Enacting Transnational Citizenship: Exploring the Structural Constraints and Agency of Chinese Immigrants' Transnational Social and Civic Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The conventional presumptions of the nation-state as the sole legitimate site and boundary of citizenship have been challenged by contemporary transnational migration, through which immigrants actively and strategically engage in cross-border practices that defy the established parameters of citizenship in terms of geographic boundary and defining dimensions. The struggle over the ownership of the meaning of citizenship necessitates exploration of immigrants as legitimate actors in the social construction of citizenship. To foreground the agency of immigrants in claiming a legitimate role and space in the social construction of citizenship while recognizing their agency as deeply shaped by the dominant politico-legal framing of citizenship, this research focuses on citizenship as learning practices situated in and shaped by time-space sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts. For Chinese immigrants in Canada who face the lack of recognition of formal dual citizenship from China, on the one hand, and structural subordination of Chinese immigrants denied of substantive full citizenship in Canada, on the other hand, the transnational civil society may emerge as a liminal space for citizenship learning. This research set out to explore how Chinese immigrants enacted themselves as transnational citizens through social and civic engagement in the Canada-China transnational space, and how such engagement was shaped by the structuring citizenship policies and discourses in Canada and China. Theoretically informed by critical and relational sociology of agency and citizenship, and methodologically following a critical ethnography research design, this qualitative study focused on transnational Chinese immigrants’ perceptions and practices of citizenship through social and civic engagement in the Canada-China transnational space and revealed how they enacted themselves as transnational citizens mainly through grassroot activism in social, educational, and cultural domains. A more open and dialogic notion taking citizenship as temporal-relational and spatial recognizes individuals as active and legitimate actors who are able to and should also be supported to relate to citizenship as a way of being, belonging, and positioning through structured practices that give meaning to a citizenly life entangled in a constellation of regulations, communities, and significant social and personal life events across state boundaries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".