Mobility is a keyword of late modernity that suggests an increasingly unrestrained and interconnected world of individual opportunities. However, as privileges enable some to live in a seemingly borderless world, others remain excluded and marginalized. Boundaries are created, modified and consolidated, particularly in times of hypermobility. Evidently, mobility is closely tied to immobility. This volume features ethnographic research that challenges the concept of mobility with regard to social inequalities and global hierarchies.
When it comes to migration, there is no level playing field. Some people are privileged, advantaged, and supported and others are marginalised, persecuted, and traumatised. The extension of the rights and equalities for which many people advocate, and provision of other extrinsic conditions are insufficient for wellbeing. This work asks: what is sufficient? What is it that people do—and can do—to change their experience from suffering to wellbeing when handling challenges of migration and other mobilities? What helps people when they are migrating? What have migrants experienced and learned that could be useful to others facing challenges of mobility and change? How can this learning be applied to promote greater social wellbeing and care of environments, in an increasingly mobile world? Mobilities of Self and Place documents rich conversations with regular migrants and refugees to critically consider migration history, human rights, place, self, and mobilities studies. The work explores ontological and epistemological questions of sense of self, sense of place, identity and agency. Mahni Dugan helps us understand how the relationship between sense of place and sense of self affects the ability of migrants to relocate with wellbeing. The movement from global to local, social to personal, intellectual to experiential offers a broad societal understanding of the phenomena and challenges of contemporary mobilities.
With this book the international academic discourse on mobility is taken a step further, through the intertwined perspectives of different social sciences, engineering and the humanities. The Ethics of Mobilities departs from the recent interest in social surveillance, raised by the use of technology for the surveillance and control of mobility as well as for transport. It widens this theme to encompass a broad scale of issues, ranging from freedom and escape to social exclusion and control, thus raising important questions of ethics, identity and religion; questions that are dealt with by a diverse, yet structured range of chapters, arranged around the themes of ethics and religion, and freedom and control. Through their variety and diversity of perspectives, the chapters of this book offer a substantial interdisciplinary contribution to the socially and environmentally relevant discussion about what a technically and economically accelerating mobility does to life and how it might be transformed to sustain a more life-enhancing future. Ethics of Mobilities will excite not only international interest, but will also appeal to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, in fields as diverse as theology and engineering.
The 21st century seems to be on the move, perhaps even more so than the last. With cheap travel, and more than two billion cars projected worldwide for 2030. And yet, all this mobility is happening incredibly unevenly, at different paces and intensities, with varying impacts and consequences to the extent that life on the move might be actually quite difficult to sustain environmentally, socially and ethically. As a result 'mobility' has become a keyword of the social sciences; delineating a new domain of concepts, approaches, methodologies and techniques which seek to understand the character and quality of these trends. This Handbook explores and critically evaluates the debates, approaches, controversies and methodologies, inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. It brings together leading specialists from range of backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessible way whilst giving detailed grounding in the evolution of past debates on mobilities. It illustrates disciplinary trends and pathways, from migration studies and transport history to communications research, featuring methodological innovations and developments and conceptual histories - from feminist theory to tourist studies. It explores the dominant figures of mobility, from children to soldiers and the mobility impaired; the disparate materialities of mobility such as flows of water and waste to the vectors of viruses; key infrastructures such as logistics systems to the informal services of megacity slums, and the important mobility events around which our world turns; from going on vacation to the commute, to the catastrophic disruption of mobility systems. The text is forward-thinking, projecting the future of mobilities as they might be lived, transformed and studied, and possibly, brought to an end. International in focus, the book transcends disciplinary and national boundaries to explore mobilities as they are understood from different perspectives, different fields, countries and standpoints. This is an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in mobility across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.
Patterns of im/mobility, collective identity and conflict are highly entangled. The im/mobility of a social or cultural group has major impact on how identity narratives, a sense of belonging and relationships to ‘others’ are shaped, and vice versa. These dynamics are closely interlinked with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion between groups and power structures that involve a broad variety of actors from local populations, to migrants, government institutions and other intermediaries. Mainly looking at patterns of internal mobility such as ‘traditional’ or strategic mobilities and mobilities enforced by crisis, conflict or governmental programmes and regimes, this book aims to go beyond currently predominant issues of transnational migration. Dynamics of non/integration and belonging, caused by im/mobility, are analysed on a cultural and political level, which involves questions of representation, indigeneity/autochthony, political rights and access to land and other resources. With ethnographic case studies from Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Bangladesh, East Timor and Indonesia, this volume provides a comparative perspective on the multifold dimensions of im/mobility in contexts where changing mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion trigger or settle conflicts and social identities are constantly re/negotiated. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social Identities.
Materialities and Mobilities in Education develops new arguments about the ways in which educational processes can be analysed. Drawing on a recent interest in mobilities across the social sciences, and a conterminous resurgence in academic accounts of materialities, the book demonstrates how these two ostensibly differing perspectives on education might be fruitfully deployed in tandem. Considering the interaction and convergence of materialities and mobilities, the book highlights the relationship between structural constraints and opportunities and the agency of individuals, providing a unique and essential insight into contemporary education. Examining a range of education spaces from the formal to the informal and the different types of mobility that manifest in relation to education, the book introduces readers to a range of theoretical resources and detailed case studies used to analyse the spatiality of education from across the disciplines of human geography, education and sociology. Drawing on material from across the globe, Materialities and Mobilities in Education is an engaging and relevant text, which will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the development of education policy and practice.
In this book Walter Gam Nkwi documents the complexities and nuances embedded in African modernities and mobilities which have been overlooked in historical discourses in Africa and Cameroon. Using an ethnographic historical approach and drawing on the intricacies of what it has meant to be and belong in Kom- an ethnic community in the Northwest Region of Cameroon - since 1800, he explores the discourses and practices of kfaang as central to any understanding of mobility and modernity in Kom, Cameroon and Africa at large. The book unveils the emic understanding of modernity through the history and ethnography of kfaang and its technologies and illustrates how these terminologies were conceived and perceived by the Kom people in their social and physical mobilities. It documents and analyzes the historical processes involved in bringing about and making kfaang a defining feature of everyday life in Kom and among Kom subjects.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC- ND Anna Wyss’ insightful account of male migrants’ journeys around Europe brings new perspectives to the European migration crisis and masculinity issues.
Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and experiencing the extreme challenges of urbanization. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of movement. Sheller shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement. She connects the body, street, city, nation, and planet in one overarching theory of the modern, perpetually shifting world. Concepts of mobility are examined on a local level in the circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and “the right to the city.” On the planetary level, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other elites are able to roam freely, while migrants and those most in need are abandoned and imprisoned at the borders. Mobility Justice is a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility in a world in which the mobility commons have been enclosed. It is a call for a new understanding of the politics of movement and a demand for justice for all.
The invention of semiconductor devices is a fairly recent one, considering classical time scales in human life. The bipolar transistor was announced in 1947, and the MOS transistor, in a practically usable manner, was demonstrated in 1960. From these beginnings the semiconductor device field has grown rapidly. The first integrated circuits, which contained just a few devices, became commercially available in the early 1960s. Immediately thereafter an evolution has taken place so that today, less than 25 years later, the manufacture of integrated circuits with over 400.000 devices per single chip is possible. Coincident with the growth in semiconductor device development, the literature concerning semiconductor device and technology issues has literally exploded. In the last decade about 50.000 papers have been published on these subjects. The advent of so called Very-Large-Scale-Integration (VLSI) has certainly revealed the need for a better understanding of basic device behavior. The miniaturization of the single transistor, which is the major prerequisite for VLSI, nearly led to a breakdown of the classical models of semiconductor devices.
