Global Migration

Xu, AM. (2021). "Constructing the refugee: Comparison between newspaper coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis in Canada and the UK.” Current Sociology 69 (5): 660-681.

This article challenges the pitfall of methodological nationalism in research on refugee representation in the Western context. This project provides a comparative analysis of news coverage on the Syrian refugee crisis in the UK and Canada, showing how racialized discourses about refugees travel across national contexts to contribute to divergent nation-building projects. It demonstrates how media reports in both countries adopt a ‘victim-pariah couplet’ framework to unsettle refugee rights. While they emphasize distinctive discursive elements to construct different imaginaries about “the nation”, the construction of refugees as threats and passive victims both erase refugee’s own voice and reproduce their racialized image in the Western media.

Xu, AM. “Use The Foreign, Govern the Foreign”: Constructing State Power and Migrant Subjects Through Voluntarism in China. (In progress)

This research examines state-controlled migrant voluntarism in Yiwu, China, a city hosting the world's largest wholesale commodity market and the county-level city with the largest immigrant population in China. Drawing on ethnographic observation and informal interviews conducted during fieldwork in Yiwu in 2020 and analysis of state media and policy documents, this research bridges studies of migrant voluntarism and migration brokerage to investigate how the entanglement of brokerage with the logic of voluntarism shapes migrant subject-making and the imaginary of the Chinese state. The state-directed nature of voluntarism in China offers a strategic lens to reconceptualize volunteering as not merely a mechanism of migrant subject-making but also a mechanism of the state to reconfigure its self-image and governance approach. Moreover, whereas research on migration brokers typically focuses on commercial actors, this project investigates how the state mobilizes volunteer brokers as moral role models and guardians to discipline the migrant population. Together, this research reveals how state-directed migrant voluntarism simultaneously configures governance and migrant subjects, producing the conditional inclusion of migrants and rescaling state power in China.