This book is the result of many years of transnational living, being and belonging, spanning the majority of my childhood and adult life. The language of transnational migration studies has allowed me to theorize and give voice to those experiences and practices that were often found in my own life and experiences. Yet in my doctoral training at a business school, I found that the majority of concepts, frameworks, and tools available to study ‘people like me’ and many of my colleagues and friends simply did not account for the complexity of transnational lives. Under the guidance of my advisor, Prof. Marta B. Calás, transnationalism and migration studies became important lenses to examine lives that were often not accounted for in most mainstream cross-cultural management and diversity literatures. Over the course of a decade, these frameworks have provided some insights not only in my personal and professional life but also for the direction of my work and the kinds of research questions I have been able to ask.

True to the transnational experiences and subjectivities highlighted in this book, the writing of the book is no different than the very concepts discussed herein. This book was written over the course of one year in Guilford, CT, Boston, MA, Providence, RI, New York City, Istanbul, Turkey, Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia—each place reflecting a space and place that I inhabited long term or for short durations of time. These travels and the transnational modes that accompanied the mobility allowed me to not only see the ways in which being and belonging were taking shape in different contexts, but to also embody it. During the summer of 2018, a trip to a seaside resort in Turkey yielded a conversation with a young adult who had left his home country of Kazakhstan to live and work in the area. He spoke little Turkish but a lot more English—he was a waiter at the restaurant in the resort and his main concern was that the tourists from mostly Arab-speaking Middle East countries had learned Turkish during their extended stays in Turkey and not as much English. Thus, he was barely able to speak with them but still expected to wait on them.