Abstract
Despite the spread of globalization discourses focusing on capital market and ubiquitous information technology, more attention to the meanings of “place”, “constructed structure”, “communities” and everyday practices investigated from ethnic studies in urban sociology has been increasing.In this paper, I try to reconstitute the concepts and methodology of ethnic studies in the discussion of the “transnationalism from below” theories by considering the reason that urban sociology incorporated the ethnic studies into its research.
In the first section, I indicate the difficulties of migration research from “a structural perspective” that has been advanced in the research field of Global Sociology in Japan.In the second section, I reconsider the original subjects of the research of urban ethnicities, and, I approve the idea that the meanings of ethnic problems occur in a transitional, splitting and new generaton.In the third section, I demonstrate that the main theme and the concepts of the ethnic studies are regenerated in the transnationalism from below theories, and insist that we should research the generating processes of other networks of meaning and power by investigating the everyday practices in transnational communities.Finally, I show that we can open up a new research field in above mentioned subjects.
