Movement Mobilities And Journeys

This collection draws on the Mobilities approach to look afresh at notions of the sacred where they intersect with people, objects and other things on the move. Consideration of a wide range of spiritual meanings and practices also sheds light on the motivations and experiences associated with particular mobilities. Drawing on rich, situated case studies, this multi-disciplinary collection discusses what mobility in the social sciences, arts and humanities can tell us about movements and journeys prompted by religious, more broadly ’spiritual’ and 'secular-sacred' practices and priorities. Problematizing the fixity of sacred places and times as territorially and temporally bounded entities that exist in opposition to ’profane’ everyday life, this collection looks at the intersection between the embodied-emotional-spiritual experience of places, travel, belief-practices and communities. It is this geographically-informed perspective on the interleaving of religious/ spiritual/ secular notions of the sacred with the material and more-than-representational attributes of associated mobilities and related practices which constitutes this volume’s original contribution to the field.

Geographies of children and young people is a rapidly emerging sub-discipline within human geography. There is now a critical mass of established academic work, key names within academia, growing numbers of graduate students and expanding numbers of university level taught courses. There are also professional training programmes at national scales and in international contexts that work specifically with children and young people. In addition to a productive journal of Children’s Geographies, there’s a range of monographs, textbooks and edited collections focusing on children and young people published by all the major academic presses then there is a substantive body of work on younger people within human geography and active authors and researchers working within international contexts to warrant a specific Major Reference Work on children’s and young people’s geographies. The volumes and sections are structured by themes, which then reflect the broader geographical locations of the research.

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading.

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study investigates the ways in which European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on distinct forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, tourism, and refugee mobilities, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ayşe Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutluğ Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo. Challenging aesthetic as well as national, cultural, and political boundaries, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.

This book offers a critical and comprehensive analysis of children’s mobilities by focusing on its interdependent, imagined and relational aspects. In doing so, it challenges existing literature, which, in mobilities studies, tends to overlook the mobilities of marginalised social groups; in social science more generally, tends to immobilize children’s studies; and in children’s mobility studies has mainly focused on the ‘independent’ and corporeal travel of children. The book situates children’s mobilities in wider contexts, offering an interdisciplinary and critical perspective throughout and drawing on scholarship at the confluence of childhood and mobilities and a range of research to offer new insights that inform the field of mobilities and studies of childhood. In this way, the book aims at widening the perspective on children’s mobility towards the inclusion of diverse age groups and of the manifold forms of mobilities that are part of children’s lives, from an interdependent and relational point of view.

This open access book focuses on migrant and minority cemetery needs through the conceptual lens of the mobilities of the living and the dead. In doing so, the book brings migration and mobility studies into much-needed dialogue with death studies to explore the symbolically and politically important issue of culturally inclusive spaces of cemeteries and crematoria for migrants and established minorities. The book addresses majority and minority cemetery and crematoria provisions and practices in a range of North West European contexts. It describes how the planning, management and use of cemeteries and crematoria in multicultural societies can tell us about the everyday lived experiences of migration and migrant heritage, urban diversity, social inclusion and exclusion in Europe, and how these relate to migrant and minority experience of lived citizenship, practices of territoriality and bordering, colonial/postcolonial narratives. The book will be of interest to readers in the fields of migration/mobilities studies and death studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners, such as local government officers, cemetery managers and city planners.

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.

As we grapple with a growing refugee crisis, a hardening of anti-immigration sentiment, and deepening communal segregation in many parts of the developed world, questions of the nature of home and homemaking are increasingly critical. This collection brings ethnographic insight into the practices of homemaking, exploring a diverse range of contexts ranging from economic migrants to new Chinese industrial cities, Jewish returnees from Israel to Ukraine, and young gay South Asians in London. While negotiating widely varying social-political contexts, these studies suggest an unavoidably multiple understanding of home, while provoking new understandings of the material and symbolic process of making oneself “at home.”