Migration, Transnational Flows, and the Contested Meanings of Race in Asia

Shanshan Lan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interests include urban anthropology, migration and mobility regimes, comparative racial formations in Asia and Euro-America, transnational student mobility, global cities, African diaspora in China, Chinese diaspora in the United States, and class and social transformations in Chinese society. Lan is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project "The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges, precariousness, and racialized performances" (CHINAWHITE, 2019-2024). She is the author of two books: Diaspora and Class Consciousness: Chinese Immigrant Workers in Multiracial Chicago (2012), and Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging (2017). She also published articles in American Anthropologist, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, International Migration, and other academic journals.

Milos Debnár is Associate Professor at the Faculty of International Studies, Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Kyoto University in 2014 and his main research interest is sociology of European migration to Japan. He has written on migration patterns, social integration and the role of race and whiteness in the integration. His current projects are a comparative study analysing choices of staying and leaving by European migrants to Japan, and a collaborative project with the University of Vienna on study abroad in East Asia by students at Central European universities. He is the author of Migration, Whiteness, and Cosmopolitanism: Europeans in Japan(2016) and his recent publications include a paper co-authored with Spela Drnovsek Zorko Comparing the racialization of Central-East European migrants in Japan and the UK (CMS, 2021, 9:30) and a chapter Privileged, Highly Skilled and Unproblematic? White Europeans in Japan as Migrants published in Expatriation and Migration: Two Faces of the Same Coin (ed. Sylvain Beck, 2023).

Chapter 1 Introduction: Researching race and migration in a transnational context.- Part I: Race, Language, and Representations.- Chapter 2. The Whiteness of English: Raciolinguistic Chronotopes and Cultural Transformations in Contemporary China.- Chapter 3. "Because I am a Foreigner": Western Migrants' Navigations of the Chinese State.- Part II: COVID - 19, Geopolitics and shifting Ethno-Racial Ideologies.- Chapter 4. "Now we are no longer needed!": How White European Migrants Talk about Race and Covid-19 in China.- Chapter 5. "EuroAmerican teachers are our hardware:" Shifting Racial Hierarchies in Chinese Private English Schools after 2020.- Chapter 6. Locating the Complexity of Whiteness in the Migration Context of Japan - white Europeans as 'good migrants'.- Chapter 7. 'White Innovation': Conceptualizing Changing Racial Hierarchies Through Migrant Entrepreneurship in Singapore and Japan.- Part III: Gender and Interracial Encounters.-Chapter 8. Being a Black Woman in Japan: The Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Nationality.- Chapter 9. Navigating Whiteness in ELT: Fear, Anger, and Exhaustion Among Chinese Women Teachers.- Chapter 10. Post-Soviet White Femininities and Marriage Migration in China.- Chapter 11. Opening New Horizons in Race and Migration Studies.