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.

Miloš 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 Špela Drnovšek 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).