Negotiating scale and mobility: transnational Koreans in Shanghai

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study investigates how skilled migrants from South Korea shuttle between linguistic and cultural resources for socialisation and career development. Drawing on the theoretical notions of cultural capital and scalar politics, this study found they strategically re-configured and transformed inter-scalar relations at the macro-spatial and micro levels of everyday practices to create new meaning and capacity for socialisation and career development. The findings indicate that the presumed hierarchical scalar relations between the Chinese, Korean, and English languages are complicated and recalibrated by participants’ shifting and strategic linguistic and cultural priorities across spaces. Transnational migration, as a site of transformation and negotiation of scalar relations, exposed the participants to cultural and ideological diversity within different spatial borders, thus empowering them to constitute or resist the scales defined by their heritage culture or such larger institutions as gender views and hierarchical relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Scale
• mobility
• capital
• Korean migrants
• Shanghai
• multilingualism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 WeChat is a widely used mobile app in China and among overseas Chinese with multi-purpose messaging and social media functions. People can post photos, videos, texts and location as well as share articles and music in Moments.

2 The term ‘world language’ has been used to refer to languages widely spoken and influential worldwide (Kang, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Start-Up Research Grant at the Education University of Hong Kong [Grant number RG 80/2018-2019R]. The second author would like to acknowledge fundings supported by ‘the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities’ in UIBE [Grant number 20QN08] and ‘The National Social Science Fund of China’ [Grant number 18CYY017].