The (dis)embodiment of transnational mobilities

ABSTRACT This article outlines a theoretical perspective attending to the embodiment of education-related migrants’ transnational mobilities as reflective of their embeddedness in the world. This argument is presented in two main parts.In the first part, it is argued that within a global discourse of increasing human capital for competitive advantage, skilled migration that follows international education – known as two-step migration – has been used by governments as a human capacity building strategy. In government-commissioned reports and studies, the dominant use of economic frameworks describes two-step migrants as rational choice makers. Such approaches produce the effect of disembodying transnational mobilities as homogeneous ‘brain flows’ across borders. However, migrants have their own pursuits and experience circumstances in relation to socio-economic, political, and cultural influences that affect their subjectivities in transnational mobilities. By building on extant research on transnationalism in the latter part of this article, this article acknowledges the embodiment of transnational mobilities through the relational aspects of migrants’ everyday lives, from forming decisions to migrate, to relocating to the host society and planning for the future. In this sense,the relationality of transnational mobilities can be theorised through skilled migrants’ engagement with the world across multiple spaces and temporalities.