 What do you think? It depends whether they're in person or not. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's true. The last one I was going to set up for you, and then I realized it was an introduction. Okay, I think this could get started then. Okay, so welcome everyone to this science centre of Taiwan Studies special lecture. Today we'd really be delighted to welcome Gary Price, who's first ever saw us talk. Or first ever in person saw us talk. So Gareth is now based at Duke University where he teaches in the linguistics programme and is also a member of the Asia Pacific Studies Institute. He got his PhD in linguistics from the University of Essex in 2009. That was what most of us first met. Gareth, he was part of the European Taiwan Studies Conference in Bokke, back in 2006. So it's kind of a really nice finding meet Gareth again in person. Although we did meet him online when he gave us online talk for us in 2021, on his book Language, Society and the States on Colonisation to Globalisation in Taiwan. The book was came out in 2019 and it paid back in 2021. I know it's a book that we do include in our Culture and Society in Taiwan class which I can see a few of you have taken. Gareth is going to speak for about 40-45 minutes and then we'll have lots of time for discussion. And again, we're really delighted that by chance we've got this theme of migration in Taiwan to become our kind of main themes. I think it's sort of like our third or fourth talk on this topic. So let's give Gareth a great big welcome in person to ourselves. Thank you. Thank you for that very kind introduction. Thank you for having me here today. It's lovely to be here and it is nice to be here in person and not just online. On a screen here. So this is the the title of the talk today. Privileged Outside is a Sociolinguistic Investigation of Foreign Communities in Taipei. And there we are. So the outline is here. I first ventured to Taiwan in 2001. I stayed until 2007 and apart from a couple of semesters here and there back doing my master's at Essex and my PhD at Essex and back for field work for two or three years. I've been back to Taipei and Taiwan on various trips here since then. My last book was on the politics of language in Taiwan, but I've always been fascinated by language and migration. I'm particularly interested at the moment in foreign populations in Taiwan and specifically I'm interested in migrants from the global north conventionally, though problematically known as expats. I should emphasize how problematic and I'm going to scare quotes for expats here, how problematic the term expats actually is. It's a demonym that refers to a group of people but it artificially distinguishes elite migrants usually from the global north from other migrants. In popular and academic usage it is often used and under theorized and rejected by some and ardently embraced by others and I use it in quotation marks to demonstrate just how unstable it is and at the same time how the term expats is reflective and productive of certain socio-political cultural and sociolinguistic realities. It's a problematic term. You'll hear me use expats. You'll hear me refer to northern migrants from the global north. I use those terms interchangeably here but expats is something at the heart of this research here. Today we're going to look at the expats research projects just to overview some of the research questions the methodology here. I've got some theory from sociology, anthropology and geography and some theory from sociolinguistics I'm hoping to marry the two happily and then I've got some data from interviews with northern migrants in Taiwan and that's the talk and I've got some very tentative conclusions about what some of this might mean here. The data that I'm presenting today is part of a wider project looking at expats in Taiwan and Thailand and from refugees to tourists people move in different ways and for different reasons across the globe impacting tens of millions of people directly and indirectly. Traditionally, migration studies more broadly that's in sociology, anthropology and geography has focused on flows from the global south rather than from the global north. There are good reasons for focusing on flows from the global south the majority of migration is from the global south or within the global south and these flows from the global south give rise to some of the most profound humanitarian challenges that we face in the world today. The emphasis on migration are from the global south the emphasis has changed slightly in the last about decades a little bit longer than a decade or so and there's a recognition that if you ignore migration from the global north you actually elide the complexity of human migration sort of more broadly here and we'll come back to that point about why study migrants from the global north and I've got some work to look at on that here but the study of migrants from the global north is still something of an each field in migration studies. The key thing here is that migrants from the in the broader scheme of international migration migrants from the global north are inherently more privileged than migrants from the global south and that is because these privileges are mobilised as various forms of capitals here and these privileges include privileges based on citizenship, passport visa regimes, transnational class position and often though not always rates at the same time privilege is always relative and this project examines the interplay between privilege and precarity manifested in material challenges biopolitical controls and estrangements from nations, cultures and languages of origin as well as difficulties integrating linguistically, culturally into their new societies here. So structurally migrants from the global north are more privileged but that privilege is always relative and the way it's distributed in individual cases at micro levels is something worth investigating here So here are the research questions here we'll look at this first one mainly today, I'm moving out of my camera spot here so I have to face across this is the main question we'll look at it how do northern migrants co-construct their migration trajectories and experiences narratively, discursively and semi-autically in online and offline spaces here that's the main question we'll be looking at today here how and why do they learn the languages of their host societies that's an important dimension of what we'll look at in some detail today here how do they talk about precarity and privilege in the context of lived meanings, this is more complex and we'll do less of this today this is still a sort of work in progress exactly how that sort of plays out how people talk about it and negotiate that those interplays there I've got some data on the next question how do they articulate the distinctions between migrant and expat or emplace themselves between different and sometimes conflicting transnational conceptions of home here and there's another question here which we won't get to today where perhaps in the Q&A you might want to ask me about it it doesn't quite fit in what I'm doing today here but it's an important question here there are expats people who identify themselves as expats who don't come from the global north and come from the global south and the question is how in this sort of research do we situate those voices in the research as well but that's again that's sort of a work in progress I've got some interesting data from Taipei on this actually but it's still one of the aspects of the work in progress here its qualitative data is ethnographically informed I've been monitoring social media sites including Facebook groups and pages blogs and forums certainly in the last social media has been around expat communities sort of coalesce in online spaces in really interesting ways and perhaps connect in interesting ways here I've then done quite a lot of in-person interviews with migrants from the global north and some from the global south this is convenience to snowball sampling adverts on Facebook groups that's sometimes gone well and sometimes not which is another methodological question that we can explore I was out in Thailand in 2019 of course the pandemic comes along and sort of stops all that and I'm going back to Thailand in this summer and then I'll be in Taiwan hopefully next summer to do more interviews here so if I've got 32 open-ended interviews 16 from Taiwan and Thailand about an hour and a half in length and they're open-ended and semi-structures and I'm aiming for about 100 interviews all told for the book project these are not statistically representative populations they're snowball sampling and convenient sampling means that they but this is qualitative work I put it emphasise that not quantitative statistical work here I've got a thousand media texts collected which I'm still going through in the process of looking at as we go on why study northern migrants well I said I'd come back to this well for me personally the answer to this is that I am or I was a northern migrant in fact I live in the United States now so to some extent I still am a northern migrant I kind of in some senses I still am but I've been in this position and I've sort of inhabited this space and this well I was saying earlier but actually I wanted to look at this for my PhD but really the theory wasn't there at that point here there's various answers to this have been proposed in the literature here Sarah Penn's work here the focus on the global south is a reproduction of a skewed image of migrants and immigrants as non-western, non-white non-elite subjects here and put another way leaving northern migrants out of the picture contributes to the invisibility of privilege in international migration and it's that invisibility which defines its power here and that leads us on to the second question this is about migration in general here this is from the sociologists British sociologists here that that it's related to this and it's in a broader sociological sense here studying elite privilege is important because if you construct well really constructing a narrative solely around the characteristics and problems of the most disadvantaged people and places does not address how the power and privileges of the advantages of the advantage are organized here and once again the invisibility of privilege is key to how it operates as a logic of power in this sense here and I think these two quotes speak to each other in really important ways to define kind of the research project and they're kind of relatively recent kind of the theorizations in sociology and migration studies more broadly which brings us on to the theoretical foundations here I draw from geography sociology and anthropology as well as the social science backgrounds here as well as from sociolinguistics as a hodgepodge of theoretical frameworks here from geography the mobility paradigm here human mobility implicates both physical bodies moving through material landscapes and categorical figures moving through representation of spaces representation of spaces linguistically and more accurately sociolinguistically defined not just in the languages we speak but the discursive cultural frameworks we use to make meaning to make sense of our worlds and our lived experiences here so we're not just people that just move that movement migration mobility has social meanings and the particular sort of meanings that are amenable to analysis arguably from a sociolinguistic point of view here more here from sociology and anthropology here two paradigms that come from these disciplines here the notions of high-skilled migration and lifestyle migration these are related to the mobility paradigm in geography and they explain how and why migrants from the global north tend to move in distinct but also similar ways compared to the better studies migrants from the global south and in particular high-skilled migration here is not fundamentally dissimilar to labour migration more broadly in that high-skilled migrants move for employment reasons there are differences in the sense that the work of high-skilled migration is usually better paid than local salaries so there's a distinction there the cultural capital of migrants such as educational qualifications language skills and passports are valued in specific ways visa categories often privileged for high-skilled migrants and crucially from a policy perspective high-skilled migration is often more palatable in the eyes of public opinion I've got to show you something here this is pure research so take that as you will people tend even if they oppose migration more broadly people tend to view high-skilled migration more positively even when they look at migration more broadly so you can see where privilege is working here in particular sort of ways here which is some important caveats here this is not to say however that all high-skilled migrants are from the global north nor that all migrants from the global north are high-skilled migrants so that's important that's the caveat there but through structural constraints and media, political and lay discourses migrants from the global north become indexically linked with high-skilled migration and vice versa high-skilled migrants migrants from the global north become associated with each other in popular imagery and sort of high-skilled migrants become these categorical figures based on citizenship native language transnational class position and often but not always race as well so if we have a look that one there this is less of a this is less of a paradigm that relates to Taiwan and it does relate in more concrete ways to Thailand but this is lifestyle migration this is not moving for employment in the same sense as high-skilled migration this is chasing the good life often people retirees for example or they're living on other sorts of income here they're not in general moving for work global nomads arguably fall into this category to some degree in that global nomads are not moving specifically for work reasons but they are moving they work in different places so they fall into a grey area here but this is some research here and there's a considerable body of work and looked at Croucher probably the first one was arrived in 2000 and looked at British in Spain Croucher looked at Americans in Mexico and then Hayes looked at Americans in Ecuador Botcherals looked at British retirees in Thailand and so on and so forth here and this one book first socio-linguistic analysis of this phenomenon and that's the Richard Lawson's book on the British in France which came out a few years ago and that's the first to explore the socio-linguistic dimensions of lifestyle and migration so as you can see there is some work in sociology anthropology and geography but there's less work in the socio-linguistic dimensions of it and I'm hoping to fill that gap and we'll get to socio-linguistics in a second here I'm not sure how many people are socio-linguists here hooray hello so I'm not going to go I'll give you a pot of history of socio-linguistics here the three concepts that I'm using from socio-linguistics that is scale complexity and mobility here so what used to happen is that socio-linguistics or socio-linguists in the mid 20th century would go to rural communities and they would invariably look at non-mobile older rural males called Norms and they were these folks here they were they were the most conservative speakers in that they were likely to preserve forms of their older dialects here and so these were the most conservative speakers they were preserving forms of older dialects that were spoken and socio-linguists were sort of interested in this here but this was kind of deeply criticized from the 1960s here onwards it failed to capture large segments of the population including women and young people and it failed to capture the dynamics of internal migration that were happening and this was especially in the UK and the US where the discipline was burgeoning you know post-war internal migration that was happening here and sort of cities became the new focus of socio-linguistic research there's Le Boeuf Wolfram and Trudgill among others and migration across cultural research begins sort of in the 70s, 80s and then continue with Rampton study in 1995 that's less important than the fact that it's taken to 2017 for a route ledge handbook on migration and language to come out which is that's not to say that something has just started happening but it's taken a while to work to colour less in socio-linguistics in terms of language and migration here it's always sort of scattered and this handbook the work in this handbook is influenced by the Mobilities Paradigm which we looked at from geography just a few slides ago and in the social sciences we're more broadly here a little bit before this handbook Blomner turns his attention to socio-linguistics and globalisation in 2010 drawing on the notion of language is less static systems and more as repertoires and these repertoires consist of language or bits of language but also semiotic resources systems of signs but reconfigured the way identities and cultures are constructed, co-constructed negotiated and in some cases resisted as well here while not always new practices the ways of conceptualising them are new and this changes our understanding of what it means to belong here and this is from Kegarajah introduction to the handbook in the place of territorialised and static ways of talking about language and social practices we are now adopting constructs that index their mobile, hybrid and constructed nature here so those notions of scale, complexity and mobility I'll talk for a couple of minutes just about these notions of scale, complexity and mobility here that can be put to work in the study of boundary migration more broadly but including in migration from the global north first we have scales and scales can be spatial or temporal space or time and often they interact they're both spatial and temporal scales particularly when we think of globalisation as the compression of time and space together here so scales can be we've got some chronotopes here I'll get to that in a second these scales exist in layered ways in Blomett's term here a linguistic utterance or semiotic sign interacts across different scales of time and space another way to think about this is how any piece of language is both spatial and temporal and often in multifaceted ways here and if this seems slightly theoretical at this point hopefully the data will show why this is a useful theoretical construct here complexity is a little bit more grounded here and it means that social categories such as citizenship or national identity but also race and gender and so on can no longer be statically linked with language practices this is to say that we can no longer take for granted the relationships between categories and language practices and in some senses we can't even take those categories as stable any more here there is in particularly contemporary verbalisation perhaps this has been true for longer an instability in the supposedly stable social categories of national identity and citizenship and things like that that doesn't mean sort of post-modern anything goes we're not quite there yet but we have to sort of think about kind of complexity as an analytical lens for what we're talking about here and when we think about scale and complexity we can think about mobility not just as people moving or migrating but the ways in which they move through different scales different levels of social and linguistic complexity and different semiotic and linguistic repertoires by repertoires I mean thinking about language not as static named systems such as Chinese or Taiwanese or English but overlapping and open-ended systems the notion of repertoires also extends to registers and styles which from a sociolinguistic perspective is about what language we use to talk to different people including levels of formality and things like that so registers and styles so how we speak to Grandma for example is not how we speak to our friends friends in the street for example there's shifting in different registers and styles here and these can be expressed through narratives about migrants and migration spoken or written discourses and the deployment of different semiotic resources and learning and speaking or speaking about non-native languages I use that term advisedly and different levels of competence in languages which are being learned in the migration process here alright so I'm going to get to some data very very shortly here and I just want to talk briefly here about some work that's already been done on Taiwan by Lampe Char who's at National Taiwan University Sociologist you might know her global Cinderella's more than this paper here and she did this fantastic paper on this in 2011 I came quite late to this research here and I won't do it justice by summarizing it here but the gist is that she explores privilege and precarity in what she calls Westerners in Taipei and it's a seminal paper in the global in global north migration studies lots of citations of this paper here it's not as theoretically developed as some of the more recent work but that's because it was so seminal that it was path breaking at the time and it's contributed to the theorization that has happened since then here and so I diverged from it in the sense that it's not really about language in the same sense as I'm using the term language or discussing the concept of language here Lampe's talking about language as a cultural capital that in her terms can be flexibly converted and into economic capital as English teachers or language workers but this work is a useful point of departure and a useful point of comparison from here and I particularly like her quote here that the macro structural constraints and intermediate institutions challenge the glorious image of free-floating cosmopolitan as she puts it here so let's go back to the research questions here let's look at these again these aren't or shouldn't be isolated from each other understood as overlapping and relational here and so we're going to look at some of these questions and some of this in relation to the the data that I've got here and I've got we'll start with this question and put this question here how do northern migrants construct or co-construct their migration trajectories and experiences narratively, discursively and semi-autically in online and offline spaces here there's a quote from DeFina saying telling stories is a way of sharing and making sense of this is about narratives telling stories is a way of sharing and making sense of experience in the recent or remote past and of recounting important emotional or traumatic events and the minutiae of everyday life stories are essential to relaying moral values and social norms and teaching them to children they are central to the construction of individual and collective identities and are used to index ways of being and social identifications here furthermore stories carry weight in important institutional encounters such as employment and immigration processes and I think that really captures what narratives do and the data I'm going to present now for a few minutes here I'm very much concerned with those narratives and how people talk about their migration experiences in this case from the global north and migrants from the global north who end up in Taipei here here's a migration narrative here this is from Lisa it's from a much longer it's just a snippet it's from a much longer interview of over an hour and she's a 28 year old white woman from the USA talking about her migration to Taiwan and she says so first and she's talking about graduation here I didn't know what to do so I became a substitute teacher I was in that public school system for a while and then I decided to come over here I was traveling I was backpacking in Europe and then I heard it's really easy to get a job over here if you just come so I was like okay let me try it so I came over here two weeks later I was the director of a preschool so I said okay sounds great so it's working in the office there and managing those English teachers and this is a snippet from a larger narrative here narratives are constructed along temporal scales of time and narratives are constructed in temporal ways here and we can see what's happening here you've got you argue I was struggling for the British for that there we are I told you I said I'm a northern migrant so what a wonderful crop that was so we've got back to temporal scales here we've got burst and became was for a while and then and then I was traveling was backpacking and then so I came two weeks later I had you can see what's happening here this different temporal markers first and then for a while two weeks later that structure the narrative as unfolding along a sequential temporal axis we can also see time marked in the tense of verbs there's past tense narratives are constructed along temporal dimensions and they often make events appear more sequential and less complex than they are in reality and in particular they can make events seem causative so what sort of makes something sort of happen here and this is just a snippet me sitting down over a coffee with my interviews here and letting them talk in these open and semi structured interviews and what you could have dive into the data and pull out the data there's this interesting sort of stuff sort of happens here and there's temporal scales there there's also spatial scales here I was in that public school system come over here backpacking in Europe just came over here working in the office there and these are all spatial constructions here these constructions locate people or actors and events in space and time and I'm highlighting the spatial dimensions here because they serve to position the narrator in space and demonstrate the roots traverse between one place or space and the current place or space here once again these are constructed as sequential and unbroken paths when migrant roots are often more complicated with that said it may be the case that routes for northern migrants are more sequential and unbroken than for migrants fleeing poverty or atrocity such as undocumented migrants or refugees it may be that the decision to move and the process of carrying out the migration is easier when privileged migrants can traverse visa systems and of course this often overlap between space and time since these dimensions are often interrelated here I hope that's convincing enough we've got a couple of things here so what's happening here we've got two occasions where Lisa quotes herself so I was like okay so I said okay and they look very very similar with so introducing the quotative I was like or I said and okay proceeding what is quoted and they serve I think to position the narrator as an active agent in the migration narrative Lisa agrees to certain things happen happening they don't just happen to her yeah okay and so she's kind of constructing herself as an agent and this might be different from more privileged migrants than less privileged migrants here in terms of agency and structure we'd have to look and see how that plays out we've also got here I'll skip that bit but we've got you know and you know here these are really interesting these are really really really interesting here where are we here it could be the throw away we say you know you know in conversation all the time right but they're used in conversation commonly but on a different level it could be that the interviewee in this case Lisa is involving the interviewer in this case me in the co-construction of objective knowledge about the reasons for migration it's the interviewer me is invited to share in the telling of the narrative the interviewer is the interlocutor in a story and the interview becomes an important space and time for the interviewee to position themselves more generally within their own scales of space and time here yeah and so there's there's um there's that there and this comes up quite a bit and I'll show you some of the data where it comes up here here's Herbie, he's 45 he's a white man American they say that some people come here because they can't make it in their own country and they say that I don't necessarily agree with that I think the people that come to Taiwan are looking for adventure, looking for fun there are some idiots, idiots running away from trouble of course you know I think people feel like they have freedom here and for all the things that people complain about I think they also get that they're privileged enough privileges directly kind of talked about here and so there's that to think about here once again if we look at the temporal scales there's less here in terms of time dimensions come because there's causatives there looking there's different verbs verb forms there here and more interesting is the spatial dimensions here people come here in their own country come to Taiwan, idiots running away from trouble have freedom here and these are all spatial dimensions that are in the evident in the narrative in the narrative here these positions they're all used to describe the motivations of northern migrants and this position northern migrants is moving seamlessly from one place to another on the basis of motivations and factors that they have agency and control over and once again it might be the case that this agency control is a distinction between privileged and less privileged migrants and something I want to explore a little bit further in this research here Lisa quotes herself Herbie quotes others so we've got they say they say people feel like people complain about and so here we can see both narratives both Lisa's and Herbie's narratives are heteroglossic in back teens terms they are multi voiced it's not just other people's voices narrate the experience of migration as much as the narrator's voice does one significance is that Herbie is co-constructing the motivations of northern migrants in particular ways that challenge more negative assessments that people whoever they are make we don't know if this is Taiwanese people or other northern migrants we're not sure who these people are here they who they say here but we can see there's a relative positioning here between Herbie's voice and versus the voices of others in this particular dynamic here and once again you get you know and you know here yeah that co-construction of the narrative with the interviewer you know what I mean you know what I'm saying and that's that's that one here moving on thinking about how do northern migrants learn local languages here I've got a quote here and I basically say and that's your Mandarin language proficiency sort of improved this is to how are you taken to be sort of kind of how does the Chinese get you around society here as a foreigner has been long enough to speak the language what's the sort of attitude to connect to someone who doesn't speak the language can you sense a difference not great interview technique with all those questions I have to be honest there but Tim takes it in his stride here and answers the question British and he answers the question here well yes I do can you sense a difference here answers my final question here but at the same time you know you say oh your Chinese is so good so that kind of attitude the Taiwanese people will have so you kind of always got that to a certain extent oh your Chinese is so good so now I'm kind of well doesn't really mean that or it's being polite you know but it's helped me get around a lot of social situations right sure and that's another thing about the XTAC community that kind of person don't know is his voice and I don't mean to be too critical about it that stays here 20 years and can say half a dozen phrases and that's it so this I love this we can see that he's been there for 25 years he quotes the evaluations of Mandarin speakers while also describing and narrating specific linguistic interactions in Mandarin it's also how Mandarin speakers evaluate his competence that is the heart of his relation to the language here this is difficult to interpret the whether or not it's polite or whether or not it's being a genuine compliment with his Chinese here it's difficult to interpret these cross-cultural norms and their expression in and through language in terms of kind of politeness here but ultimately Tim's linguistic abilities have helped him get around what he calls social situations meaning the day-to-day cultural and linguistic interaction with Mandarin speaking local Taiwanese people here and he uses and we've got I've sort of said this about this one here so there's that one there and he uses another thing and that's another thing which I think kind of introduces sort of an evaluative observation about certain members of what he calls the X-Bat community even though Tim later on tells me that he doesn't like the term X-Bat he actually says I prefer the term migrants and yet he will talk about the X-Bat community and this is an example of how this term it moves it's a very mobile term in and of itself people will use it but then they will distance themselves from it and then they will adopt it in certain contexts and not others here and and and and his evaluations of certain members of the community are personified in the category or categorical figure of that kind of person in this case it's based on language competence here and the lowering of the voice it's not we're not sure who's going to overhear this we were at Huashan Park outside but he lowers his voice on the recording and anyway so there we are here and we've got you know and you know those things turn up again there's little bits of language turn up and they're doing quite a lot of work a lot of co-construction happening there here this is something else speaking localised a lot of varieties here Liam is a white male American 50 years old I mean I've been with people guys for years in Beijing studying Mandarin and then you hear the talk and they sound like a textbook right sound like I don't sound like any and what he's trying to say here I speak with a little bit of a twang or a drawl which I think is valuable has some benefits I think people might rather hear that than a textbook right and he goes and I won't read that you can just sort of have a look at that one there but this excerpt here which we'll look at for here highly metalinguistic this is language that is used to talk about language like any language not all varieties of Mandarin are of a value equally in Taiwan's sociolinguistic marketplace here Liam describes his own Mandarin speech as having a twang or a drawl the notions of twangs and draws are not linguistic concepts they are social evaluations of usually used to describe certain varieties of English rural and non-standard varieties of English are described as having twangs and draws here and he maps these evaluations of English onto varieties of Mandarin here that evaluative observations that are used for English are mobile and he's mapping them onto Mandarin varieties here which is again how these terms and these concepts are moving around here and he goes on here to discuss expats who don't master any more than basic Mandarin in this case those who cannot say hello or thank you after 10 years plus invoking a temporal scale also Liam talks about linguistic competencies associated with level of education highly educated people motivation didn't want it and then he seems to accept that language learning is difficult for some people when he says that didn't get it this competence or lack of it is key to integrating into the Taiwanese society by connecting with local people for Liam here and we've got here right it's not you know we've got right right right here which is doing similar work I've got this one here and you communicate with your family in Mandarin so you've got I won't read that I'll let you read it quicker than I can I can say it some interesting things going on here some judgments here Nathan is in 2029 here the temporal scales or the space and scale here spatial scales are really important here Taiwanese originally from here from Changhua so you speak he's the local born in Taipei poor Taiwanese and there's the association between location and space and what people speak or what people are expected to speak and how those marrying into a Taiwanese family he's sort of internalized some of those ideologies of language that link space and place with what and registers and styles and different language varieties varieties here and I've got and I've pulled this one here Taiwanese if I was going to study anything that's going to be more Mandarin Taiwanese would always like it's kind of like a luxury that I don't need and the interesting thing is that under the Gaomingdang the association of Taiwanese was very much not with luxury but with inferiority and through the Mandarin spread campaign and Mandarin spread policies for almost 50 years and so there's a sort of a jarring juxtaposition there between that ideology and then the notion that's kind of prestige or functionality and perhaps this is indicative of Nathan's status as a privileged outsider and that's what I'm trying to talk about here today it's the key to better integration into Taiwanese culture and specifically he's extended Taiwanese family but learning it requires time and effort and that's possibly why he frames it as a luxury that he doesn't need here. Last last last bit of data here and then I'm going to wrap up home and away we've got Herbie again here so is this home then yeah it flips so when I I can't remember the exact time but your world flips when you go home and you feel like this is kind of weird you know like you're not it's not really seven years nine years I don't know when it was I mean for me I think about it in more recent terms I live in Palm Grove which is like this resort resort area kind of with a huge pool and hit shit like that right and so when I go home I have to sleep on my mum's couch in my bed that was on the floor in the corner with my mum pulling out the room and you know shit like that so it's like like why do I want to come home to Ohio that too that's supposed to be my vacation when I'm living in a vacation area you know like with a pool and all this stuff yeah and so I feel like it's flipped to where whatever but there was a time before that then I knew that this was my home and Ohio was the place I used to live you know what I mean so if I had to guess seven years we've got temporal we've got spatial dimensions there which is really interesting here your world flips the world flips on an axis spatial dimension here home resort area the floor and the bed on the floor and we've got different spatial dimensions here these locations can be countries or regions at the macro level as well as corners of rooms where one's bed is at the micro level here and this emplacement of home varies from the general to the specific here and there are the obviously when you're talking about home you would expect spatial dimensions people to talk about space when talking about conceptions of home here but there are also temporal dimensions here we've got when the exact time when seven years nine years recent terms don't know when when I go home when I'm living time there's a time before that vacation which is a temporal that's a time a delimited period of being off work there's a time before that I used to live seven years here and we see the temporal construction of home in this narrative as well here and once again you know it turns up here you know you know you know what I mean that work of co-construction in the interview to narrate arguably conceptions of where home sort of is here alright, okay that's me wrapping up here conclusions well the theoretical framework of this research project is unfolding and the conclusions I can draw from a few short excerpts are only really very tentative here nonetheless I think several things can be said the first is that northern migrant trajectories and their experiences are amenable to sociological and anthropological analysis through the languages, discourses repertoires and narratives that they deploy here here we've seen primarily short narratives in which migrants tell stories about how and why they and other northern migrants moved where they call home the language varieties that they used and how they interact with and integrate into their new cultures and societies second the macro structural affordances and constraints towards mobility are reproduced are produced and reproduced contested and negotiated at the micro level of conversational interaction even in the somewhat artificial context of the interview this interface between the micro and the macro is important social scientists often see this as a duality or opposition the micro and the macro or have done but as the great sociolinguist John Gumpers teaches us in Monica Heller's words that you can't actually have one micro versus macro you can't actually have one without the other and you certainly can't explain social process without some place for social process to happen social process thus takes place in interaction here and finally this research has a different emphasis than Lam's 2011 paper being as it is grounded in sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological approaches to interaction mainly but it seems to confirm and significantly benefits drawing on her broader sociological theorizations we can see how the subtle interplay for charity and privilege are manifested in and navigated through small narratives alright, thank you yeah, fantastic, Gary really great to kind of get a sense of that joy or feel of something that we've been missing so much over the last few years it also reminded me that about 10 years ago we had a program in New York where we had a version from Taiwan that we never managed to get with a chapter on Western migrants in Taiwan we had some proposals but it never really happened and I wasn't actually aware of Lam's work so I need to go back and look at that let me just start with one question that you didn't really have a chance to touch on that was about the case selection of this overall project I was curious about why you chose Thailand as your second case and not somewhere more comparable I was immediately thinking of somewhere like Japan, South Korea so that was let me start with that question so I was looking for somewhere that was definitely in the global south and Thailand falls under that category there the global north to global south flows where you and this is a tricky question where you locate Taiwan is a much trickier question. Lam actually does put Taiwan in the global south and I think that's you know so what I wanted to look at was somewhere nearby somewhere sort of Southeast Asia that was definitely in the global south and that way you can compare movement from the north to the south and arguably within the global north as well that's good I'm very enjoyable talk it reminds me at one level of Siegmund bombings I think the distinction between the elite who can travel and be tourists wherever they want to and have an agency over where they go and the vast majority of migrants who don't if we focus as you have done on telling stories, the narratives we've got one or two follow-ons I think I don't want to perhaps any narrative will tend to have some point that means resolved and then some denouement in it and any narrative will take a kind of who the audience are that's been talked to so you have described how the narrators talked about their lives careering from one place to another verbs but it ends up in their analysis being a career move it's a sort of elevator pitch trying to justify what they've done to the particular audience that they're with now from their point of view like an uber expat not only are you positioned so that you can move easily from one place to another whether it's your place of research but you've acquired the language and you can comment you're in such a position you can comment upon what others have done so I wonder to what extent the responses would not have included so much etc if the interlock future had been somebody else or you'd ask them in the United States or their home territory or you'd ask people who had moved to Taiwan and then decided it wasn't for them and then gone back so the denouement of the story might be the final question you asked so is this then your home is that what's happening or expat is somebody who's in exile but whose attention is to their real home which is where they came from so to what extent are these people trying to put down roots to what extent are they concerned about their children's schooling and their children's educational development whether they're going to be subject to conscription or not as it would be was these parameters coming into play and it's not criticism of anything you said I think it's an encouragement to look into these complicating factors they are great questions and avenues for further research I think that the positionality is always sort of key and grounding yourself on figuring out where you sit in all this is something that is probably a whole chapter in and of itself methodologically and I wonder what and I wonder if some comparative work can be done to sort of see whether or not some of those like you say returnees who found out that Taiwan wasn't from there what sort of stories they tell and things like that versus people who put down roots and things like that they are really good questions I don't have good answers for them right now but there's certainly sort of things to think about and thank you my focus on stage is primarily Korea but a lot of what you showed today I have a friend a friend who studied English at the University one of her colleagues there was an American who lived in English at the University for 10 years and she said it cannot even last for a cup of coffee in Korea now I'm not going to argue so many other examples but it's not just people who write English at the North Island emigrants come into East Asia and certainly in Korea because I love the language of Russians just by chance I don't think they would like that and so I wonder as your research goes into migrants from the North whose first language is not English because language is a culture of life and their experiences and perceptions are going to be different that's a really good question and there's a few dimensions to that the language this started out as actually being called the Anglophone Diaspora and then I quickly realised that wasn't going to work at all here but the interviews are conducted in English but not a lot but there are quite a few of my interviewees have Russian as a first language that's migrated to the States and then speak English as a second first language I've got I'm just trying to think who else I've got I've got a Spanish speaker but using English again as an L1 so I think what I'm trying to get out there is it sort of comes down to a lot of this is facilitated and migration is facilitated by English as a global language and perhaps that's sort of a theoretical paradigm that explains a lot of this mobility and a lot of this migration just a couple of questions to you guys what in terms of your sample selection how long did people actually have to be in Thailand or Taiwan to actually be in the sample and did it have to be work or would students also potentially be in that sample so it was over one year so and I do have students but I've got one I think student and that data isn't here but what I'm trying to do is to narrow down that selection criteria for the research that I'm doing moving forward and that's something I've got to think about kind of who gets included and that sort of thing and that's something that I will sort of think about for you Thank you so much it's fantastic I really learn a lot and I've got so many questions I have to be very selective You focus on spatial and temporal sort of perspective looking at interviews I wonder how about the gender factors and the age group factors how that influence their experience and their their migration experience can I ask the second question sorry also a very simple one have you asked them about how they define themselves are they expat or are they migrants because that's quite important how they define themselves so which one should I answer first I'm going to answer the second one first so yes I have I haven't shown that data here but I do sort of say to people how do you feel about the term migrant versus expat I frame that in different ways in the conversation it's usually not quite as blunt as that but people are very happy to talk about it and they will narrate and they will tell you that they don't like the term expat even though they've said they're using the term expat throughout the interview not all but it patterns in complex ways so I'm not sure and that sort of patterning in complex ways leads back to the first question gender and age I don't have enough data yet to see kind of how gender and age pattern yet once I have a hundred interviews they know that might those questions and thinking about how those narratives unfold and not is something that I've got to think about but it seems that just by looking in the time history that seemingly the male is the dominant group so I'll just pick up also from yours seemingly actually quite a few older age groups rather than young men yes so in my sample men are over-represented and I don't know why I know partly why that's because we know so yes so they are over-represented I know that that's because they are over-represented as a population in Taipei but I also wonder if women don't want to sit down with a strange researcher in a coffee shop there could be that at play as well but I can't find that out it comes back to I think race in particular is one of these categories that privilege and privileged mobilities draws on and in particular sort of ways here I would like to have more people of colour in my sample certainly thank you thank you so much really interesting talk kind of related to that question you just brought up privilege and this is the the topic besides that little bit where it said the person who said that the privilege was enough the privilege enough the privilege enough I was wondering what if many of you did talk about privilege at all or had any brought it up in their narratives or did they feel privileged so it's a question that is on the research questions specifically about the interplay between privilege and precarity and I often framed that in terms of can you tell me about your experiences of privilege can you tell me about your experiences of discrimination and people were very happy to talk about that there's a lot of data in the data that I've got hours and hours and hours and thousands of words tens of thousands of words to go through here and so that is how you talk about it and they're quite happy to talk about it and in general people will tell you that they feel more privileged than discrimination but discrimination does exist but that's that whole talk in and of itself which is probably, I should call it privilege outsiders too but yes that's a great question thank you my question is quite methodological especially on online resources what kind of online resources you're trying to collect on social media but more importantly what the role of online if you use the space metaphor what the cyberspace what's the role of cyberspace in your field is it a part of the site or it's a supplementary resource for your in-depth interview in your site that is a good question I think drawing on the spatial metaphor as you say I see it as an extension of the physical space of where these migrants are located and the reason this is thinking off the top of my head the reason why I would think that is that communities coalesce online much as they would do in bars or coffee shops or other kind of spaces as well and they coalesce online and they look like or they feel like spaces that are an extension of the physical space but that's something to think about did you find any differences in the trend particularly thinking about the precarity element was that coming out more in the online discussion than actual the face-to-face discussions yes the main difference between online and offline spaces is that people are much nicer in person and so the people do complain online and they complain and they give rise to that precarity and that sort of thing during the pandemic I've been looking at these Facebook sites for the last two years now quite a lot of activity in Thailand but Thailand as well and people got stuck in place and these biopolitical controls and material challenges sort of are evident that people talk about online and perhaps less so in offline spaces in my perception that the social media posting sometimes is quite like out of the context or lack of storytelling in that way how you cook with your fascinating narrative analysis it's really eye-opening to me but how you cook that way of analysis to the online resource yes so narrative analysis doesn't always work or at least you have to do different things to make it work for online comments and posts and things like that that requires some methodological sophistication in terms of thinking about what is actually work I've got over a thousand posts that I'm still sort of going through that's a big but there isn't quite a lot of social linguistic work on sort of how online communities talk and narrate and co-construct their experiences and that digital discourse has been around for a decade or more so I draw, I do have resources in social linguistics to draw on thinking about digital discourse yes thank you I want to focus on your idea of co-construction first three quick anecdotes firstly when I went to doing feed work in rural Taiwan it was assumed that I was not only you got one, an American a toka, big nose but also that I was a Mormon missionary and thinking about the history of expats in Taiwan, those who went as Christian missionaries are probably quite important secondly 25 years ago I was on airplane from Bangkok to Taipei sitting behind two people talking to each other in fluent Thai, in fluent Thai names it was only when we were getting off the plane I realised we were both African and they were talking so I would link that to the sort of precarious migration where just a few years earlier if you had got a job in Taiwan you were confined to a certain area it was like an inverse of the treaty port's freedom for expats and then thirdly in those days when you went through the airport to passport control you went through what it said aliens by that way that sort of changed still called aliens so my wider question is the extent to which there have been changes in perceptions of expats and experiences of expats since 2001 to 2007 that aligns with the changing nature of Taiwan people going as tourists or as students or for other reasons lifestyle choices elsewhere including to the PRC and the change in nature of immigration sort of thing dealt with in your series so what extent can you fit in to describe another easy question into those wider processes of change so this has given me some pause and I have thought about this and what and those the danger with doing this as it is is that these migrants become lankers and free-floating cosmopolitan and I think that they become dislocated from wider structures and processes in Taiwanese society perceptions as well in Taiwanese society and that is problematic I think so one way to remedy that is to talk to sort of Taiwanese people think of northern migrants as well I mean that few research for example the one that looks at high-skilled migration for example that graph I showed I'd be interested to see how that quantitatively worked in Taiwan as well for example whether or not I've got the resources to do that is a different question but I think that somewhere and not just somewhere I think throughout the project or throughout the book project locating those wider structures and processes in there is going to be important but then I have to do the same in Thailand and I'm less familiar with Thailand in terms of in terms of I don't have however many years experience in Thailand but yeah it's definitely something to that's given me some thoughts here and that might mean doing different things with it but I haven't quite worked out yet whether location works or whether location lives if you like so back to the have you thought about how you're going to actually structure the book? I don't think with Ryan talks one of the key decisions is what are the big chapters and are you going to look at Taiwan and Thailand together in comparative chapters or separate chapters so you kind of I know for me in my last book structure then was that a real key moment are you there yet? I've got one that I've used to get grants with and as it stands they are comparing both migrants in Taiwan and Thailand together in so thematically structured in terms of of how they so all together and thematically structured rather than side-by-side comparisons here so I've got an idea of how the book is structured and I'm quite happy but it's not just for external purposes it is actually sort of I think it sort of hangs together but I think it will change yeah I think it will change yeah Just thinking about the overseas community in Taiwan one of the big components is overseas or American Taiwanese I was wondering do they fit in? I don't know and I think it's really I think you I think because of the relationship between Taiwanese Americans for example with Taiwan either through citizenship or through visas sometimes not and also questions ethnicity and language competence or lack of language competence I think that to look at that population in detail I've got to be asking very specific and different questions that I perhaps framed other interviews with that's that's yeah and I think that will throw up a whole sort of set of dimensions worth exploring So I think just about maybe one final question if anyone want to come in or if you come back if not then we should have a pause in our Taiwan studies discussions because of course we do have another Taiwan studies event at 3 o'clock organised by the politics department we've got two politics PhD students one talking about gender politics political representation political party relation between Hong Kong and Taiwanese political parties 3 o'clock I can't remember which room oh 4 4 2 6 4 4 2 6 so that will give us an hour and a half break but before that let's give another very big round of applause for the migration discussion we've got one on the main 31st and we'll kind of give you a reminder for that as well