Abstract
Ten years ago a new journal that would anchor and foster what would become known as the “new mobility studies” appeared: Transfers. The intervening years have seen it grow into an important multidisciplinary, if not yet quite interdisciplinary, journal for researchers around the world. Reflecting on Transfers’ founding and first decade, this essay comments on the salutary development within the journal's pages of “worlding” the European and North American analyses that had characterized early mobility studies, and cautions against underestimating the continuing power of the state in constructing and administering environments of mobility.
Contributor Notes
Cotten Seiler is Associate Professor of American Studies at Dickinson College. He is the author of Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2009), and his essays have appeared in Social Text, Public Culture, American Quarterly, and other interdisciplinary journals. His current book explores the racial politics of infrastructural provisioning in the twentieth-century United States. Email: seilerc@dickinson.edu.