Migrants' New Transnational Habitus: Rethinking Migration Through a Cosmopolitan Lens in the Digital Age

Abstract

This article puts forward a cosmopolitan reading of international migration, focusing on the role played by ICTs in generating new ways of living together and acting transnationally in the digital era. After underlining some of the complex dimensions of the transnational debate and the limits of methodological nationalism, I will argue that revisiting the national–transnational nexus by adopting an ‘inclusive cosmopolitan’ stance would lead to a better understanding of the dialogically ubiquitous condition of the modern migrant. An analysis of Internet use by Romanian professionals in Toronto and their transnational families will shed light on the mechanisms through which ICTs produce connected lifestyles, enhance the capacity to harness otherness, and facilitate socialisation beyond borders, thus generating new transnational habitus.

Keywords:

• Transnationalism
• Methodological Nationalism
• Cosmopolitanism
• Transnational Habitus
• Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
• Online Migrants

Notes

1. According to Wimmer and Glick Schiller: ‘Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the global regime of nation-states by the social sciences. Scholars who share this intellectual orientation assume that national borders are the natural unit of study, equate society with the nation-state, and conflate national interests with the purposes of social science. Methodological nationalism reflects and reinforces the identification that many scholars maintain with their own nation-states’ (2003: 576).

2. This research was conducted between 2001 and 2007 and studied the impact of ICTs on the migratory and community patterns, transnational dynamics and political, economic and social participation at a distance of skilled Romanian migrants in Toronto. It stressed that the analysis of migratory phenomena in the digital era requires a ‘transnational awareness’ of the research toolkit. For more details see Nedelcu (2009a).

3. Daniele Conversi (this issue) argues, however, that digital technologies instead contribute to cultural essentialism, reinforcing long-distance nationalism and the radicalisation of global ethnic networks.

4. I use the notion of dialogic/dialogicity as a multidimensional prism for understanding social complexity. According to Edgar Morin (1990), dialogicity is based on the intertwining—within a same system—of different, opposed logics. However, it doesn't erase all of the differences specific to each entity, but allows antagonisms without reducing them to a rationalised dialectic, and helps one to understand that difference is consistent with unity.