Taiwanese Identity as a Global Identity: The Networks of Skilled Labour Migrants in the UK and Canada
What is “Taiwanese identity”? How should we understand it in globalized professional communities and industries? On Tuesday, 19 October, Professor Fiona Moore will talk about her insightful book “Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World” and share her findings around the meaning of the emerging “Taiwaneseness” in global Asian communities. All are welcome.
Professor Moore is the Professor of Business Anthropology at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on cultures, identities, and gender within global businesses and organizations. Her new book “Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World” explores how Taiwanese migrants in Canada and the United Kingdom construct, negotiate, and use their ethnic/national identities to expand and maintain their local and cross-national professional networks.
Abstract：Many people have pointed to recent nationalisation movements and the worldwide lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic as heralding the end of globalisation. However, these same events have also shown us that globalisation can be resilient and adaptive: and, furthermore, that the migration of ideas and people continues despite pressures to the contrary.
Through a study of Taiwanese skilled labour migrants and their families in the UK and in Canada, and of Taiwan itself as their society of origin, I examine the role identity plays in the network-building and career strategies of Taiwanese people overseas, and how their seemingly local identities as “Taiwanese” allow them to construct world-spanning networks. This process gives us insight into how, and why, globalisation processes continue to flourish despite pressures to localise, as well as into the ways in which Taiwan is developing as a player on the world business stage.
