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This chapter discusses the employment of migrant women to work as ‘nannies’ in private homes in the United Kingdom.¹ The term nanny has been used in the United Kingdom to denote a ‘qualified childcare professional’ (Cox, 2006; Gregson & Lowe, 1994). In this chapter, however, I argue that in 2010 it also referred to a form of deprofessionalised unqualified childcare provided in private homes across the United Kingdom. Migrant women have long been over-represented in care and domestic work in a range of advanced and emerging states (Anderson, 2007; Lutz, 2008) and this form of deprofessionalised nanny employment was no exception. This alternative use of the term nanny in the United Kingdom therefore referred with increasing frequency to migrant women who could be tasked with caring for children while also shopping, cooking, cleaning, driving, providing homework assistance etc. The chapter argues further that deprofessionalised nanny employment, occurring as it did in private domestic spaces and in the context of very low levels of state control, was likely to be characterised by high levels of informality (Cyrus, 2008). This meant that an important element of the childcare and associated domestic work sector in the United Kingdom was performed illegally. Deprofessionalisation and informality in the employment of (often migrant) nannies in the United Kingdom is troubling not only because of its association with illegal employment but also because it represented a marked failure to realise the demands for the upgrading of the status of care- and housework that have been key themes of feminist debate since the 1970s (Lutz, 2008).

We focus our study on children of immigrants in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) fields because children of immigrants represent a diverse pool of future talent in those fields. We posit that children of immigrants may have a higher propensity to prepare for entering STEM fields, and our analysis finds some evidence to support this conjecture. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS: 88-00) and its restricted postsecondary transcript data, we examine three key milestones in the STEM pipeline: (1) highest math course taken during high school, (2) initial college major in STEM, and (3) bachelor’s degree attainment in STEM. Using individual level NELS data and country-level information from UNESCO and NSF, we find that children of immigrants of various countries of origin, with the exception of Mexicans, are more likely than children of natives to take higher-level math courses during high school. Asian and white children of immigrants are more likely to complete STEM degrees than third-generation whites. Drawing on theories of immigrant incorporation and cultural capital, we discuss the rationales for these patterns and the policy implications of these findings.

This article attempts to synthesize the contributions of Jagdish Sheth to the discipline. This is done by following the development of the field in various subdisciplines such that one can observe the impact Sheth's thinking has had on the field. This is the career of an “accidental marketer” who started as a social scientist, got interested in buyer behavior, and made his mark in that field. Noticing similarities between organizational buyer behavior and individual buyer behavior, he ventured into that field too. As a visionary, he started developing theories in international marketing in the seventies, which was a popular area that time. Similarly, he published a handbook on Customer Relationship Marketing and worked in the area before it became a major area of emphasis. As a multifaceted person, he has contributed to the practitioners through books and consulting projects. However, this article focuses mainly on his academic contributions including his research, teaching/mentoring, and his philanthropic activities.

This chapter explores theory and local context of socially constructed pandemic fears during COVID-19; how material and non-material fear objects are construed, interpreted and understood by communities, and how fears disrupt social norms and influence pandemic behavioural responses. We aimed to understand the lived experiences of pandemic-induced fears in socioculturally diverse communities in eastern Indonesia in the context of onto-epistemological disjunctures between biomedically derived public health interventions, local world views and causal-remedial explanations for the crisis. Ethnographic research conducted among several communities in East Nusa Tenggara province in Indonesia provided the data and analyses presented in this chapter, delineating the extent to which fear played a decisive role in both internal, felt experience and social relations. Results illustrate how fear emotions are constructed and acted upon during times of crisis, arising from misinformation, rumour, socioreligious influence, long-standing tradition and community understandings of modernity, power and biomedicine. The chapter outlines several sociological theories on fear and emotion and interrogates a post-pandemic future.

The production of the ‘good life’ or the ‘less bad-life’ (Berlant, 2007, 2011), especially among generations of the Marcos dictatorship and the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue revolutions (henceforth, EDSA revolutions) in the Philippines, is animated by the ‘mobility imperative’ (Farrugia, 2016). The mobility imperative includes processes that encourage or demand mobility (Farrugia, 2016) for individuals and institutions. It figures in various ‘systems of practice’ (Levitt, 1998, 2001) among families in migrant-sending communities, government and corporations that magnify how migration is the ticket to better life (McKay, 2012) or its glorification as a heroic act (de los Reyes, 2013, 2014). Among the generations of the Martial Law and the EDSA revolutions, therefore, the ‘good life’ is hinged upon departure as professionals (e.g. nurses and engineers), workers in elementary occupations (e.g. construction and domestic workers) or mail-order brides or pen pals. Put simply, the good life in these generations is a function of remittances.

This chapter examines how the contemporary generation of young people construct the ‘good life’ in differential and new terms (de los Reyes, 2023; McKay & Brady, 2005) from previous generations. Using interviews and vision boards of left-behind children (15–18 years old), it argues that left-behind children critically appraise the ‘mobility imperative’. The chapter shows that there is a growing imagination of alternatives to the migration-induced good life among left-behind children, and therefore, they gradually refuse the ‘mobility imperative’. For them, the aspired good life consists of potentially being employees or entrepreneurs in their own villages and living a life with their own families (de los Reyes, 2019, 2020).

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

My ‘lost project’ is captured in a recollection of a senior school ball, my final ethnographic encounter following 15 months of fieldwork in a middle class government high school, from which students barely get a mention in any of the publications stemming out of the overall project. Two questions are pursued in the paper, focused firstly on why students were ignored in the final rendering of my doctoral research and why I continued to continue to research student groups so actively right up to the end point of the project? Attributing this apparently contradictory set of circumstances to an anthropological commitment to holism that eschews the smallness of studies of groups and sites and fail to take account of broader socio-political contexts, the author is content enough in acknowledging that insights reported here would not have emerged without an ongoing commitment to an engaged holism throughout the whole of the project.