Browse
Odiolândia (Hateland)
Giselle Beiguelman
Translocated Colonial Subjects in Collaboration
Animals and Human Knowledge
Pushkar Sohoni
Abstract
The domestication and use of animals is an integral part of the history of technology, as beasts were used to improve the efficiency of agricultural, military, and transportation activities. Individuals and social groups often had to be introduced along with animal technologies, as the domestication, breeding, training, and handling of animals was a culture that could not be immediately learned. In the age of European empires, several ethnic groups were imported along with the animals that they tended. This article highlights the role of humans as part of animal technologies, as an important anthropological component when technologies that involve animals are introduced to new settlements and areas. Using three case studies in which animal technologies from Asia were introduced to other parts of the world, it can be seen that humans are an essential and integral component of animal technologies.
Vistas of Future New Mobility Studies
Transfers and Transformations
Georgine Clarsen, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller
Abstract
With our eighth volume of this journal, the Transfers editorial team celebrates our achievements under our outgoing editor, Gijs Mom. This article outlines our priorities under our new editor, Dagmar Schäfer, and reaffirms our commitment to the burgeoning field of new mobility studies. The presentations by Mimi Sheller and Peter Merriman, fellow members of the editorial team, at our journal’s panel at the recent T2M conference, “Vistas of Future Mobility Studies: Transfers and Transformations” is summed up for the convenience of those who were not able to attend. This journal will continue to encourage and publish work that places mobilities at the center of our scholarship, with special emphasis on the humanities. Our commitment is to good, innovative, activist scholarship that can help us move toward alternative mobility futures.
Afterword
Dangerous Mobilities
Mimi Sheller
Abstract
The articles in this special issue show how a theoretical approach informed by the mobilities turn can reveal new facets of the history of dangerous mobility. This afterword draws together some of these lessons concerning materialities, bodily sensations, and performativity, and then considers how we might study these aspects of danger and mobility from an international, comparative, and historical methodological perspective.
Becoming-Wolf
Or The Art of Affection in Nicolette Krebitz’s Wild
Tanja Prokić
Book Reviews
Beth Gutelius, Janet Gibson, Dhan Zunino Singh, Steven J. Gold, Alexandra Portmann, Peter Cox, Rudi Volti, Adrian Drummond-Cole, and Steven D. Spalding
Chance Favors Those in Motion
Maria Hupfield
City Sterilization and Poverty Management
Examining a Mobility Hub in the “Redevelopment and Enhancement” of Downtown Tallahassee
Christopher M. McLeod, Matthew I. Horner, Matthew G. Hawzen, and Mark DiDonato
Abstract
People experiencing homelessness use service centers, shelters, missions, and other voluntary organizations to access material resources and social networks. Because these service hubs have a dense array of resources, people sometimes incorporate them into their daily movements around urban space, which results in patterns or tendencies called mobility systems. Drawing on participant observation, document analysis, and spatial analytics via geographic information systems (GIS), we describe the mobility system organized around one homeless services center in Tallahassee, Florida. Moreover, we present a case study of how this homeless services center was moved away from downtown to an upgraded facility to show how city administrators manage homeless mobility systems when they are deemed unsafe for downtown redevelopment. The case supports previous studies that found punitive and supportive strategies are used together, but adds how mobility and “network capital” can be used to evaluate center relocations in the future.
Editorial
Gijs Mom
Embodied Vibrations
Disastrous Mobilities in Relocation from the Christchurch Earthquakes, Aotearoa New Zealand
Gail Adams-Hutcheson
Abstract
This article contributes to debates that consider things (buildings) that have previously been assumed to be bounded and fixed. When thinking about how literally anything can become mobile, this article addresses how buildings “live on” through the bodies of participants. The notion of material affects is advanced to draw together a complex set of ideas on vibrant materialities. Material affects, then, entangle the earth, forces, embodiment, and micro mobilities to expose the vibrant matter of buildings. Empirical material is drawn from semistructured interviews with people who relocated out of Christchurch following the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes and aftershocks. In relocation, acute spatial awareness and sensitivity to movement and vibration—that is, the minute shudders and flexes of buildings—colonized the bodies of participants. Material affects are able to challenge the distinction between vital energy (life) forces and materiality.