Mobilities On The Margins

This open access book examines places on the margins and the dynamics through which a marginal position of a place is created. Specifically, it explores how places, mostly in sparsely populated areas, often perceived as immobile and frozen in time, come into being and develop through interference of everyday mobilities and creative practices that cut across the spheres of culture and nature as usually defined. Through fieldwork and case studies from areas in Iceland, Finland, Greenland, and Scotland, the book’s twelve chapters draw out the multiple relations through which places emerge, where people compose their lives as best they can with their surroundings. A special concern is to explore the links between travelling, landscape, and material culture and how places and margins are enacted through mobilities and creative practices of humans and other beings. The emphasis on mobility disturbs the perception of a place as a bounded entity and offers a useful and necessary understanding of places as mobile and fluid. Mobilities on the Margins is a novel and timely contribution to the exploration of human and more-than-human interactions in a world of increasingly fluid mobilities and insistent crises.

This open access book examines places on the margins and the dynamics through which a marginal position of a place is created. Specifically, it explores how places, mostly in sparsely populated areas, often perceived as immobile and frozen in time, come into being and develop through interference of everyday mobilities and creative practices that cut across the spheres of culture and nature as usually defined. Through fieldwork and case studies from areas in Iceland, Finland, Greenland, and Scotland, the book’s twelve chapters draw out the multiple relations through which places emerge, where people compose their lives as best they can with their surroundings. A special concern is to explore the links between travelling, landscape, and material culture and how places and margins are enacted through mobilities and creative practices of humans and other beings. The emphasis on mobility disturbs the perception of a place as a bounded entity and offers a useful and necessary understanding of places as mobile and fluid. Mobilities on the Margins is a novel and timely contribution to the exploration of human and more-than-human interactions in a world of increasingly fluid mobilities and insistent crises.

This edited volume explores the idea of Europe through a focus on its margins. The chapters in the volume inquire critically into the relations and tensions inherent in divisions between the Global North and the Global South as well as internal regional differentiation within Europe itself. In doing so, the volume stresses the need to consider Europe from critical interdisciplinary perspectives, highlighting historical and contemporary issues of racism and colonialism. While recent discussions of migration into ‘Fortress Europe’ seem to assume that Europe has clearly demarcated geographic, political and cultural boundaries, this book argues that the reality is more complex. The book explores margins conceptually and positions margins and centres as open to negotiation and contestation and characterized by ambiguity. As such, margins can be contextualized in relation to hierarchies within Europe, with different processes involved in creating boundaries and borders between different kinds of Europes and Europeans. Deploying case studies from different places, such as Iceland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the UK, Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Sicily, European colonies in the Caribbean and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors analyse how different geopolitical hierarchies intersect with racialized subject positions of diverse people living in Europe, while also exploring issues of gender, class, sexuality, religion and nationality. Some chapters draw attention to the fortification of Europe’s ‘borderland,’ while others focus on internal hierarchies within Europe, critiquing the meaning of spatial boundaries in an increasingly digitalized Europe. In doing so, the chapters interrogate the hierarchies at play in the processes of being and becoming ‘European’ and the ongoing impacts of race and colonialism. This timely and thought-provoking collection will be of considerable significance to those in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in Europe. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This handbook provides an overview of developments in the youth mobility and migration research field, with specific emphasis on movement for education, work and training purposes, encompassing exchanges sponsored by institutions, governments and international agencies, and free movement. The collection features over 30 theoretically and empirically-based discussions of the meaning and key aspects of various forms of mobility as practiced in contemporary societies, and concludes with an exploration of the costs and benefits of moving abroad to individuals and societies at a time when the viability of free circulation is being called into question. The geographical scope of the book covers Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas, and takes into account socio-economic and regional inequalities, as well as recent developments such as the refugee crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. The book integrates the fields of youth mobility and migration studies, creating opportunities for the establishment of a new paradigm for understanding the spatial circulation of youth and young adults in the twenty-first century.

This is a study on the creative appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by mobile Africans and the communities to which they belong, home and away. With a focus on Cameroonian migrants from Pinyin and Mankon who are currently living in Cape Town and the Netherlands, this book examines the workings of the social fabric of mobile communities. It sheds light on how these communities are crafting lives for themselves in the host country and simultaneously linking up with the home country thanks to advances in ICTs and road and air transport. ICTs and mobilities have complemented social relational interaction and provide migrants today with opportunities to partake in cultural practices that express their Pinyin-ness and Mankon-ness. Pinyin and Mankon migrants are still as rooted in the past as they are in the present. They were born into a community with its own sense of home, moral ethos and cultural pride but live in a context of accelerated ICTs and mobility that is fast changing the way they live their lives. Drawing on this detailed ethnographic case study and related literature, Henrietta Nyamnjoh argues that while ICTs continue to enhance mobility for those who move and for those who stay put, they have become inextricably linked in forging networks and reconfiguring existing ones. Contrary to earlier studies that predicted radical social change and the passing of traditional societies in the face of new technologies, ICTs have been appropriated to enhance the workings of existing social relations and ways of life while simultaneously pointing to new directions in ever more creative and innovative ways.

In social theory and sociology, time and travel in technological cultures is one of the new and challenging research topics in the 'mobilities turn'. Yet surprisingly, contemporary practices of mobility have till now, seen only limited theorization within these disciplines. By analyzing historic and contextualized transit practices, this revealing book argues that travel cannot now simply be reduced to getting from A to B; it is an integrated part of everyday life. In this area, researching how problems can be identified as dilemmas and reformulated as design problems helps create a new vocabulary; one which will not only change the agenda in the debate on mobility problems in the public domain, but will also suggest new ways of theorizing mobility innovations. In this fascinating book, author Peters: develops a conceptual framework to study contemporary transit practices and evaluate innovation strategies gives new insights regarding historic and contemporary design strategies and regarding innovations related to travel in technological cultures gives special attention to electronic timespaces and ICT based mobility innovations investigates cases of travel in technological cultures, car travel, air travel, and cycling in Dutch towns. An original and provocative contribution to the emerging field of mobilities, this book will become an essential resource for advanced undergraduate, post-graduate, researchers and practitioners in the fields of sociology, geography, spatial planning, policy and transportation studies.

Marginality does not mean isolation. In Africa where people are permanently on the move in search, inter alia, of a 'better elsewhere', marginality means disconnection to obvious possibilities and the invisibility of the myriad connections that make life possible for the ordinarily sidestepped. This book is about the workings of networks of the mobile in Africa, a continent usually associated with the 'global shadows' of the world. How do changes in the possibilities for communication, with the recent hype of mobile technology, influence the social and economic dynamics in Africa's mobile margins? To what extent is the freedom associated with new Information and Communication Technologies reality or disillusion for people dwelling in the margins? Are ordinary Africans increasingly Side@Ways? How social are these emergent Side@Ways? Contributions to answering these and related questions are harvested from ethnographic insights by team members of the WOTRO funded 'Mobile Africa revisited' research programme hosted by the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands.