Mobilities of Self and Place


Book Description

When it comes to migration, there is no level playing field. Some people are privileged, advantaged, and supported and others are marginalised, persecuted, and traumatised. The extension of the rights and equalities for which many people advocate, and provision of other extrinsic conditions are insufficient for wellbeing. This work asks: what is sufficient? What is it that people do—and can do—to change their experience from suffering to wellbeing when handling challenges of migration and other mobilities? What helps people when they are migrating? What have migrants experienced and learned that could be useful to others facing challenges of mobility and change? How can this learning be applied to promote greater social wellbeing and care of environments, in an increasingly mobile world? Mobilities of Self and Place documents rich conversations with regular migrants and refugees to critically consider migration history, human rights, place, self, and mobilities studies. The work explores ontological and epistemological questions of sense of self, sense of place, identity and agency. Mahni Dugan helps us understand how the relationship between sense of place and sense of self affects the ability of migrants to relocate with wellbeing. The movement from global to local, social to personal, intellectual to experiential offers a broad societal understanding of the phenomena and challenges of contemporary mobilities.




Intimate Mobilities


Book Description

As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.




The Ethics of Mobilities


Book Description

With this book the international academic discourse on mobility is taken a step further, through the intertwined perspectives of different social sciences, engineering and the humanities. The Ethics of Mobilities builds upon the recent interest in social surveillance, widening the theme to encompass a broad scale of questions, ranging from freedom and escape to social exclusion and control, thus raising important questions of ethics, identity and metaphysics.




Mobility and Independence


Book Description




Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy


Book Description

Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy challenges prevailing conceptions of a natural tie to the land and a demographically settled world. It argues that much human mobility in the last millennium BC was ongoing and cyclical. In particular, outside the military context 'the foreigner in our midst' was not regarded as a problem. Boundaries of status rather than of geopolitics were those difficult to cross. The book discusses the stories of individuals and migrant groups, traders, refugees, expulsions, the founding and demolition of sites, and the political processes that could both encourage and discourage the transfer of people from one place to another. In so doing it highlights moments of change in the concepts of mobility and the definitions of those on the move. By providing the long view from history, it exposes how fleeting are the conventions that take shape here and now.




Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas


Book Description

This collection brings together a variety of anthropological, historical and sociological case studies from Central Asia and the Caucasus to examine the concept of translocality. The chapters scrutinize the capacity of translocality to describe, in new ways, the multiple mobilities, exchange practices and globalizing processes that link places, people and institutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus with others in Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Illuminating translocality as a productive concept for studying cross‐regional connectivities and networks, this volume is an important contribution to a lively field of academic discourse. Following new directions in Area Studies, the chapters aim to overcome ‘territorial containers’ such as the nation‐state or local community, and instead emphasize the significance of processes of translation and negotiation for understanding how meaningful localities emerge beyond conventional boundaries. Structured by the four themes ‘crossing boundaries’, ‘travelling ideas’, ‘social and economic movements’ and ‘pious endeavours’, this volume proposes three conceptual approaches to translocality: firstly, to trace how it is embodied, narrated, virtualized or institutionalized within or in reference to physical or imagined localities; secondly, to understand locality as a relational concept rather than a geographically bounded unit; and thirdly, to consider cross‐border traders, travelling students, business people and refugees as examples of non-elite mobilities that provide alternative ways to think about what ‘global’ means today. Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas will be of interest to students and scholars of the anthropology, history and sociology of Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as for those interested in new approaches to Area Studies.




Staging Mobilities


Book Description

This text is about the fact that mobility is more than movement between point A and B. It concerns how the movement of people, goods, information, and signs influences human understandings of self, other and the built environment.




Mobilities, Literature, Culture


Book Description

This is the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars’ engagement with mobilities scholarship. As such, the volume both advances new theoretical approaches to the study of culture and furthers the recent “humanities turn” in mobilities studies. The book’s scholarship is deeply informed by cultural geography’s vision of a mobilised reconceptualisation of space and place, but also by the contribution of literary scholars in articulating questions of travel, technologies of transport, (post)colonialism and migration through a close engagement with textual materials. A comprehensive introduction maps pre-histories and emerging directions of this exciting interdisciplinary endeavor while taking up the theoretical and methodological challenges of the burgeoning subfield. Contributions range across geographical and disciplinary boundaries to address questions of embodied subjectivities, mobility and the nation, geopolitics of migration, and mobilities futures.




Lifestyle Mobilities


Book Description

Being mobile in today's world is influenced by many aspects including transnational ties, increased ease of access to transport, growing accessibility to technology, knowledge and information and changing socio-cultural outlooks and values. These factors can all engender a (re)formation of our everyday life and moving - as and for lifestyle - has, in many ways, become both easier and much more complex. This book highlights the crossroads between concepts of lifestyle and the growing body of work on 'mobilities'. The study of lifestyle offers a lens through which to study the kinds of moorings, dwellings, repetitions and routines around which mobilities become socially, culturally and politically meaningful. Bringing together scholars from geography, sociology, tourism, history and beyond, the authors illustrate the breadth and richness of mobilities research through the concept of lifestyle. Organised into four sections, the book begins by dealing with aspects of bodily performance through lifestyle mobility. Section two then looks at how we can use mobile methods within social research, whilst section three explores issues surrounding ideas of mobility, immobility and belonging. Finally, section four draws together a number of chapters that focus on the complexities of identity within mobility. Often drawing on ethnographic research, contributors all share one common feature: they are at the forefront of research into lifestyle mobilities.




Mobility and Displacement


Book Description

This book explores and contests both outsiders’ projections of Mongolia and the self-objectifying tropes Mongolians routinely deploy to represent their own country as a land of nomads. It speaks to the experiences of many societies and cultures that are routinely treated as exotic, romantic, primitive or otherwise different and Other in Euro-American imaginaries, and how these imaginaries are also internally produced by those societies themselves. The assumption that Mongolia is a nomadic nation is largely predicated upon Mongolia’s environmental and climatic conditions, which are understood to make Mongolia suitable for little else than pastoral nomadism. But to the contrary, the majority of Mongolians have been settled in and around cities and small population centers. Even Mongolians who are herders have long been unable to move freely in a smooth space, as dictated by the needs of their herds, and as they would as free-roaming "nomads." Instead, they have been subjected to various constraints across time that have significantly limited their movement. The book weaves threads from disparate branches of Mongolian studies to expose various visible and invisible constraints on population mobility in Mongolia from the Qing period to the post-socialist era. With its in-depth analysis of the complexities of the relationship between land rights, mobility, displacement, and the state, the book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of cultural geography, political geography, heritage and culture studies, as well as Eurasian and Inner-Asian Studies. Winner of the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award (AAG, 2022)