Cultural Mobility

Cultural Mobility offers a model for understanding the patterns of meaning that human societies create. It has emerged under the very distinguished editorial guidance of Stephen Greenblatt and represents a new way of thinking about culture and cultures with which scholars in many disciplines will need to engage.

Meritocracy today involves the idea that whatever your social position at birth, society ought to offer enough opportunity and mobility for ‘talent’ to combine with ‘effort’ in order to ‘rise to the top’. This idea is one of the most prevalent social and cultural tropes of our time, as palpable in the speeches of politicians as in popular culture. In this book Jo Littler argues that meritocracy is the key cultural means of legitimation for contemporary neoliberal culture – and that whilst it promises opportunity, it in fact creates new forms of social division. Against Meritocracy is split into two parts. Part I explores the genealogies of meritocracy within social theory, political discourse and working cultures. It traces the dramatic U-turn in meritocracy’s meaning, from socialist slur to a contemporary ideal of how a society should be organised. Part II uses a series of case studies to analyse the cultural pull of popular ‘parables of progress’, from reality TV to the super-rich and celebrity CEOs, from social media controversies to the rise of the ‘mumpreneur’. Paying special attention to the role of gender, ‘race’ and class, this book provides new conceptualisations of the meaning of meritocracy in contemporary culture and society.

This book explores the issue of cultural mobility within the interwar network of the European avant-garde, focusing on selected writers, artists, architects, magazines and groups from Poland, Belgium and Netherlands. Regardless of their apparent linguistic, cultural and geographical remoteness, their mutual exchange and relationships were both deep and broad, and of great importance for the wider development of interwar avant-garde literature, art and architecture. This analysis is based on a vast research corpus encompassing original, often previously overlooked periodicals, publications and correspondence gathered from archives around the world.

In June 2014, Brazil opened the twentieth FIFA World Cup with a spectacular ceremony. Hosting the World Cup was a strategic developmental priority for Brazil: mega-events such as these allow the country to be ranked amongst the world’s political and economic leaders, and are supposed to propel the country to its own unique modernity. But alongside the increased media attention and publicity, came accusations of governmental ‘corruption’ and overspending. In Socio-Cultural Mobility and Mega-Events, Tzanelli uses Brazil’s 2014 World Cup to explore how mega-events articulate socio-cultural problems. Critically examining the aesthetics and ethics of mobilities in the mega-event, this book explores these socio-cultural issues and controversies: the background of staging mega-events, including the bidding process and the host’s expectations for returns; ceremonial staging and communications between artistic representations and national symbolism; the clear reaction mega-events almost always generate in national, regional and global activist circles, including accusations of overspending and human rights violations. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of mobility, sociology of globalisation, cultural sociology, social and anthropological theory, as well as the sociology of sport, human and cultural geography, and leisure and tourism studies.

Over the past 10 to 15 years there has emerged an increasing concern with mobility in the social sciences and humanities. Here, Peter Merriman provides a contribution to the mobilities turn in the social sciences, encouraging academics to rethink the relationship between movement, embodied practices, space and place.

Our world is unquestionably one in which ubiquitous movements of people, goods, technologies, media, money, and ideas produce systems of flows. Comparing case studies from across the world, including those from Benin, the United States, India, Mali, Senegal, Japan, Haiti, and Romania, this book focuses on quotidian landscapes of mobility. Despite their seemingly familiar and innocuous appearances, these spaces exert tremendous control over our behavior and activities. By examining and mapping the politics of place and motion, this book analyzes human beings’ embodied engagements with their built world and provides diverse perspectives on the ideological and political underpinnings of landscapes of mobility. In order to describe landscapes of mobility as a historically, socially, and politically constructed condition, the book is divided into three sections-objects, contacts, and flows. The first section looks at elements that constitute such landscapes, including mobile bodies, buildings, and practices across multiple geographical scales. As these variable landscapes are reconstituted under particular social, economic, ecological, and political conditions, the second section turns to the particular practices that catalyze embodied relations within and across such spaces. Finally, the last section explores how the flows of objects, bodies, interactions, and ecologies are represented, presenting a critical comparison of the means by which relations, processes, and exchanges are captured, depicted, reproduced and re-embodied.

What determines how cities move on? The ever-increasing challenges to urban mobility come in many forms, and approaches to address them range from the technically ingenious to attempts to change travel behaviour. Key amongst factors essential to the success of any such approach is whether the urban environment proves to be fertile ground for the desired progress. Another vital determinant of success is how well individual measures to engineer the transport system interact with other developments. This leads to the principal subject of Megacity Mobility Culture: the basic principles that determine the paths along which cities move. This book demonstrates that the concept of ‘mobility culture’ provides a framework for understanding the development of urban transport which transcends the boundaries between academic disciplines. Based on a discussion of the diversity of megacities worldwide, it provides help in navigating the complexity of megacity mobility culture. Experts from megacities around the world each take the reader on a journey to their own city and its mobility culture, giving a deeper insight into the unique evolutionary paths of mobility that these places have taken, and what lies before them. Whilst acknowledging the overwhelming diversity of cities worldwide, the authors also identify common denominators behind the evolution of urban transport systems – seven temperaments which are found in a unique mix in any given city, defining the character of its mobility culture. The Institute for Mobility Research is a research facility of the BMW Group. It deals with future developments and challenges relating to mobility across all modes of transport, with automobility being only one aspect among many. Taking on an international perspective, ifmo’s activities focus on social science and sociopolitical, economic and ecological issues, but also extend to cultural questions related to the key challenges facing the future of mobility. The work of the Institute is supported by an interdisciplinary board of renowned scientists and scholars, and by representatives of BMW, Deutsche Bahn, Lufthansa, MAN, Siemens and The World Bank.