Transnational studies compares and contrasts these dynamics to rethink assumptions about identity, sovereignty, and citizenship. Assembling writings from some of the most important theorists in history, politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, The Transnationalism Reader explores the ways that transnational practices and processes in different domains, and at different levels of social interaction, relate to, and inform each other. It also compares the spatial organization of social life during different historical periods. Coherent in its vision and expansive in its disciplinary, geographic, and historical coverage, The Transnationalism Reader is a field-defining collection.

Argues that a new set of transnational social welfare arrangements has emerged that challenge traditional social welfare provision based on national citizenship and residence. The idea that social rights are something we are eligible for based on where we live or where we are citizens is out-of-date. In Transnational Social Protection, Peggy Levitt, Erica Dobbs, Ken Chih-Yan Sun, and Ruxandra Paul consider what happens to social welfare when more and more people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship where they receive health, education, and elder care. The authors use the concept of resource environment to show how migrants and their families piece together packages of protections from multiple sources in multiple settings and the ways that these vary by place and time. They further show how a new, hybrid transnational social protection regime has emerged in response to the changing environment that complements, supplements, or, in some cases, substitutes for national social welfare systems as we knew them. Examining how national social welfare is affected when migration and mobility become an integral part of everyday life, this book moves our understanding of social protection from the national to the transnational.

In recent years, 'transnationalism' has become a key analytical concept across the social sciences. While theoretical approaches to the study of global social phenomena have traditionally focused on the nation-state as the central defining framework, transnational studies views social experience as a complex and dynamic product of multiple regional, ethnic, and institutional identities. Far from being static or bounded by national borders, social, political, and economic forces operate on supra-national, trans-regional, and trans-local scales and scopes. Transnational studies compares and contrasts these dynamics to rethink assumptions about identity, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Assembling writings from some of the most important theorists in history, politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, The Transnationalism Reader explores the ways that transnational practices and processes in different domains, and at different levels of social interaction, relate to and inform each other. It also compares the spatial organization of social life during different historical periods. Coherent in its vision and expansive in its disciplinary, geographic, and historical coverage, The Transnationalism Reader is a field-defining collection.

What can we learn about nationalism by looking at a country's cultural institutions? How do the history and culture of particular cities help explain how museums represent diversity? Artifacts and Allegiances takes us around the world to tell the compelling story of how museums today are making sense of immigration and globalization. Based on firsthand conversations with museum directors, curators, and policymakers; descriptions of current and future exhibitions; and inside stories about the famous paintings and iconic objects that define collections across the globe, this work provides a close-up view of how different kinds of institutions balance nationalism and cosmopolitanism. By comparing museums in Europe, the United States, Asia, and the Middle East, Peggy Levitt offers a fresh perspective on the role of the museum in shaping citizens. Taken together, these accounts tell the fascinating story of a sea change underway in the museum world at large.

""The Transnational Villagers is one of the finest empirical studies available of a phenomenon that is commanding the attention of scholars and policymakers--the creation and maintenance of social ties and dual lives across national borders. In this admirable ethnography, Levitt offers a glimpse of what the world of the new century might begin to look like. This book both contributes to the vibrant research literature on international migration, and challenges it."--Ruben G. Rumbaut, co-author of "Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation

"Levitt allows her respondents to speak and to tell marvelously incisive stories that reveal the dislocations as well as the new possibilities associated with transnationalism. "The Transnational Villagers is a major contribution to our understanding of the meaning of borders in an age when technology increasingly seems to allow humans to leap effortlessly over them."--Richard Alba, author of "Ethnic Identities

"Levitt's study makes abundantly clear that immigration is no longer a one-way process, but a complex multi-faceted experience increasingly bringing together places of origin and destination. A must read for anyone interested in immigration and national development."--Alejandro Portes, co-author of "Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second-Generation

"In her study of Dominicans living in Boston yet maintaining close connection with family and politics in the Dominican Republic, Levitt asks, do these new transnational communities mean something new for our long established expectation of assimilation to American society and if so, what? She truly breaks new ground in our understanding of immigration and ethnicitytoday."--Nathan Glazer, author of "We Are All Multiculturalists Now

"Levitt provides an empathetic and rich account of village life and the lives of ordinary migrants, but also makes a major original contribution to social scientists' understanding of migration and the diffusion of global culture. Beautifully written, forcefully argued, and theoretically original, this book should be required reading for anyone concerned with immigration, globalization or development studies."--Mary Waters, author of "Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities

The thirteen essays in this volume offer a challenge to conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences. By expanding conceptual categories, the essays reveal how aspects of the religious have always been part of allegedly non-religious spaces and show how, by attending to these intellectual blindspots, we can understand aspects of identity, modernity, and institutional life that have long been obscured. Religion on the Edge addresses a number of critical questions: What is revealed about the self, pluralism, or modernity when we look outside the U.S. or outside Christian settings? What do we learn about how and where the religious is actually at work and what its role is when we unpack the assumptions about it embedded in the categories we use? Religion on the Edge offers groundbreaking new methodologies and models, bringing to light conceptual lacunae, re-centering what is unsettled by their use, and inviting a significant reordering of long-accepted political and economic hierarchies. The book shows how social scientists across the disciplines can engage with the sociology of religion. By challenging many of its long-standing empirical and analytic tendencies, the contributors to this volume show how their work informs and is informed by debates in other fields and the analytical purchase gained by bringing these many conversations together. Religion on the Edge will be a crucial resource for any scholar seeking to understand our post-modern, post-secular world.