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In the following, the region of Southeast Asia will be introduced by offering an overview of the recent developments regarding demographic transition, socioeconomic change, social inequality and the diversification of migration patterns. We will sketch out, how young people fare in the face of these conditions, especially with regard to their own or their families' mobilities. Finally, the four contributions of this section, each reflecting a specific context of Southeast Asia's transnational societies and the related intergenerational dynamics, will be introduced.

This paper aims to ascertain whether and to what degree universities are becoming organizational actors globally. Utilizing an original dataset of a sample of 500 globally oriented universities, we explore how universities have increasingly become organizational actors as is the case of American universities. We consider the following indicators of university transformation into organization actors: development or institutional advancement, diversity or inclusion, legalization, and internationalization goals and structures. We find that these globally oriented universities have created international, development, and legal offices. Surprisingly, nearly half of the universities in our sample also have diversity offices. These “getting organized” indicators are somewhat similar to what holds for American universities, suggesting that there is globalization of organizational actorhood among universities. At the same time, however, we find that there are pronounced regional differences, especially when it comes to organizing around diversity and legal affairs.

This paper describes the parent–child relationships of upper-middle-class Chinese parents and their adolescent children who were “parachuted” to the United States for private high schools. With parents remaining in China and children in the United States, thousands of miles away, such a transnational educational arrangement complicates the already volatile parent–child relationships during the adolescent years. Through ethnographic interviews of 41 students and 33 parents, I demonstrate different forms of child–parent relationships in a transnational education setting: those who found that the further physical and temporal distance has brought the parent–child relationship closer through frequent communications, children who experienced “accelerated growth” yet questioned the necessity, and delicate parent–child relationships due to increasing transnational cross-cultural or intergenerational differences. These types of parent–child relationships are not comprehensive of all the lived experiences of the “parachute generation,” yet they shed new light on transnational education and the unintended emotional dimensions of educational migration. In a transnational context for an economically well-off group, parental absence or separation of children and parents is no longer a clear-cut concept and has different layers of meanings, taking into account the frequency of communication, duration of spring and winter breaks and the existence of third-party agents such as for-profit intermediaries (or educational consultants) and host families. The diverse patterns of parent–child relations reveal the heterogeneity and complexities of “doing family” across geographic spaces and global educational hierarchies, as well as the roles of communication technologies, the tempo of mobilities and educational intermediaries.