Governing Global Talent

The session opened with a presentation by Özden Bulutbeyaz, a sociologist with an MA from Free University Berlin currently seeking a doctoral position, whose comparative policy research examines how Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands have positioned themselves as destinations for highly skilled migrants. Her study interrogates how “global talent” frameworks shape labor market governance and migrant selectivity, and how post-Brexit realignments and shifting labor market demands are reconfiguring high-skilled mobility governance across the three contexts.

Lived Experience, Belonging, and Migrant Realities

The second presentation came from Cindy Novaria Nada Karina, a self-taught fiction writer, family migrant, and MSc International Development Studies student based in Amsterdam, who writes under the pen name Cindy Colijn. Drawing on her own experience of migration and belonging, as well as her academic background, she shared two works of literary fiction: By Her Own Means, which follows a migrant graduate navigating job-market exclusion and questions of dignity in Amsterdam, and Soft Doors, which explores the emotional and structural realities of building a life across migrant and LGBTQ+ experiences. Her presentation raised productive questions for the group about the role of fiction in rendering visible the human realities that migration research often struggles to capture.

Transnational Aging and the Politics of Return

The session closed with a presentation by Jasper Singh, a doctoral researcher in Psychological Anthropology at the University of Münster currently in the fieldwork phase of her PhD, whose project Homeward Bound examines how highly skilled Indian returnees from Gulf Cooperation Council countries invest in remittance houses not simply as financial assets but as affective practices through which they negotiate nostalgia, social distinction, and aspirations for the future. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography, biographical interviews, photovoice, and object-related conversations, her work brings affect and material culture to the centre of debates on transnational aging and return migration.

The ARC-M Migration Dialogue Group looks forward to continuing these conversations in upcoming sessions.