Infrastructures of immobility: enabling international distance education students in Africa to not move

ABSTRACT

There is now a large literature discussing how mobilities are part of contemporary everyday power geometries and is a resource to which people have unequal access. This body of work has, thus, valorised mobility as a desirable good. Why some people choose immobility and what has to be mobilised to enable this immobility has received much less attention. This paper draws on interviews with international distance education students in Namibia and Zimbabwe studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to explore the spatio-temporal underpinnings to why students choose to remain at home while studying abroad and how this is arranged. It outlines the infrastructures of reach that enable student immobility and how their incomplete nature means that students have to rely on extensive systems of mobilities of other people and objects to ensure that their study progresses without their own educational mobility. In doing so we move away from considering immobility as a result of limited access to mobility. Instead, we set out a new research agenda on why and how the infrastructures of immobilities are important in mobility research.     

Gender,marriage, and the dynamic of (im)mobility in the mid-Western hills of Nepal

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between gender, marriage, and (im)mobility in rural hilly areas of mid-Western Nepal, showing how (1) the mobility of men is predicated on the ‘immobility’ of women, with marriage being key to the gendered dynamic of (im)mobility, (2) how the construction of hegemonic masculinity, exemplified by a figure of a successful international migrant, is inseparable from an ideal of femininity vested in the figure of a virtuous domesticated housewife. Examining different scales of mobility, the paper cautions against posing a rigid dichotomy between ‘mobile men’ and ‘immobile’ women, illustrating that the ‘left behind’ wives experience an impressive degree of everyday mobility in contrast to their internationally mobile husbands.     

Accountability in a state of liminality: Iranian students’ experiences in American airports

This paper studies the lived experience of Iranian students upon arrival at American airports. By using two concepts of liminality and accountability, I examine how Iranian students walk the gauntlet of US airports, and study the influences of the treatment they receive at airports on their perceptions of the US. Empirically, I draw on 15 in-depth qualitative interviews with eight Iranian students at a Southern university in the US. The paper posits that multiple layers of liminality surface and intensify in airports as a threshold where international travelers can see both ways, behind and before them, while belonging to neither one. The requirement to be an ‘accountable other’ adds up to the contingencies of the situation. Theoretically, this paper puts the politics of mobility in the colonial context and claims that legal recognition will not result in integration when negative discourses around the civilizational other regards their mobility as a threat and challenges their social recognition.     

Rethinking network capital: hospitality work and parallel trading among Chinese students in Melbourne

Drawing on an ethnographic study of Chinese female tertiary students’ work practices in Melbourne, Australia, this article engages critically with John Urry’s concept of network capital. I show how these students’ work practices link them both into relatively fixed, localized, diasporic employment networks in Melbourne’s Chinese restaurant sector; and into relatively mobile, transnational, digitally mediated trading networks in the micro-entrepreneurial activity of daigou or parallel trading: buying local goods on behalf of customers in China. Based on this case study, I develop three main inter-related claims. First, I argue that geographic and social mooring in place, as well as mobility, can generate benefit for individuals and groups, just as both fixity and mobility may generate disadvantage or risk. Second and relatedly, I propose that social capital cannot operate entirely independently of geography, as Urry’s proposal of network capital as a replacement for the concept of social capital implies. Third, through my development of the concept of ‘feminine network capital’, I show how network capital may take ‘weak’ and tactical, as well as ‘strong’ and strategic forms.     

The Reconstruction of a Social Network Abroad. An Analysis of the Interaction Patterns of Erasmus Students

Abstract

Most studies of interaction patterns of international students focus on ‘degree mobility’ and flows from ‘non-Western’ towards ‘Western’ countries. Nevertheless, in Europe, the shorter alternative of ‘credit mobility’ is more prevalent. However, empirical evidence on social network formation within this specific group of international students remains limited. Therefore, in this article, we study the formation of interaction patterns of students who study for a delineated period in another European country, based on a research project conducted in Austria, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Poland and the UK. The results show that specific interaction patterns can be explained from a flow perspective. Moreover, our study shows that students’ networks abroad are already formed before actual departure. In addition, we provide empirical evidence that institutional as well as group practices encourage or impede interaction between exchange and local students. Two transversal dimensions are especially relevant in the explanation of how groups are formed abroad: language proficiency and shared social spaces.     

Producing Thailand as a transit country: borders,advocacy, and destitution

ABSTRACT

The space of the ‘transit country’ is increasingly depicted in policy and NGO rhetoric as a taken-for-granted space where migrants pass through on their way to seek protection in the Global North. Yet I argue that the ‘transit country’ is a contested space, a space where ‘temporariness’ may be produced purposefully in order to limit opportunities for protection. In this paper, I argue that Thailand produces itself as a transit country in order to manage and control refugee and asylum seeker populations. Through several discursive and material tactics, including security spectacles, legal maneuvering, and migrant destitution, Thailand maintains and exploits the status of a ‘transit country.’ The purposeful construction of a place where ‘no one will stay’ challenges depictions of migration as linear movements defined by sources and destinations, where transit spaces become only more distance to traverse. While the production of transit countries has always been political, the case of Thailand suggests that the politics involved need not center the migration deterrence efforts of traditional destination countries of the Global North, but have implications within states and regions of the Global South as well.     

A user’s guide to Lisbon: mobilities,spatial apprenticeship and migrant urban integration*

This paper engages with the ‘mobility turn’ scholarship in order to provide tools for the study of migrants’ integration to urban space. The analysis of urban mobilities draws attention to the practical know-how that underlies mobility practices. I argue that migrants’ urban apprenticeship – that is, the ways migrants learn (to use) city spaces – shape their access to urban resources and their participation in urban life. Based on fieldwork conducted in Lisbon, Portugal, I explore how migrants’ urban knowledges play out in their everyday practices and resonate with broader concerns over migrant integration.     

‘Walking out’: the mobilities of love

ABSTRACT

In this article, I propose that mobility performs a crucial role in the production and sustenance of intimate relationships and focus, in particular, on courtship practices and their modern-day equivalents. I pursue this discussion through close readings of literary and autobiographical texts from the nineteenth century through to the millennium, and by means of a framework that triangulates the work of Tim Ingold, David Seamon and Henri Bergson. My focus here is on how the mobilities we practice during the everyday routines of courtship – i.e. the paths we make, the routes we take, the roads we travel, the journeys we repeat, the transport we use – come to characterise the relationship concerned and impact upon its progress. Both Ingold’s work on ‘lines’ and Seamon’s on ‘place-ballet’ are conceptually suggestive in this regard and speak to recent work in mobilities/cultural geography on the significance of patterns of movement in the praxis of relationships.     

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.     

Unrecognised Cosmopolitans: Mobility and Openness Among Globally Engaged Family Farmers

In contemporary cosmopolitanism research, cities are iconic places where cosmopolitan exchanges and actors find their ‘natural’ milieu. Farmers not only are remarkably absent from this literature but have been depicted as operating with a highly localist and agrarian world view and being strongly connected to the land and the farm through history, biography and family tradition. In this paper, we present findings from a three-year study of entrepreneurial family farmers who are globally engaged and undertake extensive mobility as part of their farm business practices. The paper shows how they readily display some of the key hallmarks of contemporary cosmopolitanism: they are highly mobile and frequently engage in the routineness of international travel; they understand the strategic significance of cultural sensitivities and competencies; and they gain pleasure from engaging with difference. Yet, we suggest that these expressions of cosmopolitanism are also contradictory and, at times, may be understood as either ‘instrumental’, ‘banal’ or ‘engaged’. The paper illustrates how ordinary and everyday cosmopolitan repertoires and sentiments can arise outside the usual settings and among actors not readily acknowledged in the cosmopolitanism literature.     

‘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.     

Women ‘like parched earth in need of rain’ and who relax by working: gossip and the surveillance of Filipino seafarer wives’ morality and mobility

Research on the impact of male emigration on stay-behind wives shows that gossip, which transnational migration intensifies, surveils the women’s morality and constricts their mobility. Based on semi-structured interviews supplemented by field observations, this article examines the impact of gossip on the lives and experiences of stay-behind Filipino seafarer wives. First, it looks into how the women negotiated an environment in which their morality became dominated by the need to keep their reputation as faithful wives intact. As women whose husbands were away for long periods of time, they were seen as being ‘like parched earth in need of rain’ and therefore susceptible to temptation and seduction. Second, it examines how through dibersyon – activities that translated work into recreation – they counteracted the constricting effects of gossip on their mobility without compromising their perceived morality. The article concludes with a reflection on the contradiction the women’s negotiation of gossip creates: they inadvertently help to maintain gendered conceptions of morality and mobility while simultaneously working around the gender ideological and normative boundaries gossip enforces.     

Being-in-motion: the everyday (gendered and classed) embodied mobilities for UK university students who commute

This article makes the case for a more robust mobilities approach to student geographies in the UK, in order to problematise the enduring binary of [im]mobility (‘going away’ vs. ‘staying local’) and to challenge the presumed linearity of educational (and mobility) transitions in higher education. Through a discussion of two UK-based studies, we make the case for considering the complex and multi-layered everyday mobilities of students who commute to illuminate a broader range of mobility practices that shape students’ experiences and identities, and which are embedded in multiple and intersecting embodiments of class, gender, age and ethnicity.     

The Culture of New Mobility in Russia: Networks and Flows Formation

Abstract

The paper considers the development of the culture of new mobility in Russia from the perspective of the quantitative analysis of the changes occurring in the structure of traffic movements and flows and communication using mobile phones, the internet, and other mobile gadgets. The culture of mobility is defined as a set of the interactions which are carried out apropos and during mobility. It is argued that the culture of new mobility in Russia is specified by the processes of ‘individualization’ and ‘networked individualism’. This conclusion is inferred from the rapid growth of individualized automobility, from the considerable increase in international tourism and from the widespread prevalence of mobile gadgets as indispensable attributes of everyday life.     

Together and Apart: Affective Ambiences and Negotiation in Families’ Everyday Life and Mobility

Abstract

This article addresses the affective, emotional, and familial dimensions of urban everyday mobility. Drawing on theoretical inspiration from phenomenology, non-representational theory, and mobilities research on the relational mobilities of children and families, the paper explores the everyday mobility of 11 households with children in the multi-modal context of Copenhagen, Denmark. Following the conceptualization of everyday mobility practices as heterogeneous ‘negotiation in motion’, the empirical analysis investigates how the strong relational dynamics between household members are organized around affect, care, familial bonding, and the rhythms of everyday life, which shape spatial patterns of moving together and apart. A new qualitative method combining GPS tracking, mapping, and household interviews is explored to show how everyday patterns of relational mobility are filtered through spatial affordances, affective ambience, and the temporalities of the lifecourse to influence transport alternatives of route and modal choices.     

The Movement Beyond (Lifestyle) Migration: Mobile Practices and the Constitution of a Better Way of Life

Abstract

This article revisits my ethnography of the British in rural France to question how mobility in post‐migration life was deemed intrinsic to the better way of life that they sought through their migration. Through the exploration of the migrants’ everyday lives, I reveal that the migrants’ mobile practices and their expectations of mobility contributed towards the perceived success of their new lives and were thus significant to the ongoing process getting to a better way of life. Beyond this example, the article also demonstrates how the findings of mobilities researchers may be mobilized in traditional anthropological fieldwork.     

Everything changes to stay the same: persistent global health inequalities amidst new therapeutic opportunities and mobilities for Filipino nurses

ABSTRACT

The global migration of Filipino nurses has received significant attention, yet little is known of these healthcare workers’ experiences and mobilities within the Philippines. I explore the experiences and narratives of Filipino nurses living in Manila, some of whom have no desires to migrate. I uncover the often novel forms of therapeutic mobilities undertaken by these nurses, focusing on call centre nursing and entrepreneurship as key alternative career pathways within the realms of ‘therapeutics’. Through interrogating the various mobilities undertaken by nurses – physical mobilities and migration, socioeconomic mobilities and occupational mobilities in the form of a career change – it becomes clear that international physical mobility is no longer key. Nevertheless, Filipino nurses continue to provide care in global contexts in novel ‘therapeutic’ industries and doing so allows them to increase their socioeconomic mobility.     

Transit boundaries: race and the paradox of immobility within mobile systems

ABSTRACT

The central city is once again hot. Many city areas where poor minorities were left behind during the decades-long suburban growth are experiencing a revival. New high-rise condominiums and other developments are drawing tens of thousands back to city spaces that were once considered undesirable. These ‘return to the city’ trends are supported in part by growth machine engines, such as Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and TIF (Tax Increment Financing) districts, often to the detriment of lower-income minority residents, who still find themselves trapped within the boundaries of spatial inequalities in the city. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, I show how public transportation is used to buttress the city’s growth machine, while simultaneously maintaining the boundaries of spatial and other types of inequalities. In doing so, I highlight how public transit is used to create and support growth along race (and class) lines. Specifically, I show how mobility and growth for Whites and predominantly White spaces in the city are proactively shaped through favorable new public transit development and revitalization initiatives such as TOD and TIF. At the same time, in predominantly Black and Latinx spaces, where intracommunity public transportation usage is high, new transit related development is below sparse or completely lacking, further fortifying transit and other spatial boundaries.     

Co‐ordinating Passages: Understanding the Resources Needed for Everyday Mobility

Abstract

This article contributes to the ‘mobilities turn’ in social science by proposing new concepts and methods for analysing the ways in which people draw upon a range of resources to manage everyday mobility. We distinguish between the ‘projects’ people want to achieve and the ‘passages’ they need to go through in order to do so. We also distinguish between ‘pre‐travelling’ and ‘re‐ordering’. The analysis builds on insights from time‐geography, mobility studies and actor‐network‐theory to develop a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the dynamic and situated nature of travel in everyday life. The study combines qualitative and quantitative data from a study of hypermobile people in the Netherlands.     

(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.