Geography of Mobility and Migrations

At the roots of many travels to distant destinations - be it in the context of tourism or migration – are historically laden and socio-culturally constructed imaginaries. People worldwide rely on such imaginaries, from the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, to shape identities of themselves and others. These unspoken representational systems are powerful because they enact and construct peoples and places, implying multiple, often conflicting, representations of Otherness, and questioning several core values multicultural societies hold, by blurring traditional territorial, social and cultural boundaries, and creating hybrid forms. What are the contours of power, agency, and subjectivity in imaginaries of transnational mobility and the intersecting social categories those visions both reify and dissolve? Ethnographic studies of human (im)mobility provide an innovative means to grasp the complexity of the global circulation of people and the meaning-making images and ideas surrounding these movements. As a polymorphic concept, mobility invites us to renew our theorizing, especially regarding conventional themes such as culture, identity, and transnational relationships. This paper critically analyses some preliminary findings of an ongoing multi-sited research project that traces how prevalent imaginaries of transnational tourism to and migration from the “global South” are (dis)connected. I suggest anthropology has unique contributions to make to the current debate in the social sciences by ethnographically detailing how mobility is a contested ideological construct involving so much more than mere movement.

""This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokaster with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics
constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic
point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

[roads, globalization, transnationalism, development, postsocialism, materiality, Albania]""

To refine wholesale accounts of transnationalism, scholars have cited the amplification of border enforcement and immigration control. Whilst received analysis emphasizes multiple processes whether border militarization, mass deportation or the crossdeputization of local authorities, other trends remain unexplored. Employing the insights of scholarship on the diffusion and decentralization of policing and crime control, this work interrogates the enlistment of private individuals in official gatekeeping efforts. Drawing on relevant empirical examples -anonymous tip lines, voluntary immigration posses, border vigilantes, local anti-immigrant ordinances and other practices that compel, encourage and include societal participation -it assesses three modalities of citizen involvement: deputization, responsibilization and autonomization. Each displays distinct state-society relations and techniques for mobilizing societal actors and energies. In addition to illuminating the complexities, consequences and contradictions of contemporary immigration control, this article enriches understandings of social exclusion and the redistribution and transposition of government amidst neoliberal restructuring.

This article analyzes displacement in the context of three communities in South Asia: Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils in India, and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In each of these cases, refugee management emerges out of the complexities of geopolitics and humanitarianism and becomes central to urban questions of the right to move and remain in the city. Drawing on scholarship in the geopolitics of
migrant (im)mobilities, refugee studies, and South Asia studies, we argue that displacement threatens the contours of belonging and citizenship across South Asian nation-states. For these reasons, the cities where
the displaced live have become the locus of national unbelonging and state violence through entangled forms of securitization and urbanization. In particular, we detail the spatial and socioeconomic segregation of
displaced populations in which they are subject to mundane bureaucratic violence and the role that social class plays in navigating the exclusions triggered by displacement. In the cities where the displaced settle,
the displaced shape the urban economy, whereas the state applies strategies of spatial control that aim to nationalize urban space while maintaining the refugees as forever displaceable.

For the past few centuries, anti-nomadic legislation has attempted to settle nomads who traveled throughout England and elsewhere in Europe, as their mobilities challenged the sedentarist goals of modern nation states. As recently as 1994, the nomadic way of life was effectively criminalized in England and Wales, revealing the unbalanced power relations between Gypsies and Travelers and the state. This article will examine and highlight the agency and spatialities of resistance of nomadic Gypsy and Traveler groups in England who are struggling for the recognition of their right to legally inhabit caravan sites in areas such as Green Belt land. The selection of places in the Green Belt for their homes offers another contested landscape that runs counter to the typical understanding of Gypsies and Travelers residing in marginalized places due to discrimination or wanting to remain unnoticed. By drawing from Gypsies and Travelers' own narratives, this article documents how they navigate through policies designed to constrain them.

Demonic geography is an approach to practicing human geography that operates from the premise that there are no such immaterial entities as 'souls', 'spirits', 'minds', integrated, stable 'selves', or conscious 'free will'. This paper elaborates the theoretical framework of demonic geography by spelling out how it is different from non-representational theory and by articulating it with recent developments in experimental psychology, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind. Counterintuitively, the paper shows that the deflationary, materialistic ontology of human nature espoused by demonic geography need not lead to meaninglessness, unhappiness, or the collapse of moral behaviour. Instead, subscribing to demonic geography opens up new ways to find meaning, to pursue happiness, and to live the good life.

This article discusses how the Rohingyasa forcibly displaced community transformed the everyday lives and the territory of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Since August 2017, Cox's Bazar, a borderland of Bangladesh is hosting more than a million of non-citizens within 32 camps in its two subdistricts. Based on mobile ethnographic research, I arguea. borderlands are sites where politics of territory intersects politics of identity. The Rohingyas' statelessness and perpetuated marginalization are the outcome of this politics between identity and territory of the nation-states. b. The state prioritizes the security of its citizens from the refugees. Consequentially, the state enacts combined mechanisms of biopolitical and territorial practices that physically demarcate the refugee camps and socially segregate the refugees. I introduce this combination of mechanisms as hybrid governmentality. In Cox's Bazar, the key mechanisms of hybrid governmentality include-labelling refugees based on political rationale and providing them with identification cards, enacting street level surveillance to ensure confinement of the refugees, and maintaining everyday separation between refugees and the citizens.

This article analyzes the ways in which Canadian and Australian immigration policies represent causes and consequences of neoliberal restructuring. Interrogating neoliberalism as a series of political-economic and moral changes derived from the marketization of societal and governmental arrangements, it illustrates how numerically-based ‘points systems’ have been employed as mechanisms for: gauging human capital; establishing indices of risk and undesirability; and promoting the ‘responsibilization’ of incoming migrants. In doing so the points systems' historical trajectory is traced through a variety of administrative reforms characteristic of neoliberal government and flexible accumulation. Ultimately, this article contends that as rational, technical and economically guided systems of enumeration and assessment, both governments' policies mirror, enhance and extend neoliberal arrangements and sensibilities. In providing ostensibly objective techniques of evaluation the points systems have assisted in injecting the ideal neoliberal citizens- who are, above all, flexible, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial and autonomous- from abroad. Overall this paper contributes to studies of state restructuring by providing new insights into the links between the neglected domain of immigration control and emergent techniques of societal regulation and citizen-making.

This article considers how migrant deaths -particularly in the borderlands of Europe and the United States -relate to the speed at which migrants travel. It argues that the most dangerous boundaries for migrants, and the most difficult ones to traverse, are those which embody the sharpest divides in energy consumption, divides reflected in the vulnerability of migrants who typically move at relatively slow speeds and have insufficient access to safe modes of travel. Thus, migrant deaths and the boundaries that produce them embody the injustices associated with grossly unequal levels of access to, control over, and consumption of environmental resources.

In the last few years, asylum claims based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI) have received increased attention within migration and queer studies. Mostly focusing on the refugee status determination process, these works have emphasized how the expectations of asylum institutions about "genuine queer refugees" lead to the exclusion of many applicants from SOGI asylum. This paper aims at shifting the analysis perspective from the legal categorization process to the impacts of everyday experienced categories of "asylum seekers" or "refugees" on queer migrants in the Parisian area. Using a three-year long ethnographic fieldwork, completed through interviews with queer asylum seekers and refugees, this paper investigates how refugeeness, understood as the objective and subjective effects of migration and asylum policies on individuals, contributes to shaping lived experiences of sexual and gender minorities in France. By drawing attention to the ways that the multiple power relationships queer asylum seekers and refugees have to face are spatially grounded, this paper discusses how an intersectional understanding of sexuality, gender, and refugeeness allows us to emphasize the role played by migration status in the negotiation of hetero-and cisnormativity. This paper also argues that far from remaining passive toward the categorization process they are subjected to, queer asylum seekers and refugees strategically appropriate the administrative categories with which they are associated. Such an analysis of lived experiences of queer asylum seekers and refugees in the country of arrival thus highlights the complex reshaping of social location caused by migration.

Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned the efficacy and social equity dimensions of prevailing strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems, highlighting the importance of sociological research on the potentially 'other-ing' impacts of mainstream conservation policy discourse. We draw on research in the Chimanimani Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) on both sides of the Zim-babwe–Mozambique border, scrutinizing simplifications inherent in terms such as ''illegal foreigners'' that obfuscate histories and contemporary realities of cross-border social ties. Engaging perspectives of park authorities and chiefs as well as people who have taken up artisanal mining, we explore two related themes—how 'belonging' is negotiated as well as how conservation agendas are instrumentalized by state and non-state actors. Bringing attention to gaps between policy discourses surrounding TFCAs and territorialized practices of exclusion, the article concludes by calling for greater attention to the mutating significance of colonially established boundaries as well as the dynamic influences of social networks in borderland spaces.

Discussing recent trends and developments in migration and mobility affecting what may be referred to as a ‘reconstitution’ of villages, this paper discusses the changing character of rural
settlement and settlement patterns in Turkey today. The binary division of rural and urban is questioned through a dialectical/relational approach to settlement formation, while settlement is defined by relation to (human) movement, itself understood as incorporating the modalities of migration and mobility. By focusing on the socio-economics of increasing affluence, the advance of capital generally, and the introduction of neoliberalism into agriculture in particular, a number of contemporary rural-oriented (migratory/mobility) movements and ‘living structures’ are investigated, which, taken together, suggest a growing development of ‘dual settlement’ and ‘multiplace hybrid’ life. The paper concludes with a typology of villages and some thoughts on the theoretical implications of this study.

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of domestic labor mobility among Brazilian construction workers in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. We start from the premise that mobile laborers are crucial for the physical development and expansion of cities. However, the importance of domestic migrants in this process is insufficiently addressed in mobility studies. Building on existing research on domestic population movements in Brazil, we argue that the current generation of mobile
construction workers draws on the intangible and material infrastructure generated by previous generations of migrants to enable novel kinds of (permanent) labor mobilities.

This paper examines how opportunity structures for learning, income, and status emerge in a global space shaped by local stakeholders aspiring for strategic positions in international competition. The case-study of Hong Kong suggests that moving up the pyramid of college and university degrees provides opportunities for higher income and reduces turbulence in times of global recessions and layoffs. However, low socio-economic status students are more likely to sustain their upward movement if their learning experiences are enriched with boundary-crossing competencies provided by studies abroad, foreign language training, cross-disciplinary programs, etc. While outbound mobility enhances opportunities for upward mobility, it also challenges the established cultural patterns of learning. This paper discusses the tensions and ties between outbound and upward mobility by analyzing local–global disequilibria in human and institutional agencies of higher education working across social, economic and political boundaries.

Urban mobilities are produced through different relations, interactions and materialities. Different combinations of these factors lead to different mobilities, some of which are more sustainable than others. Moreover, mobilities are influenced, shaped and produced through the materialities that create power relations between mobilities and people and that reinforce certain unsustainable ways of moving in the urban space. This paper focuses on the Western Harbour in the city of Malmö, Sweden, which is an area that has been developed during the era of sustainable development and thus the production of mobilities as part of the development should have been sustainable. However, it is shown in this paper that this has not been the case. In particular, peoples’ movements and how they use urban space have not been in focus during the development of the Western Harbour area. While cycling through the Western Harbour, the experience is that obstacles are often in the way and that the network within the area is not connected and is confusing. Moreover, the dominance of cars is very distinct. In this paper, I argue that these materialities influence mobilities and that this can lead to the dominance of unsustainable forms of mobility. By analysing urban mobilities in the Western Harbour, I show that urban planning, even though it might have sustainability as its foundation, can lead to materialities that produce unsustainable mobilities.

Within the inclusive approach of mobility studies, migration has
been referred to as one of the most prominent forms of mobility.
However, discussing all migrants’ experiences as just
“mobile” experiences shadows the range and nuances of migration.
This paper argues and illustrates how migration can be
a form of mobility and also addresses migration as a much
nuanced form of mobility that has been rather silent in existing
literature. We examine one social condition that has informed
a range of international migrants’ experiences: their (re)organization
of gender patterns within the family on the basis of
transnational realities. We use a multi-scalar model of intersectionality
to conceptualise migratory movements as mobility,
particularly when the meaning is assigned to it on the basis of
power relationships. This way, we suggest a fruitful intersectional
analysis of migration and mobilities.

Wisdom is at once one of the most elusive and most valued kinds of knowledge. Empirical research shows that, indeed, across cultures, people hope that life experience will eventually make them wiser. The problem is that, to date, the academic study of wisdom and of the processes by which it can be learned has been dominated by psychologists. The first part of the article reviews the state-of-the-art psychological scholarship on wisdom to show how that conceptualization lacks geographical sensitivity and therefore misses some of the crucial geographical mechanisms by which people become wiser. The second part of the article singles out and focuses on one such mechanism, namely, the learning of wisdom through geographical dislocations. By drawing on insights from the study of international migration, exile, and transculturation in postcolonial contexts, the final part of the article suggests specific learning processes that might strengthen the hypothesis that geographical dislocations and the attendant cross-cultural experiences they generate are often conducive to wisdom. La sabiduría es a la vez uno de los tipos de conocimiento más esquivos y más valorados. La investigací on empírica en verdad muestra que en todas las culturas la gente espera que la experiencia de la vida eventualmente los haga más sabios. El problema es que hasta ahora el estudio académico sobre la sabiduría y sobre los procesos por medio de los cualesésta puede alcanzarse ha estado dominado por los psicólogos. La primera parte del artículo revisa el estado del arte de la erudicí on psicoí ogica sobre este particular, para mostrar c ´ omo esa conceptualizací on carece de sensibilidad geográfica y en consecuencia deja de considerar algunos de los mecanismos geográficos cruciales mediante los cuales la gente se hace más sabia. La segunda parte del artículo escoge y se concentra en uno de tales mecanismos, o sea, el aprendizaje de la sabiduría por medio de las dislocaciones geográficas. A partir de la perspicacia del estudio de la migrací on internacional, el exilio y la transculturací on en contextos poscoloniales, la parte final del artículo sugiere procesos de aprendizaje específicos, que podrían fortalecer la hipótesis de que las dislocaciones geográficas y las experiencias culturales de vasto espectro generadas por aquellas a menudo llevan a la sabiduría. Palabras clave: distancia, dislocaciones geográficas, migrací on internacional, aprendizaje visceral, sabiduría.

Studies of relations between China and Latin America have largely focused on economic and political relations between the Chinese state and specific countries in the region, or examined the experiences of Chinese migrants in Latin American countries. This is also true in studies of China-Chile relations. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with ethnic Chinese persons in Santiago, Chile, this article examines how “China” and “Latin America” are mutually constituted and negotiated through ethnic Chinese intra-regional geographical mobilities and social networks. These mobilities and networks illustrate that “China-Latin America relations” are not disembodied macro-processes. Instead, they constitute and dramatically shape the lives and opportunities of ethnic Chinese persons in the Americas. I attend to the concrete ways these persons exchange and create information, and negotiate complex regional identities and networks, in response to historical and contemporary geopolitical uncertainties. In doing so, this article provides an important ground-up perspective to the shifting power dynamics between China and Latin America.

Human mobility as an adaptation strategy for people displaced by development projects is not adequately explored in existing studies. This paper considers how emerging understandings of mobility and adaptation can improve resettlement planning in the development context. Understanding new forms of mobility has the potential to reduce the negative impacts of resettlement. The paper draws on fieldwork with people displaced by the Cambodian Railway Project who use a range of strategies to cope with the complex and uneven impacts of resettlement, including returning intermittently to previous locations and engaging in transient migration within and beyond Cambodia to maintain and extend livelihoods. Yet, many ‘mobile’ resettlers also face regulatory limitations affecting their mobility. Residency in the resettlement sites is a requirement for receiving land title, a much sought after asset in rapidly developing Cambodia which enables access to credit and other forms of financial and physical security. Being mobile to take advantage of diverse livelihood opportunities is nonetheless crucial for survival. Within the multiple objectives of resettlement, new strategies may facilitate, rather than limit, mobility as an adaptive response, without undermining other aspects of urban planning.

The overarching question of this article is how can we develop a critical understanding of the social place of highways and automobility in the case of a non-capitalist European context such as socialist Albania? Socialism was a period of modernisation for Albania. Part of this modernisation project was the production of a modern built environment, especially infrastructures and urban spaces. Within this context during socialism thousands of miles of new roads were constructed in the country. The remarkably limited use of roads, combined with their systematic building and maintenance, kept this infrastructure’s materiality in a relatively good condition for many decades. Since the early 1990s, though, the end of the regime has signified a period of booming mobility and automobility. Postsocialism and the wider context of neoliberalism have been marked by state withdrawal from many of its previous roles, and the maintenance of basic infrastructures has become increasingly dependent on international aid. Nevertheless, the roads are currently being socially reappropriated and reconfigured, as people embrace automobility, which was a very limited practice during socialism. This article explores the kind of socio-material relationships that road construction and the roads themselves generated in socialist Albania and how these
are linked to postsocialist spatial practices.

It is hard to talk about human mobilities without taking into consideration how mobility is being shaped by and shaping processes of imagination. The key concepts of imagination and mobility have rich and complex genealogies. The matter is even made more complex because there are many related concepts surrounding them. Imagination is
associated with images, imagery and imaginaries, whereas mobility is connected to movement, motion and migration (not to mention its imagined opposite, immobility). To be able to see the forest for the trees, I focus in this critical reflection on a discussion of the concepts themselves. One of the analytical advantages of mobility studies, a
relatively novel field of study, is that it shows us how imagination (a dynamic psychological process) and imaginaries (products of the imagination) are crucial for very different forms of human (im)mobility.

The paper shows how error statistical theory can be deployed to grasp the deeper epistemic logic of the peer-review process. The intent is to provide the readers with a novel lens through which to make sense of the practices of academic publishing.

This paper argues that, in order to take place, space and scale more seriously in the study of our discipline, we have to complement the pervasive understanding of geography as a tradition of thought or an extended conversation with an understanding of our discipline as a tradition of practice, in which the main focus is on the becoming of geographers. It is argued that the theme of 'what it takes to be a good geographer' is a fertile way to study this process of becoming. The four main advantages of this approach are illustrated empirically in the body of the argument by the author's reflections on his socializing within two very different geographical traditions.

The purpose of this doctoral study is to bring a spatial dimension into the research on urban mobilities and connect the spatial dimension to the marginalisation of cyclists in urban space. This is been done by exploring the role of urban bicycling and transport planning. The theoretical frame of space, mobilities and power is used for analysing that role through case studies in two Scandinavian cities, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Urban bicycling is a good example of showing the relation between space and mobilities, since cyclists often suffer from marginalised space in cities around the world. The philosophical foundation of the thesis is in critical realism and critical theory. For background data, observations and document studies have been conducted in Stockholm and Copenhagen. The main data collection for this thesis was done both qualitatively, in the form of interviews with planners and politicians, and quantitatively, in the form of survey studies among the citizens of Copenhagen and Stockholm. The data is analysed with the help of the theoretical framework that builds on mobility studies, spatial theory by Lefebvre, and Harvey and power theories deriving mainly from Lukes’ three dimensions of power. The materialisation of power relations is analysed with the example of modern planning in Sweden and Denmark. Overall this thesis manages to show how cycling as a mode of transport is marginalised in urban space, and that urban space wars between cyclists and car drivers and among cyclists are fought in Copenhagen as well as in Stockholm. The conclusion is that different factors, such as the economic situations in Denmark and Sweden, have affected urban and transport planning and thus have created two very different transport systems, where cycling plays a large role (Copenhagen) and a smaller role (Stockholm). Nevertheless, this thesis shows that even in cities that are very good for cycling, like Copenhagen, the motorised modes of transport create many problems and are still dominating urban space.

This article calls for studies of migration, borders and deportation to bring the practices and dynamic spaces of transportation more fully into the research frame. While modern deportation is unthinkable without vehicles, transport is a blackbox for the interdisciplinary literature on the state-enforced movement of population. This article focuses on deportation by air and engages largely with policies and practices relating to the UK deportation experience. It has two aims. First, to offer a critical analysis of the techniques and tactics that are used to turn commercial and charter flights into machineries of deportation. Second, to show that aviation is not a mere instrument that puts deportation policy into practice, but, like other material places in the deportation and detention world, an irreducible zone of knowledges, tactics, and politics. A proper understanding of the deportation complex is radically incomplete without an account of the mobile places of transportation.

Barnes and Sheppard (2009) assume that an anti-monist and anti-reductionist economic geography is desirable and that this desirability is so obvious that no argument needs to be advanced in its support. This commentary challenges this assumption and suggests that a monist and reductionist economic geography organized around the idea of truth-seeking is neither unthinkable nor unpalatable. In order to flesh out this idea, the commentary builds on recent work in the philosophy of scientific induction to show why one of its less publicized advances – error statistical theory – holds far more promise for the future development of economic geography than Barnes and Sheppard's vague and nebulous 'engaged pluralism'.

Migration in the New Europe: East-West Revisited responds to demand for a study on migration and policy developments in the light of European Union enlargement. The innovative character of the book is its approach to the emerging European migration space. The editors argue that the concept of a common European migration space will replace the traditional division into East and West because of two simultaneous processes: the ongoing European Union enlargement and the creation of a common European Union immigration policy.

‘Mobility’ is a zeitgeist of the European Union. European enlargement and the removal of borders in Central and Eastern Europe has reinvigorated geographical mobility in Europe while the extension of neo-liberal economic reform across the region has been said to offer opportunities for social mobility to a new demography. The right to spatial and social mobility in the EU is described as enhancing freedom, opportunity and choice for large numbers of people living in Central and Eastern Europe, yet the reality for many people living and working across borders in the EU is marked still by poverty, uncertainty and immobility. How do we conceptualise this inequality within a discourse of ‘free movement’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ in Europe? In this paper I will discuss theories of mobility that have shaped the discourse on mobility and immobility in the EU in recent times. I will explore the ways in which this discourse has contributed to an almost immutable acceptance of the EU as a ‘mobile space’. Adding to this I will present some early empirical findings from case studies in the Edinburgh, Scotland and Krakow, Poland to show that the everyday experiences of young Polish people who negotiate the invisible borders of the EU to find ‘opportunities’ has many dimensions, raising further questions about how ‘mobility’ is perceived and enacted by young Polish people living and working in the UK.


MOBILNOŚĆ I „NIE-MOBILNOŚĆ” W UNII EUROPEJSKIEJ: DOŚWIADCZENIE POLSKIEJ MŁODZIEŻY ZAMIESZKAŁEJ W ZJEDNOCZONYM KRÓLESTWIE

Mobilność to zeitgeist Unii Europejskiej. Poszerzenie UE i zniesienie granic w Euro- pie Wschodniej i Środkowej odrodziło skalę mobilności; jednocześnie liberalne reformy mają teoretycznie zapewnić możliwość mobilności społecznej nowym populacjom. Prawo do przestrzennej i społecznej mobilności w obrębie Unii opisywane jest często jako poszerzające przestrzeń wolności, możliwości i wyboru; jednocześnie jednak dla sporej liczby mieszkańców Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej rzeczywistość jest nieco odmienna, nadal naznaczona biedą, niepewnością i nie-mobilnością. W jaki sposób możemy pogo- dzić ów dysonans między „swobodą przepływu osób” a równością szans? W niniejszym artykule autorka omawia różne teorie mobilności, które wpływały na dyskursy dotyczące mobilności i nie-mobilności w Europie. Artykuł przedstawia również wstępne wyniki jej własnych badań w Edynburgu i Krakowie, ukazujące różnorodność codziennych doświadczeń migrującej polskiej młodzieży która negocjuje niewidzialne granice spo- łeczne i kulturowe w celu poszerzenia przestrzeni możliwości.

In this introduction to the Focus Section “Learning as a Geographical Process,” I provide a context for the four articles that follow, by means of (1) making explicit the threefold rationale for this initiative; (2) relating this initiative with previous geographical scholarship on the problematic of learning; (3) highlighting the significance of the self-referential character of our work; (4) providing a brief outline of the articles that follow; and (5) pointing out the important fact that both “learning” and “geographical process” constitute semantically rich categories and that relating the two involves a many-to-many type of logical mapping.

Scholars of religion and theology on the one hand, and academics in the broad field of migration studies on the other, have been examining the intersections between religion and migration from disparate theoretical, methodological, and religious perspectives during the past decade. This groundbreaking multi-authored volume seeks to bring these multiple points of view together both by elucidating each approach and then bringing them into conversation with each other. As the anchor volume in the Palgrave Religion and Global Migrations series, Intersections of Religion and Migration will provide state-of-the-art reviews of academic debates in the field and also suggest productive ways in which scholars may enhance their study of religion and migration by engaging with and employing a variety of approaches to the topic, which will set out a research agenda for the coming decade and beyond.

Edited by Jennifer Saunders, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Susanna Snyder.

Contributions include:
Jennifer Saunders, Susie Snyder and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh: Introduction
Holly Straut Eppsteiner and Jacqueline Hagan: Religion as Psychological, Spiritual and Cultural Support in the Migration Undertaking
Kim Knott: Living Religious Practices
Zayn Kassam: Muslims in America: The Challenges of Migration and the Construction of Religious Identities
Khayti Y. Joshi: The Racialization of Religions in Migration
Hugo Cordova-Quero: Embodied (Dis)Placements - The Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, and Religion in Migration Studies
Ellen Posman: Home and Away: Exile and Diaspora as Religious Concepts
Stephen M. Cherry: Exploring the Contours of Transnational Religious Spaces and Networks
Daniel Groody: Migration - A Theological Vision
Benjamin Schewel: Ethics, Transcendence and Borders
Alastair Ager and Joey Ager: Religion, Forced Migration and Humanitarian Response
Erin K. Wilson and Luca Mavelli: Taking Responsibility: Sociodicy, Solidarity, and Religious-Sensitive Policy-Making in the Global Politics of Migration
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Susie Snyder and Jennifer Saunders: Tracing The Ways Ahead

This paper analyzes the use of surveillance by activist groups opposed to the extensive securitization of the US-Mexico border and examines the implications of their activities for scholarship on borders, surveillance, and empowerment. The work of three organizations-the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), No More Deaths, and Humane Borders-is covered. While there is some overlap in their practices, these three organizations, respectively, have concentrated on (1) the use of digital photography and video recording equipment to monitor state agents and vigilante organizations; (2) the coordination of citizen-organized foot patrols to locate and assist migrants in danger; and (3) the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to support the provision of water and high-resolution border maps to migrants. In documenting the practical use and symbolic framing of surveillance by secular and faith-based activists, this article adds necessary complexity to prevailing conceptualizations of observational strategies and practices. It demonstrates that, while they may enhance and extend state control over bounded territories and populations, watching, monitoring, and rendering visible are not inherently exclusionary or repressive acts and can, in fact, be used in the service of undermining borders and their attendant consequences. The groups examined herein have applied surveillance towards contesting official gatekeeping strategies and creating alternative moral geographies where the imperatives of sovereignty and national security are subordinated to social justice and global hospitality.

The paper aims to reveal one integrated global map which points out the major geographical inequalities in providing basic utilities across the countries using multivariate analysis and thematic cartography. Sixteen indicators with global coverage were selected taking into account the waste collection services, sanitation facilities, drinking water sources, energy, electricity, habitat and demographic conditions. Several data are broken down for the total, urban and rural population in order to outline the rural-urban disparities between and within countries. A special focus is given to waste collection coverage, in order to compute a comprehensive global assessment of this key indicator of public health, which is one of the poorest monitored basic utility. The world countries were divided into 10 classes according to the hierarchical cluster analysis. Each class has particular features outlining the gaps between high, middle and low-income countries with direct impact on quality of life, public health, and environment.

This book presents the re-theorisation of travel and transformation. It explores the factors that influence the behaviours of a traveller, how these become entwined in experiences and how travel experiences continue on a traveller’s return. It uses the notion of transformation to redevelop the temporal and spatial boundaries of physical travel, develop a model for unpacking transformation and to look at new methods in the exploration of travel research.

Grounded in scholarly analysis and personal reflection, and drawing on a multi-sited and multi-method research design, Momentous Mobilities disentangles the meanings attached to temporary travels and stays abroad and offers empirical evidence as well as novel theoretical arguments to develop an anthropology of mobility. Both focusing specifically on how various societies and cultures imagine and value boundary-crossing mobilities “elsewhere” and drawing heavily on his own European lifeworld, the author examines momentous travels abroad in the context of education, work, and spiritual quests and the search for a better quality of life.

As recent contributions to this journal have evidenced, little effort has been made to revise the eroded nexus between cartography and movement in mobility thinking, especially when movement is considered in the context of forced and undocumented migration. The existing literature is particularly overshadowed by the emphasis of critical cartography on the deciphering or countering of ideologically driven cartographies that prevent experimenting with maps differently, i.e. as multi-expressive experiences and navigational performances of migration. The critique of the immobility of maps further obscures the sensitivity of contemporary map studies to new mobile grammars. In this paper, I further complicate the relationship between maps and migration by moving through and beyond the existing critical stance. Drawing on the expressive and actionable qualities of maps in the European migrant crisis, I explore the ‘migrancies’ of maps as evocative visual scripts (iconotexts), emotional mediators (iconobjects) and digital connectors (actionable objects) that are performed differently by the actors involved in migration. Through the revision of the critical cartography and migration nexus within wider ‘migro-mobility thinking’, I advance potential research routes that are both in accord and discordant with the legacy of critical cartography.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17450101.2020.1799660

The East-German city Leipzig and the West-German city Osnabrück, the main locations of our research, are among the pioneers of a nationwide movement for the decentralisation of refugee accommodation. At the beginning of the 2010s, local authorities in the two cities decided against housing refugees in mass accommodation centres, instead choosing to support them in leading self-determined lives by facilitating their access to private housing. However, the two cities then responded very differently to the increasing number of people coming to Germany for protection over the course of 2015. Based on empirical observations, this paper discusses an exemplary solution to a major research problem of how to compare the diverse and changing practices and discourses of refugee accommodation in local migration regimes. To find answers to this question, we develop a five-dimensional comparative model, combining the relational rescaling approach of Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Çağlar with Henri Lefebvre's spatial constructivist considerations.