In this chapter, the focus is on hybrids as another form of subjectivity taking shape under conditions of mobility. The previous chapter focused on transmigrants, emphasizing the agentic and reflexive nature of transnational selves that are formed with particular attention to issues of belonging, nationhood, and race/ethnicity. The emphasis herein is on the creation of novel ways of being and belonging to the social world that take shape through transnational scales. The added element beyond the agentic and reflexive consideration of the previous chapter is the creative, emergent, and novel aspects of subjectivity that take shape depending on context and encounters. These new hybrid subjectivities are not readily represented by the axioms of diversity and difference research as they use problematic notions of identity and culture as the main frameworks. Notably, such subjectivities arrive out of the intersections of three important considerations: the epistemic, social, and material dimensions as understood from a transnational lens. Hence, this chapter focuses on those elements that make hybrid selves the new subjects of work and, in doing so, provides alternative ways for theorizing and studying subjectivities arriving out of mobility ontologies. To achieve this, the first section provides an outline of what constitutes hybrid selves followed by how such subjectivities manifest themselves at work through empirical examples. In the third and final section, there is discussion of the epistemic, social, and material dimensions that altogether allow for the emergence of hybrid selves with implications around how differences are studied and valued in MOS.

Understanding hybrids

Hybrid selves and hybridity more broadly is an approach to understanding in-between, third space subjectivities that arise from the encounters between/among different people and cultures, where culture is understood as a shifting set of scripts, narratives, and sense of the world. As a concept that speaks to liminal spaces, hybridity also has currency in postcolonial traditions (Young, 1995/2005; Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006; Özkazanç-Pan, 2008), in literature (Bakhtin, 1981) and in work that speaks to the intersections of feminism and cultural studies (Anzaldúa, 1987; Saldívar-Hull, 2000). In postcolonial traditions, hybridity speaks to those agentic colonizer-colonized encounters whereby the rules of recognition were being defied, including attempts to subvert colonial authority (Fanon, 1952/2008, 1963; Bhabha, 1990).