Re-centring Diverse Practices and Geographies of Transnational Migrant Giving

Dr Kavita Datta (Queen Mary)

Transnational migrants’ giving practices are predominantly understood in relation to remittance sending with far less attention afforded to other migrant practices of giving. While scholars acknowledge that remittances encompass a diverse range of practices from personal transnational financial investments to intra-household transfers to charitable giving, the latter has been arguably eclipsed in most research on transnational giving. The more recent suggestion of a ‘remittance-philanthropy’ continuum affords an opportunity to disentangle complex and diverse practices and geographies of transnational migrant giving which move beyond the hegemonic lens of remittance giving. Drawing upon empirical research conducted with Somali migrant men and women in the East End of London, this presentation has three interrelated aims: first to provide more integrated and nuanced understandings of migrant giving; second to document diverse economies of giving in migrant communities paying particular attention to the motivations, mechanisms and geographies of charitable giving which underpin them; and third to ‘theorise back’ on dominant western models of giving. In so doing, the presentation seeks to enrich understandings of, and contribute to new research agendas on, transnational migrant giving.

Dr Kavita Datta (Queen Mary) Re-centring Diverse Practices and Geographies of Transnational Migrant Giving

About the Speaker

Dr Kavita Datta is a Reader in Geography and Director of the Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary University of London. She is a development geographer with research interests in transnational migration, finance and gender. These interests have been developed in a series of projects investigating the changing nature, politics and sensibility of work and transnational migration to global cities like London; the everyday financial practices of new migrant communities in relation to credit, remittances and banking and the scope and scale of Muslim migrants’ philanthropic networks in London in a post-recessionary context. Kavita has published widely and is author of Migrants and their Money (Policy Press) and co-author of Global Cities at Work: New Migrant Divisions of Labour (Policy Press). She is Co-Editor of Area: A Journal of the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers.

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: cb92@soas.ac.uk