‘Don’t Stop Me Now’: Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Bourne Saga

This article explores the search for identity of the main character of the Jason Bourne movies in the light of contemporary critical theories on mobility and cosmopolitanism. This theoretical framework is combined with close textual analysis of the films in order to explore the visual and narrative mechanisms that the three Bourne movies starring Matt Damon use in order to, first, capture the protagonist’s lost sense of self and, second, construct a new cosmopolitan hero for the mainstream. As I argue, Bourne’s unrelentless journey across borders encapsulates some of the paradoxes of our highly mobile times, while also calling attention to certain shortcomings and inadequacies of the ‘national paradigm’, to make sense of an individual’s existence within contemporary societies.     

Cultures of Commuting: The Mobile Negotiation of Space and Subjectivity on Delhi’s Metro

Abstract

As part of Delhi’s redevelopment, aimed at creating a ‘global city’, new public transport infrastructure is being built. The Metro, in particular, has become iconic of what city authorities and developers refer to as Delhi’s ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘world city’ status. Authorities have attempted to change commuting practices embedded in the culture of Delhi, a crowded, economically and culturally diverse city, in line with desired new behaviours including an emphasis on cleanliness, order and quiet. To explore these developments this paper presents findings from a qualitative study (conducted in 2009) analysing the urban mobility of a diverse group of young people. Their experiences of the Metro revealed interacting fields of power in the city, between passengers, and between passengers and those in control of the network. These relationships were situated within wider processes of urban reconstruction that intersect with global flows of capital, technology and ideologies of ‘modernity’ and development. The findings also highlighted the contestation of cosmopolitanism: its use to describe a desired urban imagination and its deployment as everyday competencies of negotiation and flexibility designed to manage change, unfamiliarity and inequality.     

Why do English-speaking countries have relatively high fertility?

In broad terms, the division in Europe between countries with very low fertility and countries with sustainable fertility matches Esping-Anderson’s classification of the same countries into ‘conservative’ and ‘social democratic’ (Esping-Anderson 1990). A central difference between these two types relates to their preferred models of the family. The conservative countries hold more to the ‘breadwinner’ model of the family while the social democratic countries seek higher levels of gender equity within the family and in the workplace. State support in both conservative and social democratic countries is designed to be consistent with these differing views of the family. Would we then not expect fertility to be very low in Esping-Anderson’s third group of countries, the ‘liberal’ countries, essentially English-speaking countries? By the Esping-Anderson definition, liberal countries are notable for their lack of support for families from public sources. Instead, according to Esping-Anderson, families must rely upon market provision for the services that they may need to combine work and family and they must rely on market employment to generate the income required to support their children. Contrary to this theory, whether measured by contemporary cross-sectional fertility or completed cohort fertility, with the exception of Canada, English-speaking countries now have the highest fertility rates among the countries that were classified by Esping-Anderson. Given the strength of theoretical explanation that arises from comparative studies of fertility in Europe, the paper examines why fertility in English-speaking countries seems not to follow expectation.     

‘Facework’, Flow and the City: Simmel,Goffman, and Mobility in the Contemporary City

This paper contains a re‐reading of Simmel and Goffman with an eye to the mobility practices of the contemporary city. The paper offers a ‘new’ perspective on mobility in the contemporary city by re‐reading two sociological ‘classics’ as there is a need to conceptualise the everyday level of flow and mobility in the midst of an intellectual climate dominated by grand theories of networks and globalisation. In the re‐reading of Simmel and Goffman, the aim is to reach an understanding of how contemporary material mobility flows and symbolic orders and meanings are produced and re‐produced. You may argue that other academic disciplines such as anthropology and human geography have made important contributions to this understanding. What has not been done, however, is to show how these two sociological thinkers can move beyond mere application to this field of study. With their sociological sensitivity, they rather carry important insights that will benefit the sociology of mobility. Arguably Simmel and Goffman offer the opportunity to connect the global flows to the everyday level of social practice, as well as linking more basic/classic sociological theory to contemporary issues of mobility. The reason to ‘look back’ is therefore to capture some of the past's ‘sociological imagination’ and relate it to an important social phenomenon of the present.     

City Branding and Social Inclusion in the Glocal City

Abstract

This article begins with a re-assessment of city branding that focuses on the marketing strategies routinely employed to promote a competitive identity for the contemporary ‘glocal’ city, before moving on to the issue of social inclusion. Combining a socio-semiotic approach with recent insights from urban studies, it explores a sample of 12 British city council websites to discuss to what extent web-mediated communication, within the modernisation agenda espoused by local authorities, may effectively help to represent and give voice to today’s multicultural and migrant urban communities. The article adopts a critical reading of municipal websites with the aim of understanding how a social inclusion agenda can be incorporated into the authoritative and functional discourse typically used by the sites and proposes that the onset of new interactive technologies, such as blogs and social networks, do have significant democratic potential in this respect, even though their incorporation into the sites is still at a preliminary stage. As such, the article is concerned with how flows of information and people are coming together in the early twenty-first century and transforming what began as a static textual/discursive space into one that is responsive to the flux of the contemporary city. At the time of writing, this is very much a communication revolution in the making, with the new interactive portals sitting somewhat awkwardly alongside information-based web pages and links. In addition, the article investigates the ways in which the sites attempt to present their cities as diasporic, cosmopolitan and ‘glocalized’ spaces, paying particular attention to the subjugated discourse of migration and the way that the cities’ non-white population is fixed and bounded by aesthetic and discursive means.     

Journeys to Knua: displacement,return and translocality in Timor-Leste

ABSTRACT

Return journeys to ancestral lands are a central dimension that underscores contemporary ideas of origin, identity, kinship, custom, health and prosperity for the East Timorese. The material and social reproduction of knua – both in the sense of the ancestral territory and associated kin-based ritual community – is heavily reliant on ongoing place-based and translocal customary reciprocal exchanges. Based on multi-sited fieldwork, this article examines the return journeys to Lesuai, an ancestral settlement in the remote central southern highlands of Timor-Leste, which was abandoned during the Indonesian invasion and restored in the later years of occupation. Lesuai community believes the spirit realm exerts an overwhelming influence over their general well-being, compelling ‘house’ members to renew their connection with knua to maintain family ties and benefit from ancestral protection. Closer ethnographic attention reveals how the motivations, experiences and understandings of ‘return’ to origin places are highly personal, gendered and generational. Broadly, these return mobilities demonstrate the agency, adaptability and resilience of conflict-affected populations. Through prolonged displacement and resettlement, dispersed knua members have created new livelihoods, subjectivities and attachments across multiple places, which are reconfiguring family ties, connections to ancestral places, and how ritual obligations are fulfilled.     

Affective Friendship that Constructs Globally Spanning Transnationalism: The Onward Migration of Filipino Workers from South Korea to Canada

This article explores how affective friendship of migrant Filipino workers constructs transnationalism that overarches different host countries. Following a sequence of ‘mobility and sedentariness’ through ‘multi-sited ethnography’ methods, I discuss the affective friendship that emerges out of a specific sociocultural context in Korea, namely activities of the Catholic congregation. I also demonstrate that such friendship is accompanied by onward migration to Canada through the transfer of ties in a new social setting. Moving beyond the duality of home and abroad, this study reveals that migrants’ transnationalism exhibits cosmopolitanism through the reconfiguration of their compatriot friendship into globally spanning, multi-local ties.     

Resilience,Moorings and International Student Mobilities – Exploring Biographical Narratives of Social Science Students in the UK

Whilst research into the changing landscape of the UK Higher Education (HE) has produced a burgeoning literature on ‘internationalisation’ and ‘transnational student mobility’ over the past few years, still fairly little is known about international students’ experiences on their way to and through the UK higher and further education. Frequently approaching inter- and transnational education as ‘neutral’ by-products of neoliberal globalisation, elitism and power flows, much HE policy and scholarly debate tend to operate with simplistic classifications of ‘international students’ and therefore fail to account for the multifaceted nature of students’ aspirations, mobilities and life experiences. Drawing on the notion of ‘resilience’ and insights from the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, this paper envisages alternative student mobilities which run parallel or counter to the dominant flows of power, financial and human capital commonly associated with an emerging global knowledge economy. Engaging with ‘resilient’ biographies of social science students studying at three UK HE institutions, the paper challenges narrow student classification regimes and calls for a critical re-evaluation of the relationship between international student mobility and other contemporary forms of migration, displacement and diaspora.     

(Un-)becoming Chinese creatives: transnational mobility of creative labour in a ‘global’ Beijing

ABSTRACT

Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this article shows how the vibrant interaction between global cultural industries and the local Chinese economy propels transnational labour mobility and affects the subjectification of transnational creative workers. Having come to China to enhance their careers, these professionals have been incorporated into the Chinese creative workforce, contributing to the Party State’s aspiration to use creativity as a growth engine for the economy and as a form of soft power. In terms of these workers’ everyday experience, however, China’s aspiration to ‘foreign creativity’ does not necessarily guarantee a privileged life. The State’s restrictions on migration and the insecure working circumstances within the Chinese creative workplace discourage these transnationals from fully integrating in Chinese society and the Chinese labour market. At the same time, this research shows that the precarious lives led by transnational creative workers in Beijing are also productive and generate the conditions for a situated cosmopolitan subjectivity. Such a cosmopolitan subjectivity fosters respect for cultural difference and relations of mutual understanding and care among both international and local subjects.     

Emergent Uses of a Multiplayer Location‐aware Mobile Game: the Interactional Consequences of Mediated Encounters

This case study of the behaviours of players in an advanced location‐aware gaming environment provides a first glimpse of what the experience of living in a mobile‐based augmented urban public space might be like, and of the kind of social order and emergent ‘form‐of‐life’ that might characterize it. We have focused our analyses on three key features. First, game‐related mobility: how users adjust their movements to the ‘augmented’ ecologies that they encounter (augmented with localized informational objects relevant to the ongoing game activity). Second, ‘Onscreen encounters’, which occur when players notice one another's position on their mobile screen. The management of such interactions, where players are open to interaction because their location is a public matter, is a key feature of the construction of the social order in such a location‐aware environment. Third, the management of situations of actual or potential misalignment between ‘ordinary’ and screen‐mediated perceptions. The very possibility of such misalignment is also a peculiarity of location‐aware technologies. These technologies entail collaborative work by the actors to appropriately tame the power relationships that might emerge from such perceptual asymmetries.     

Early-life mortality clustering in families: A literature review

Research on early-life mortality in contemporary and historical populations has shown that infant and child mortality tend to cluster in a limited number of high-mortality families, a phenomenon known as ‘mortality clustering’. This paper is the first to review the literature on the role of the family in early-life mortality. Contemporary results, methodological and theoretical shortfalls, recent developments, and opportunities for future research are all discussed in this review. Four methodological approaches are distinguished: those based on sibling deaths, mother heterogeneity, thresholds, and excess deaths in populations. It has become clear from research to date that the death of an older child harms the survival chances of younger children in that family, and that fertility behaviour, earlier stillbirths, remarriages, and socio-economic status all explain mortality clustering to some extent.     

The impact of changes in the marital status on return migration of family migrants

Many migrants have non-labour motives to migrate, and they differ substantially from labour migrants in their migration behaviour. For family migrants, the decision to return is highly influenced by changes in their marital status. Using administrative panel data on the entire population of recent family immigrants to the Netherlands, we estimate the effect of a divorce and remarriage on the hazard of leaving the Netherlands using a ‘timing of events’ model. The model allows for correlated unobserved heterogeneity across the migration, the divorce and remarriage processes. The family migrants are divided into five groups based on the Human Development Index (HDI) of their country of birth. We find that both divorce and remarriage increase return of family migrants from less-developed countries. Remarriage of family migrants from developed countries makes them more prone to stay. Young migrants are influenced most by a divorce. The impact of the timing of a divorce and remarriage on return is quantified graphically.     

Marital Fertility Control Among the Qing Nobility: Implications for Two Types of Preventive Check

Demographers, as early as Malthus, have assumed that the preventive checks, delayed marriage and celibacy, were absent in traditional China. In this paper on the Qing (1644–1911) imperial lineage, we demonstrate that, instead, there may have been a different, more ‘modern’ preventive check: fertility control within marriage. Marital fertility of lineage couples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was low to moderate. Such low fertility was the product of three behavioural mechanisms: late starting, early stopping and, most significantly, long spacing. Couples apparently regulated their fertility according to their economic resources and the sex of their surviving children. Moreover, they did so, we suggest, by regulating their coital frequency. Deliberate fertility control, in other words, was already within the ‘calculus of conscious choice’ for some Chinese well before this century. The speed of contemporary sinitic fertility transitions may accordingly be attributed to the fact that they did not require a change in attitudes, only the diffusion of new incentives and effective technologies.     

Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene, and their relationship to Pacific Islands climate activism. In a context where Indigenous peoples and perspectives are poorly represented in global climate politics, it is important to understand how Pacific people represent their own interests and imagine their own futures as pressures to move due to climate change take hold. We examine political action outside of formal governance spaces and processes, in order to understand how Indigenous people are challenging state-centric approaches to climate change adaptation. We do so by studying the works of Pacific activists and artists who engage with climate change. We find that *banua – an expansive concept, inclusive of people and their place, attentive to both mobility and immobility, and distributed across the Pacific Islands region – is essential for the existential security of Pacific people and central to contemporary climate activism. We find that Pacific activists/artists are challenging the status quo by invoking *banua. In doing so, they are politicising (im)mobility. These mobilisations are coalescing into an Oceanic cosmopolitanism that confronts two mutually reinforcing features of contemporary global climate politics: the subordination of Indigenous peoples, perspectives and worldviews; and the marginalisation of (im)mobility concerns within the global climate agenda.     

‘How can we go on caring when nobody here cares about us?’ Australian public maternity units as contested care sites

BackgroundProvision of personalised, continuous care focused on ‘well women’ is now central to midwifery identity and work ideals, but it remains difficult in hospital contexts shaped by increased demand and by neoliberal policies. Previous accounts of occupational and work-family conflicts in midwifery and nursing have pointed to the ‘moral distress’ associated with managing conflicting expectations in health workplaces.QuestionThis paper examines these issues in the Australian context and considers further the ethical implications of midwives not feeling ‘cared for’ themselves in health care organisations.MethodsQualitative research in several Victorian maternity units included use of interviews and observational methods to explore staff experiences of organisational and professional change. Data were coded and analysed using NVivo.FindingsMidwives reported frequent contestation as they sought to practice their ideal of themselves as caregivers in what they reported as often ‘uncaring’ workplaces. To interpret this data, we argue for seeing midwifery caring as embodied social practice taking place within ‘organisation carescapes’.ConclusionTheoretical analysis of the moral and ethical dimensions of the contemporary organisational structure of maternity care suggests that a practice-based and dialogical ethic should form the core principle of care both for women in childbirth and for their carers.     

Settler Welfare on Tropical Forest Frontiers in Latin America

Because of urgent concerns to protect tropical forests in Latin America, social science research on them has been generally ‘forest-centred.’ This forest-centred approach considers the people who inhabit the frontier as agents of land use change and forest conversion focusing on how their actions affect forest cover. Welfare indicators for forest frontier populations (income, education, health, access to basic services) are addressed only incidentally in terms of how they influence land use. ‘People’ centred research, which asks questions from the perspective of human welfare such as, ‘Are frontier settlers better off than they were before?’ or ‘What kind of socio-economic impacts does frontier life have on the people who live there?” and “How can their lives be improved?,” has been less common. As a result, we know much about the impacts, especially adverse impacts, which settler activity on the frontier has on forest cover but little about the impacts settlement has on settlers, themselves. This paper attempts to shift discussion towards these kinds of questions and a more people centred approach by reviewing existing research that directly addresses the welfare of settlers in tropical forest frontiers in Latin America. We also review research that touches on settler welfare by considering the concept of ‘sustainability’ on the forest frontier and stakes out a comprise position between ‘forest’ and ‘people’ centred questions or concerns. Settler welfare is defined primarily in economic terms. Household income, wealth, and agricultural productivity are interpreted a proxies for welfare in most cases. We also consider welfare in terms of access to basic services (health and education) and living conditions. We particularly consider how settler welfare indicators may change over time on the frontier. Tropical forests, defined as tropical, moist, broadleaf forests, are the main ecological setting of interest. These forests are generally the largest unoccupied areas in many Latin American countries and are thus, also the main ‘agricultural frontier’ or areas of new settlement by small farmers.     

Family Practices,Holiday and the Everyday

Holidays are central to the rhythm of everyday family practices and consumption, and are often depicted, within both academic literature and consumer marketing, as a defining moment in contemporary family life. To date, academic accounts of the experiences of travel and tourism have been mostly developed outside of the realm of everyday family practices and intimate relations. In this paper, therefore, we advance an interpretation of family holidays as a constituent of everyday family practices. To do this, we bring together three distinct yet interrelated conceptual frameworks: those of family practices, holiday and the everyday. Presenting and analysing data collected from ethnographic research with six families and exploring the themes of anticipation and utopian family practices, we identify how the notion of family holidays can be used a conduit for realising not only relationality between family members but also as a means of easing out the tensions and aspirations of everyday family life, a way to perfect the everyday and also to make it more palatable.     

The ‘digital glimpse’ as imagining home

This paper proposes the concept of the ‘digital glimpse’, which develops the existing framing of imaginative travel. Here it articulates the experiences of mobile workers digitally connecting into family life and everyday rituals when physically absent with work. The recent embedding of digital communication technologies into personal relationships and family life is reconfiguring how absence is experienced and practiced by workers on the move, and through this, new digital paradigms for life on-the-move are emerging. This paper explores how such social relationships are maintained at-a-distance through digital technology – using evidence from qualitative interviews with mobile workers and their families. Digital technology now enables expressive forms of ‘virtual travel’, including video calling, picture sharing, and instant messaging. This has implications for the ways in which families can manage the social and relational pressures of being apart. Experiences of imaginative travel created through novel media can enrich the experience and give a greater sense of connection for both those who are at home and those who are away. While technology is limited in its ability to replicate a sense of co-presence, ‘digital glimpses’ are an emergent set of sociotechnical practices that can reduce the negative impact of absence on family relationships.     

Stopping the ‘War on the Car’: Neoliberalism,Fordism, and the Politics of Automobility in Toronto

Abstract

This article interrogates the politics of automobility in Toronto under the regime of mayor Rob Ford, who came to power in 2010 promising to ‘stop the war on the car.’ The election of Ford, and the thrust of his subsequent agenda, came as a surprise to many in the city, due to Toronto’s reputation as a cosmopolitan diverse transit-friendly global city. The Toronto case study allows for the analysis of the relationships between Fordism, automobility, and the politics and rationalities of neoliberalism. Instead of seeing neoliberalism as something external or imposed, its contested politics are rooted in diverging social and economic interests directly derived from Fordism and the system of automobility, with opposing political-economic factions both drawing on different elements of neoliberalism. Authoritarian populist neoliberal regimes like the Ford administration in Toronto, and the roll-back austerity they promote, are not antithetical to automobile Fordism, but on the contrary represent an attempt to protect and reinvigorate it in the face of the forces of de-industrialization and financialization. As such they receive their support from social groups irrevocably invested in the continuation, and irrationalities, of the Fordist system of automobility. This has implications for how the politics of neoliberalism might unfold in the future.     

Constructing Global/Local Subjectivities – The New Zealand OE as Governance through Freedom

Abstract

The New Zealand working holiday phenomenon is commonly called the ‘Overseas Experience’ – often simply abbreviated as ‘OE’. While the OE as a working holiday is fundamentally constructed as a time of freedom, fun and cultural experiences, it is also crucially understood as a personal development and coming of age experience. Yet, the sorts of changes young New Zealanders envisage as they embark on their temporary journey abroad have been largely unexplored. Drawing on qualitative research material gathered in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2006–20007, this article explores the multiplicity of reasons young adults from NZ have for engaging in this finite travel phenomenon. By using Nikolas Rose’s theorisations about governance through freedom and the constitution of subjects in advanced liberal democracies, this paper shows that the exercise of freedom and the personal transformation into a full adult member of New Zealand society are highly visible aspirations of OE travellers. This transformation seems to require the paradoxical obligation to be free and exercise choice. Drawing on Rose, the article illustrates how as young New Zealanders insert themselves into OE discourses, they are governed through freedom.