Nomadic Sojourns Journal Volume 2

Movement composes the day-to-day and mundane to the extra-ordinary internal forests of our bodies. nomadic sojourns journal takes the creative leap to explore such movement(s) through the lens' of a number of different fields and mediums. This year's topics: the Zhiguli, love, life, and mishaps along the way, art, political movements (or the lack thereof), cockroaches and office life, drag racing, Shakti, and reparations for slavery.

A movement-themed annual journal with contributors writing from a myriad of fields. This year's topics: the philosophy of walking, psychedelics and consciousness, Kundalini Yoga and consciousness, dance photography, dream and nightmare, a shaman's journey, help, anthropology and Guyana, short fiction in India, classical music, and the hidden movement within literature. From the back cover: Born as dream, as trickle down reveries of sand dunes and parted ways. Of new relations, those past and gone; life of love, death of parting ways. Of wings spread distant, of the omnipresent and illusory hope that something new, something different awaits. Through literature and the subterranean darkened tracks of dream, weaved in tendrils of anthropological stratum and amorphous musical renderings and along pathways worn anew by philosopher’s troddings and flickerings of consciousness awakened, nomadic sojourns journal approaches the exploration of movement as child through the vistas of philosophy, literature, music, dream, consciousness, photography, anthropology, poverty, and aid. We are born of movement, seek movement to offer our lives change, require movement to maintain the illiusion of sanity, call upon movement to move our bodies through space and time to arrivals. We return. We go. We are composed, and constituent, of movement; we long for it when our capability to acheive it is lost and dream of stillness after having moved too much. The first annual volume of nomadic sojourns journal offers an opening as becoming, as possibility of what may come. And to that, we move. Website: www.nomadicsojourns.com

In the Arab world, people belong to kinship groups (lineages and tribes). Many lineages are named after animals, birds, and plants. Why? This survey evaluates five old explanations – “totemism,” “emulation of predatory animals,” “ancestor eponymy,” “nicknaming,” and “Bedouin proximity to nature.” It suggests a new hypothesis: Bedouin tribes use animal names to obscure their internal cleavages. Such tribes wax and wane as they attract and lose allies and clients; they include “attached” elements as well as actual kin. To prevent outsiders from spotting “attached” groups, Bedouin tribes scatter non-human names across their segments, making it difficult to link any segment with a human ancestor. Young’s argument contributes to theories of tribal organization, Arab identity, onomastics, and Near Eastern kinship.

This collection of essays engages with a wide range of disciplines including art, performance, film and literature, to examine the myriad effects of contemporary surveillance on our cultural psyche. The volume expertly articulates the manner in which cultural productions have been complicit in watching, seeing and purporting to ‘know’ race. In our increasingly mediated world, our sense of community is becoming progressively virtual, and surveillant technologies impact upon subjectivity, resulting in multiple forms of artistic and cultural expression. As such, art, film, and literature provide a lens for the reflection of sociocultural concerns. In Surveillance, Race, Culture Flynn and Mackay skilfully draw together a diverse range of contributions to investigate the fundamental question of exactly how surveillant technologies have informed our notions of race, identity and belonging.

Global studies is a fresh and dynamic discipline area that promises to reinvigorate undergraduate and postgraduate education in the social sciences and humanities. In the Australian context, the interdisciplinary pedagogy that defines global studies is gaining wider acceptance as a coherent and necessary approach to the study of global change. Through the Global Studies Consortium (GSC), this new discipline is forming around an impressive body of international scholars who define their expertise in global terms. The GSC paves the way for the expansion of global studies programs internationally and for the development of teaching and research collaboration on a global scale. Mark Juergensmeyer and Helmut Anheier’s forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Global Studies with SAGE is evidence of this growing international collaboration, while the work of Professor Manfred Steger exemplifies the flourishing academic literature on globalization. RMIT University’s Global Cities Institute represents a substantial institutional investment in interdisciplinary research into the social and environmental implications of globalization in which it leads the way internationally. Given these developments, the time is right for a book series that draws together diverse scholarship in global studies. This Handbook allows for extended treatment of critical issues that are of major interest to researchers and students in this emerging field. The topics covered speak to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of global issues that reaches well beyond the confines of international relations and political science to encompass sociology, anthropology, history, media and cultural studies, economics and governance, environmental sustainability, international law and criminal justice. Specially commissioned chapters explore diverse subjects from a global vantage point and all deliberately cohere around core “global” concerns of narrative, praxis, space and place. This integrated approach sets the Handbook apart from its competitors and distinguishes Global Studies as the most equipped academic discipline with which to address the scope and pace of global change in the 21st century.

The concept of Third Culture Kids is often used to describe people who have spent their childhood on the move, living in many different countries and languages. This book examines the hype, relevance and myths surrounding the concept while also redefining it within a broader study of transnationality to demonstrate the variety of stories involved.