Global mobility – high-skilled professionals and their families
Highly-educated professionals are increasingly mobile across borders – seeking fulfilling, and well remunerated jobs, and maybe a different lifestyle. Such mobility is not frictionless – skills and expertise are not always fully recognized or used by new employers, for a range of reasons that can be hard for newcomers to discern or unpick.
It can be difficult to find professional or social networks in a new society. Partners and children can struggle with the transition. But these families also embrace the upsides of mobility – cosmopolitan orientations, international credentials, cultural and linguistic flexibility, imagining futures on a transnational scale, living in privileged spaces.
My research documents the experiences of these high-skilled professionals. It helps the companies employing them understand how to retain and support their expensive hires. Related issues I research include family practices, parenting decisions around education, negotiations around identity and belonging.
My work has been funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark, the Independent Research Fund Denmark, the Israeli Science Foundation, and the British Association of Comparative and International Education.
Recent publications include:
Beech, J., Koh, A., Maxwell, C., Yemini, M., Tucker, K. & Barrenechea, I. (2021) ‘Cosmopolitan start-up’ capital: mobility and school choices of global middle class parents. Cambridge Journal of Education, 51(4): 527-541. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2020.1863913
Yemini, M., Maxwell, C., Koh, A., Tucker, K., Barrenechea, I. & Beech, J. (2020) Mobile nationalism: parenting and articulations of belonging among globally mobile professionals. Sociology, 54(6):1212-1229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520933457
Maxwell, C. & Yemini. M. (2019) Modalities of cosmopolitanism and mobility: parental education strategies of global, immigrant and local middle-class Israelis. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(5): 616-632. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019.1570613
Please email me if you would like a full PDF of any of these papers.