In Melbourne , where I live and work, I teach Asian Studies as an elective at my university . This means that my students choose to do my subjects because of a genuine interest in Asia . However, whenever I enter a lecture or classroom, my students often sit in groups divided by their residency status . International students often sit with other students who may be co-nationals or from their region āfor instance, a Vietnamese student may sit with other Vietnamese students or with a group of international students from China , Malaysia and Singapore . Meanwhile, the domestic students will almost always sit with other domestic students regardless of ethnic heritage . This situation happens despite students sharing other classes with each other, and with some of them in the final year of their degree . Students finishing their degree would have had shared classes with each other for three to four years. This (self) siloing also takes place outside the classroom where international students spend their social time with other international students and domestic students doing the same with their domestic peers (people they are equal to in terms of age, qualifications and social-economic conditions) despite a healthy population of international and domestic students circulating in the Melbourne Central Business District (CBD) . These on-campus and off-campus scenes are all too common across Australia (Arkoudis et al. 2010) despite international students frequently reporting in the annual International Student Barometer that while they enjoyed their Australian education , they regret not cultivating local friendships (Gomes 2015a; Reddon 2014).
Melbourne CBD is a transient space with domestic and local students flowing through it due to the four state universities which occupy different parts of the city . Moreover, as I point out in the Introduction of this book, Melbourne has established itself as an international student city where it is home to 175,000 international students each year (Herbet 2016). Besides the universities, the CBD itself and its immediate surroundings supports numerous institutions catering to international students undertaking English -language studies, foundation programmes and diploma courses as well as branch campuses of interstate universities and colleges. The area is also residence to international students themselves since the city is heavily dominated by apartments occupied by these students .
Whenever I return to Singapore for visits to catch up with non-Singaporean friends living and working in Singapore who may or may not be permanent residents , many express that their friendship circles are more solidly made up of fellow foreigners with similar socio-economic backgrounds and not with Singaporean -born locals. While some of my friends may have, at some stage of their experience in Singapore rented a room with a Singaporean family , none of them had cultivated meaningful relationships with these families despite sharing close proximity in the domestic space. Approximately 80% of Singaporeans live in high-rise apartments leased by the Housing Development Board (HDB), which have anywhere from one to four bedrooms; however, an average four-bedroom apartment for instance, is 110 square metres (Singapore Ministry of Information and Communication 2012). My friends however admit that they almost always had their meals out and only ever returned home to sleep.
Curious to understand more of the experiences of foreigners , in particular their (lack of) relationships with the locals, I started conducting research on transient migrants in both Australia and Singapore (Gomes 2017). 1 I found that my respondents ābe they international students , working professionals or working holiday makers āoverwhelmingly stated that their friends were largely, and sometimes exclusively, made up of other transient migrants . While all respondents expressed a desire to have meaningful relationships within their local community , the reality of their situation was clearly far from such. In previous publications, reflecting on the phenomena of self-siloing for instance, I put forward the argument that my respondents were living in a parallel society. Here I defined a parallel society as one made up exclusively of fellow transient migrants (Gomes 2017, p. 177). Transient migrants ācreate spaces for themselvesā in the receiver nation āfrom their perspective, and so experience what the receiver nation has to offer ā¦ [but only] ā¦ on their termsā (Gomes 2017, pp. 149ā150). Is there more to this transient-local siloing than just the existence of parallel societies? This chapter is a response to my initial thinking about such siloing behaviours.
Introducing Siloed Diversity
Siloed diversity takes place because (transient) migrants rely on a hierarchy of identities they possess while in transience to make connections and disconnections with people. In transience , some identities (e.g. status as an international student, working holiday maker, foreigner working in the receiver nation or global citizen ) may be more uniquely dominant than others (e.g. ethnicity ) 2 as compared to when they are back in their sender countries . The conne...