Hasan Mahmud, Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Liberal Arts Program, has been at Northwestern in Qatar since 2015. His recent monograph, Remittance as Belonging: Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home (Rutgers University Press, 2025), is based on years of field work with Banghladeshi migrants in Tokyo and Los Angeles. We interviewed Dr. Mahmud about his new book.
How would you describe your personal inspiration behind writing this book?
The inspiration came from my experience with Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo as a graduate student at Sophia University. My longstanding academic interest has been understanding “development,” but from a critical point of view, which came from observations of several development programs in rural Bangladesh, where I grew up. I was admitted into the nascent Global Studies program at Sophia University, where I took a course on international migration with a focus on migration and development. The course discussed migrant remittance as an essential alternative source of development funding. I also learned that academics recognize migrants as either self-interested or altruistic in sending remittances. However, I met several Bangladeshi migrants during my evening visits to a Bangladeshi halal (meat) shop, who would share their very human stories of joys and sufferings, determinations and frustrations, despair and hope. I was surprised that the academic discourse did not echo the migrants’ thoughts about their remittance. While the academic discourse was extraneously optimistic and jubilant about the potential of migrant remittance to foster development in migrants’ origin countries, the migrants themselves would talk about how their primary motivation and concern was for their families, and relatives besides themselves. Nowhere in the migration-development discourse did I find the voices of the migrants. Being a migrant and a son of a lower-middle class family in Bangladesh, I could feel the migrants’ frustration about academic and policy discussions that exclude the migrants, that devise institutional mechanisms to channel remittance to development programs that the migrants were least concerned about, that develop normative ideas about pushing migrants’ to prioritize the state’s development goals over their personal and familial priorities. I would connect this with the critical take on development as a form of neo-imperialism whereby the colonial knowledge apparatus continues to marginalize the voice of the previously colonized people. So, I decided to study migration as a way to enrich academic discourse, while also engaging with the migrants to learn their stories of remittance coming from their lived experiences. Gradually, this project became more of a scholarly battle against the coloniality of development discourses that suppress the migrants’ view and obscure more of their lived reality.
What is the work’s key intervention in your field?
Migrant remittances have been celebrated as an alternative source of development funding since the end of the Cold War and the rapid globalization of the 1990s. My book engages with several disciplines that explore globalization, development, and social change, including anthropology, geography, international relations, and sociology. Specifically, I focus on migrant remittances from the migrants' perspective, which allows me to demonstrate how migrants exercise agency within the constraints imposed by various institutions and processes at both local and global levels. This work complements existing scholarship by highlighting aspects of migrant remittances that have been overlooked in academia and policy discussions about development in the Global South. Furthermore, it recognizes the limitations of the top-down approach that often characterizes conventional development discourses. My study offers a corrective perspective by emphasizing the viewpoints of migrants who send remittances, as well as the primary stakeholders involved in the migration-development dynamic. I view my research as a contribution to post-developmentalism, acknowledging the positive impacts of migrant remittances on development while also critically assessing the potential downsides of migration for individuals and their communities.
How would you define your research methodology? How does this methodology sustain your intervention?
I find it challenging to accurately describe my research methodology using traditional textbook examples. I initially began with conventional ethnography combined with a grounded theory approach to understand migrants' perspectives on their remittances. However, I soon realized that I was also part of this study as an international student-migrant and remittance sender. Instead of following the conventional grounded theory ethnography, I adopted a developing form called Global Ethnography. This approach starts with theoretically guided questions and selectively engages with interviewees and their real-life experiences in the field. Throughout my research, I consistently interacted with participants and reflected on my own experiences as a migrant and remitter while writing and analyzing my field notes. Being personally involved and emotionally invested in the study could feel overwhelming, especially when my interviewees shared deeply emotional and troubling experiences. However, these stories were often balanced by narratives of their achievements and fulfillment through remittances. This study has been more than just an academic exercise; it has become a journey of self-discovery and an opportunity to learn about other migrants and their experiences with transnationalism, including remittances.
Besides other academics in your field, what audiences do you most hope will read your book, and what do you hope will be their take-away message?
I was inspired to undertake this study due to my own experiences and those of other migrants, who are often excluded from the dominant academic and policy discussions on migration and development. In my analysis, I focus on the stories of migrants to understand their remittances, which adds depth to the existing policy-centric discourses. I believe that both academics and non-expert educated readers will find my book fascinating and inspiring. Drawing from the experiences of migrants, including my own, I argue that migrant remittances represent more than just transnational economic exchanges. Influenced by various social and cultural factors, remittances reflect migrants' sense of belonging to their families and communities across borders. Rather than simply pursuing personal financial interests, the acts of sending remittances are deeply embedded in care, duty, and aspiration. Therefore, it is crucial to reconceptualize migrant remittances by considering these complexities in order to better understand the causes and consequences, as well as the implications of migrant transnationalism for individuals and society.
