Key figures of mobility: An introduction

Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences, 2016

Global Change and Human Mobility is the title of this volume, published in the series of Springer essays dealing with all the aspects considered in the Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences. The title of the book appeals to scholars interested in the issue of change and mobility across the world, both empirically and theoretically, offering a selection of studies developed by members of the International Geographical Union Commission (see www.globility.org) on this subject, from both thematic and geographical perspectives. Owing to its ability to link locations and societies, human mobility has received increasing academic attention over the last few years in the context of the globalization process. As a manifestation of some of the world's key political, economic, societal, and cultural issues, human mobility has acquired great importance in the social sciences and particularly in geography. The chapters of this book demonstrate the strength of this topic in looking at a changing world from the focus of a new disciplinary approach. From these contributions, it can be seen that human mobility transforms the perspective of migrations conceived as processes between points of origin and destination, analyzing the fluidity of the relations between spaces. Therefore, new tendencies of human mobility and new interpretations of old processes overlap in this book's chapters. Chapter 1 is dedicated to a theoretical reflection about the state of the art in the subject of human mobility and is written by Professor Armando Montanari and Dr. Barbara Staniscia from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Professor Montanari established the Commission on Global Change and Human Mobility within the International Geographical Union in the year 2000, while Dr. Staniscia is the current Scientific Secretary of the Commission. Chapter 2 offers a perspective of the reaction of migration systems in the current context of global financial and economic crisis. Professors Daniel G€ oler from the University of Bamberg in Germany and Zaiga Krišjāne from the University of Latvia develop a broad reflection on the "regional element" of transnationalism, opening that concept with a new transregional perspective drawn from the v

2016

This contribution reflects upon different aspects of human mobility throughout history as well as the way how they relate to politics. It briefly describes important moments in the European history of migration, including the periods of Antiquity, Middle Ages and the contemporary history. This paper argues that human mobility has been present through-out history and is a natural phenomenon. Since ancient times, large-scale migrations, mo-tivated in most cases by demographic developments and climatic changes, have substan-tially determined the shape of the contemporary world. The freedom of movement has been one of the important facets of societies throughout history. However, in the 20th cen-tury, with the rise of different kinds of freedoms, the freedom of movement has shrunk. The technology which accompanies mobility and restricts it is also something new. This article concludes by discussing the issue of human mobility and its relation to politics and takes into account the recen...

The authors would like to thank Tania Lines, Home of geography, Rome for helping to establish a better English than that of a first draft, and an anonymous referee for useful comments on an earlier version of the text. Mobility as a geographical problem One main aspect of the geographical context of human societies is the increased mobility of persons, goods and information. Tourism, leisure, business, residence, migrations etc. are fields of this mobility. Nowadays, the figures allow us to illustrate this fact on numerous spatial scales: in France, 6.4 million business trips were taken in 2002, 28 percent of which abroad; there were 715 million "international tourists" in 2002 throughout the world; 35 million tourists in Las Vegas in 2001; 75 million border crossings in France in 2002, etc. Although mobility is recognized as an important field of geographical investigation, its implications have not yet been clarified. Often, mobility is seen as flow of persons, goods and information (Bassand et al., 1985), but one sees mobility as "taken-forgranted". We are not surprised when facing mobility, but we should be; then we would see that mobility arises in a certain context, that geographers have approached places and spaces as if there were no mobility and that there could be conceptual difficulties when dealing with mobility. Indeed, mobility raises several problems for the geographical investigation of place. Fundamentally, mobility affects places in the sense that exchanges take place in and relate to a great number of places. However, it is interesting to observe that places are A practice-based approach to the conceptualisation of geographical mobility Belgeo, 1-2 | 2005

aspeers.com

Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 2020

The introduction to the first part of the special issue of Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, titled "On the Move: Migration and Diasporas", situates the articles included in the issue within theoretical discussions of significant factors that have influenced population movements, formation of diaspora communities, and diversification of the transnational life style during the past decades. The introduction discusses the genealogy of the concepts of diaspora, transnationalism, migration, and mobility, also drawing attention to their simultaneous circulation within the inter-and cross-disciplinary field today. Both forced and voluntary forms of migration are addressed. The relevance of the contributions of the current issue to larger tendencies and theoretical debates on mobility and migration is outlined. The study of migration and mobility constitutes a vast area of academic inquiry, yet there is not enough research on migration processes in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet countries. The articles fill this gap, engaging in a variety of issues, theoretical and methodological approaches, and diverse regions and historical contexts. These include historical transnational commuting practices, the effects of status shifts from voluntary to forced migration, the inadequacy of contemporary ICT-based communication means in comparison with face-to-face encounters, modes and strategies of (transatlantic) transnational identity, affective economy of migration, including its traumatic impact, and relevance of the researcher's positioning in terms of the national culture of homeland and host country. Many contributions highlight the important role of http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol78/introduction.pdf 8 www.folklore.ee/folklore Triinu Ojamaa, Leena Kurvet-Käosaar sociality in managing migration and mobility, and in so doing, also diversify and contest central conceptual paradigms within the field.

2015

This introductory article discusses methodological challenges for and perspectives related to a field of study that has only recently gained importance in historical research: transnational lives. For a long time, methodological nationalism had slowed down or even prevented investigations of individual or collective lifecourses that were characterised by a high degree of mobility and internationality. We argue that a critical engagement with concepts from the social sciences related to the current interest in processes of globalisation and transnational phenomena can open up new perspectives on "mobility and biography". In doing so, we first explore how focusing on lives that crossed political, social or cultural boundaries can bring aspects of individual agency together with larger structural settings as explanatory factors. In the second part, this article attempts to conceptualise transnational lives for historical research. Introducing our own concept of "cosmobilities", we demonstrate how engaging with two sociological strands, "rooted cosmopolitanism" and "mobilities", might provide a fresh impetus for analysing transnational subjects and their practices.

This introductory article discusses methodological challenges for and perspectives related to a field of study that has only recently gained importance in historical research: transnational lives. For a long time, methodological nationalism had slowed down or even prevented investigations of individual or collective lifecourses that were characterised by a high degree of mobility and internationality. We argue that a critical engagement with concepts from the social sciences related to the current interest in processes of globalisation and transnational phenomena can open up new perspectives on “mobility and biography”. In doing so, we first explore how focusing on lives that crossed political, social or cultural boundaries can bring aspects of individual agency together with larger structural settings as explanatory factors. In the second part, this article attempts to conceptualise transnational lives for historical research. Introducing our own concept of “cosmobilities”, we demonstrate how engaging with two sociological strands, “rooted cosmopolitanism” and “mobilities”, might provide a fresh impetus for analysing transnational subjects and their practices.

The Routledge handbook of mobilities, 2013

Migration has long been a major topic in archaeology and as long as culture history framed archaeological understanding of material culture, migrations have been seen as the stuff that (pre)history was made of. As New, processual and post-processual perspectives have steered attention elsewhere in more recent decades, migration has rapidly dropped off the archaeological agendas. A lack of interest does not mean, however, that people in the past did not migrate and scientific advances in physical anthropology have forced the issue back on the agenda. The case of the so-called ‘Lady of York’ who probably hailed from North Africa, is an evident case in point. In other fields, like the ancient Mediterranean or the post-medieval northern and central Atlantic, the combined archaeological and literary evidence leaves little doubt about large-scale and sustained migrations, voluntary and forcibly alike. The question is therefore not so much whether people migrated – they clearly did. The aim of this issue is accordingly to look beyond the mere observation of large-scale movements or migrant networks and to examine not only the reasons that motivated people to migrate but also the consequences for both migrants and their host societies. This issue is therefore not so much about finding ‘hard evidence’ of actual migrants and migrations, although that is certainly part of the equation, but it rather represents an endeavour to explore the diversity and complexity of mobility and migration in the past, both recent and distant, and to investigate the many dimensions of these broad processes. The emphasis of the issue thus falls on local actors, practices, contexts and networks that sustained migrations and enabled mobility of, within and between communities in order to highlight the social and economic dimensions of migration and mobility.

The Mobilities Paradigm. Discourses and Ideologies, 2016