Mediterranean Mobilities

The upheavals of the Arab Spring grabbed the world’s immediate attention, and concern quickly grew over their potential aftermath, with the fear that a ‘tidal wave’ of immigrants and refugees would ‘flood’ European territory. The Arab Spring has highlighted the Mediterranean as a migration region, and new research is now required to bring to light too often neglected mobility patterns and border practices that predate and outlast the tumultuous spring of 2011. The edited volume Space, Mobility and Borders in the Western Mediterranean tackles these contemporary issues related to migration in the Mediterranean region. It brings together high-quality, original academic contributions from both empirical and theoretical points of view by scholars from diverse disciplines, who draw upon Anglophone, Francophone, Spanish and Italian research. It reexamines borders in the light of a now full-blown body of literature that seeks to capture the complexity of their contemporary features beyond their most direct visual enactments, in particular the sweeping deployment of policing devices and operations along the North/South fault line. Another distinctive binding thread in this book is that it emphasizes migrants as active subjects interacting with local events, national policies and the bordering process. Offering an examination of the intricate interplay among the events of the Arab Spring, migration’s multiple types and actors, and the evolving relationship between migration control and borders in the region, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars of migration studies, European Union Studies and Mediterranean Studies.

This book critically assesses mobilities across the Mediterranean Basin and explores the implications of changing European relationships in the light of observations of the intersectional formation and evolution of identities, behavior and ideas. Further, it discusses the timely topic of a new diversity of migration and mobility practices (personal and virtual mobilities in terms of gender, motivations, emotional geographies, impacts, and circulation) from conceptual and empirical perspectives, providing new insights for scholars and policy makers in the context of urgently needed national and European policies. Mediterranean Mobilities is based on fieldwork in European and non-European countries and on mutual learning and transfer of knowledge among scholars from nine universities in Morocco, Algeria, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, as well as stakeholders in Europe and North Africa. The results stem from the FP7 Marie Curie IRSES project MEDCHANGe coordinated by the book editor. The project comprises fieldwork conducted by distinguished scholars in Europe, Morocco, Algeria and Israel, generating original data and findings on fast changing realities. This book appeals to researchers but also serves as a basic or complementary text in advanced undergraduate, graduate or master’s courses on mobilities/migration, regionalization, cooperation, international relations and Mediterranean studies as part of teaching programs in geography, sociology, international political sciences, as well as programs focusing on regional studies (e.g., European integration). It is also of interest to the professional and institutional community in the wide area of Mediterranean politics, economy and society as well as a general readership.

For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.

Uses epigraphic and linguistic evidence to track movements of people around the ancient Mediterranean.

Material Connections eschews outdated theory, tainted by colonialist attitudes, and develops a new cultural and historical understanding of how factors such as mobility, materiality, conflict and co-presence impacted on the formation of identity in the ancient Mediterranean. Fighting against ‘hyper-specialisation’ within the subject area, it explores the multiple ways that material culture was used to establish, maintain and alter identities, especially during periods of transition, culture encounter and change. A new perspective is adopted, one that perceives the use of material culture by prehistoric and historic Mediterranean peoples in formulating and changing their identities. It considers how objects and social identities are entangled in various cultural encounters and interconnections. The movement of people as well as objects has always stood at the heart of attempts to understand the courses and process of human history. The Mediterranean offers a wealth of such information and Material Connections, expanding on this base, offers a dynamic, new subject of enquiry – the social identify of prehistoric and historic Mediterranean people – and considers how migration, colonial encounters, and connectivity or insularity influence social identities. The volume includes a series of innovative, closely related case studies that examine the contacts amongst various Mediterranean islands – Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, the Balearics – and the nearby shores of Italy, Greece, North Africa, Spain and the Levant to explore the social and cultural impact of migratory, colonial and exchange encounters. Material Connections forges a new path in understanding the material culture of the Mediterranean and will be essential for those wishing to develop their understanding of material culture and identity in the Mediterranean.

"The Mediterranean in the Age of Globalization is a welcome corrective to the tendency to present globalization as a homogenous concept, and the failure to describe how it operates in specific regions. Ribas-Mateos examines globalization and migration across the Mediterranean, using an innovative, integrated framework so as to map social places by describing how social, political, cultural, and economic forces are embedded within a globalizing environment.The author articulates an original and compelling narrative, mapping the Mediterranean as a global place where international and regional forces are intertwined in multiple threads. In doing so, she identifies two key components of globalization--affecting specifically forms of welfare and issues of mobility--in the context of a weakening European welfare state and the relocation and reinforcement of Mediterranean borders. Nine Mediterranean cities are investigated as ""gateway"" cities, which shape two major effects of globalization: welfare and mobility. The book challenges conventional North-South perspectives, and focuses and systematizes the way international migration should be conceptualized.The originality of the book results from the author's fieldwork, which is rich in descriptive detail, and from a theory centered around global perspectives. Seven case studies in Southern Europe--Algeciras, Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Naples, Turin, and Thrace--deal with issues related to migration and the welfare state. She also includes two ethnographies that represent two Mediterranean gateways in the North-South Mediterranean division: Tangiers (in Morocco) and Durres (in Albania), which are mapped as border-cities in the global Mediterranean context. Because of its intrinsically multidisciplinary nature, this superb volume will be of particular interest to academics and social science researchers as well as policymakers and international agencies."

The Mediterranean world is a model that serves the analysis of the dynamic process of cultural identity through approximation and differentiation, through openness and self-assertion, through a constant contact - by way of travel - to foreign regions, cultures and societies. For ancient Greek culture, mobility seems to be a specific characteristic. The same can be said for the Christian, Judaic and Islamic Middle Ages, however, under different or changed circumstances. This publication presents the contributions to an international workshop in cultural analysis, which focused on mobility as a proof of the historical flexibility of Mediterranean cultural systems.

With more than 230 million international tourists a year, the Mediterranean region is the largest tourist destination in the world. This book outlines that its economic importance is matched by its significance as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon. Through a series of ethnographic insights into some of the key sites of mass Mediterranean tourism, it focuses on package tourists' experiences of the serial, banal and depthless spaces that are mushrooming along the coast and the enchantments, dissolutions and dreams that saturate them. Moving away from the notion of authentic places corrupted by mass tourism, the book shows how new forms and spaces are made and remade by the mobilities and performances of locals, workers and tourists. Finally, the book looks at the complex materialities of mass tourism and the many networks that make it possible.