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Abstract

This article explores the ways people targeted by restrictive migration and mobility policies in Algeria experience, interpret, and contest them. It focuses on the perspective of harragas, literally “those who burn” the borders. In the Maghrebi dialects, this is notably how people leaving without documentation are referred to. It reflects the fact that they do not respect the mandatory steps for legal departure. Also, they figuratively “burn” their papers to avoid deportation once in Europe. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, this article outlines the complex and ambiguous attitudes toward the legal mobility regime of those it aims to exclude: compliance, deception, delegitimization, and defiance. It contributes to debates about human experiences of borders and inequality in mobility regimes. It helps deepen knowledge on why restrictive migration and mobility policies fail and are often counterproductive, encouraging the undocumented migration they were meant to deter.

The seas and oceans, ships and boats, alongside other maritime activities and practices, have become a focus of work within the “new mobilities paradigm.” However, water worlds much like the space they occupy in the relation to the land remain situated in the margins of such work, despite an oceanic (re)turn in disciplines such as human geography, sociology, anthropology, and politics. Drawing from this recognition, this article seeks to make two contributions. First, following earlier, agenda-setting work, it makes a renewed call for mobilities scholarship to centralize work on oceans, ships, and other forms seagoing travel and life. Second, in doing so, it suggests such work needs to voyage more deeply and widely in the future, exploring mobilities beyond surficial connections and flows across our oceans, and making more expansive the subjects and objects and scales of investigation, under the remit of the “new mobilities paradigm.”

Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System. Alexander Betts and Paul Collier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Once posited as a revolutionary transportation technology, the Segway never took off as some expected because the social acceptance of the technology was not considered in a systematic manner. Using a framework for social acceptance of technology borrowed from the literature on renewable energy, we examine how social, economic, and environmental costs of the Segway, along with regulatory issues presented barriers to implementation. High prices, legislative and spatial issues, and a lack of appeal to consumers presented challenges to acceptance. This case study provides a timely reminder of the multifaceted and complex nature of social acceptance that will need to be applied to future innovations, such as autonomous vehicles, to better understand factors that need to be considered for them to be embraced by society.

Abstract

The Windrush scandal belongs to a much longer arc of Caribbean-British transmigration, forced and free. The genesis of the scandal can be found in the post–World War II period, when Caribbean migration was at first strongly encouraged and then increasingly harshly constrained. This reflection traces the effects of these changes as they were experienced in the lives of individuals and families. In the Caribbean this recent scandal is understood as extending the longer history of colonial relations between Britain and the Caribbean and as a further reason to demand reparations for slavery. Experiences of the Windrush generation recall the limbo dance of the middle passage; the dancer moves under a bar that is gradually lowered until a mere slit remains.

Being Lighter Than Air Derek P. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 304 pp., 34 illustrations, $27.95 (paperback)

Challenging Landscapes of Confinement Michael J. Flynn and Matthew B. Flynn, Challenging Immigration Detention: Academics, Activists and Policy-makers (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2017), 352 pp. £81 (hardback).

“Bottleneck” in Dakar: From Metaphor to Anthropological Analytical Tool Caroline Melly, Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in An African City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 224 pp., 11 halftones, $30 (paperback).

Migratory Trajectories, Affective Attachments, and Sexual-Economic Exchanges Christian Groes and Nadine T. Fernandez, eds., Intimate Mobilities: Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 248 pp., $120 (hardback).

Engineering Nineteenth-Century Transport Innovations Maxwell Lay, The Harnessing of Power: How 19th Century Transport Innovators Transformed the Way the World Operates (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018), 374 pp., £64.99 (hardback).

The Politics of Mobility in Postcolonial Kenya Kenda Mutongi, Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 352 pp., 31 halftones, $30 (paperback).

A Sense of What Commuting Takes David Bissell, Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 272 pp., 6 illustrations, $32 (paperback).

Vanishing Point? The City after the Car Venkat Sumantran, Charles Fine and David Gonsalvez, Faster, Smarter, Greener: The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility (Massachusetts: The MIT Press), 326 pp, $29.95

Troubling the “View from Above” Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 298pp., 24 color plates. Hardcover: $77, Paper $25.

Mobility, Mobilization, and Cooptation Claudio Sopranzetti, Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility and Politics in Bangkok (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), xiv +328 pp., $85.00 (hardback), $29.95 (paperback).

No Exit: The Persistent Legacies of Mobility Choices in Houston Kyle Shelton, Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 302 pp., 24 black-and-white illustrations, $29.95 (paperback)

Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their environments. Crops suggest ways to embed rootedness in mobility studies, fleshing out the linkages between flows and matrices and thus developing effective frameworks for reconnecting local and global history. Our focus here is on the movements, or failures to move, of “cropscapes”: the ever-mutating ecologies, or matrices, comprising assemblages of nonhumans and humans, within which a particular crop in a particular place and time flourishes or fails. As with the landscape, the cropscape as concept and analytical tool implies a deliberate choice of frame. In playing with how to frame our selected cropscapes spatially and chronologically, we develop productive alternatives to latent Eurocentric and modernist assumptions about periodization, geographical hierarchies, and scale that still prevail within history of technology, global and comparative history, and indeed within broader public understanding of mobility and history.

The project “Individual Itineraries and the Circulation of Scientific and Technical Knowledge in China (16th–20th Centuries)” has shed light on the impact of individuals’ geographic mobility on the spatial dynamics of knowledge in late imperial China, where the bureaucratic system dictated a specific pattern of mobility for the elites. The question was also studied for other socioprofessional groups—craftsmen and medical doctors—and for the actors of the globalization of knowledge—Christian missionaries, colonial doctors, and the Chinese students. The studies conducted shed light on a variety of places, social milieus, fields of knowledge, and on the conditions of travel of technical knowledge—including sericulture, water conservancy, medicine, natural history, and statistics—against the background of the expertise such as classical scholarship—the dominant body of knowledge, sanctioned by imperial examination—circulated among the elite.