AAG Annual Meeting, February 24-28, 2012, New York

Migration of Professionals and the City – Mobility, Locality and Identities of Expatriates and the Global Elite

Panel organizer: Lars Meier (University of Munich)

The migration of professionals is widely seen as paradigmatic representation and driver of globalization. It is the global elite of highly qualified professionals like managers or scientists, which are mainly defined by their mobile lives (Elliott/Urry 2010). But everyday lives are also based and take place in specific cities. This session aims to integrate papers that shed light on the everyday life of the mobile global elite shifted between mobility and urban life establishment in specific cities.

Professionals, the global elite and expatriates are also characterized by their identities. Since the group of professionals is defined by its class position – as global elite – it is of interest to investigate the relevance of their class identity within the city. It would be also appealing to get insights into the relevance of the professional gender and ethnicity for their everyday life in the respective city.

This session compiles empirically based papers which shed light on one of the following topics:

- Everyday life and practices of highly qualified migrants in a specific city
- Relevance of identities like class, ethnicity and gender for the global elite
- Encounters between the global elite and the other
- The power of locality on mobile lives

I invite proposals for oral presentation of a maximum of 250 words by September 16, 2011. Please also provide your name, affiliation and current email address. Authors will be notified of acceptance for presentation in this session by September 20, 2011. Please note that after acceptance of your abstract you have to register for the conference, pay the attendance fee and upload your abstract to the conference homepage.

Please submit abstracts to: Lars.Meier@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de