Transient Mobility and Middle Class Identity Media and Migration in Australia and Singapore

This book offers an understanding of the transient migration experience in the Asia-Pacific through the lens of communication and entertainment media. It examines the role played by digital technologies and uncovers how the combined wider field of entertainment media (films, television shows and music) are vital and helpful platforms that positively aid migrants through self and communal empowerment. This book specifically looks at the upwardly mobile middle class transient migrants studying and working in two of the Asia-Pacific’s most desirable transient migration destinations – Australia and Singapore – providing a cutting edge study of the identities transient migrants create and maintain while overseas and the strategies they use to cope with life in transience.

Chapter 1: Transient Migrants: A Profile of Transnational Adaptability.- Chapter 2: Replicating everyday home life in transience: Connecting to the home nation through social media and entertainment media.- Chapter 3: Identity on my Mind .- Chapter 4: The Significance of home nation identities in transience.- Chapter 5: Connections and Disconnections: Forming Parallel Societies in Transience.- Chapter 6: A Culture of Mobility: Christianity.- Chapter 7: Globetrotting: Aspirations for Transnational Mobility.

Catherine Gomes is a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne and recently completed an Australian Research Council DECRA (Discovery Early Career Research Award) fellowship. Her work covers migration, transnationalism and diasporas, particularly transient migration in Australia and Singapore with special interest in international students, their well-being, their social networks and their media and communication use. Catherine is founding editor of Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration (Intellect Books).