front cover of African American Travel Narratives from Abroad
African American Travel Narratives from Abroad
Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow
Gary Totten
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
During the Jim Crow era, African American travelers faced the prospects of violence, harassment, and the denial of services, especially as they made their way throughout the American South. Those who journeyed outside the United States found not only a political and social context that was markedly different from America's, but in their international mobility, they also discovered new ways of identifying themselves in relation to others.

In this book, Gary Totten examines the global travel narratives of a diverse set of African American writers, including Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Matthew Henson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston. While these writers deal with issues of identity in relation to a reimagined sense of self—in a way that we might expect to find in travel narratives—they also push against the constraints and conventions of the genre, reconsidering discourses of tourism, ethnography, and exploration. This book not only offers new insights about African American writers and mobility, it also charts the ideological distinctions and divergent agendas within this group of writers. Totten demonstrates how these travelers and their writings challenged dominant ideologies about African American experience, expression, and identity in a period of escalating racial violence. By setting these texts in their historical context and within the genre of travel writing, Totten presents a nuanced understanding of both popular and recovered work of the period.
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Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond
Edited by Reece Jones and Md. Azmeary Ferdoush
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The world is experiencing one of the largest movements of people in history with 65 million people displaced by conflict in 2015, the majority of which were from Asia. This book brings a deep engagement with individuals whose lives are shaped by encounters with borders by telling the stories of a poor Bangladeshi women who regularly crosses the India border to visit family, of Muslims from India living in Gulf countries for work, and the harrowing journey of a young Afghan man as he sets off on foot to Germany. The international and interdisciplinary work in this book contributes to this moment by analyzing how borders are experienced by migrants and borderlanders in South Asia, how mobility and diaspora are engaged in literature and media, and how the lives of migrants are transformed during their journey to new homes in South Asia, the Middle East, North America, and Europe.
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Buying Time
Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
Thomas F. McDow
Ohio University Press, 2018

In Buying Time, Thomas F. McDow synthesizes Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern, and East African studies as well as economic and social history to explain how, in the nineteenth century, credit, mobility, and kinship knit together a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region. That vibrant and enormously influential swath extended from the desert fringes of Arabia to Zanzibar and the Swahili coast and on to the Congo River watershed.

In the half century before European colonization, Africans and Arabs from coasts and hinterlands used newfound sources of credit to seek out opportunities, establish new outposts in distant places, and maintain families in a rapidly changing economy. They used temporizing strategies to escape drought in Oman, join ivory caravans in the African interior, and build new settlements.

The key to McDow’s analysis is a previously unstudied trove of Arabic business deeds that show complex variations on the financial transactions that underwrote the trade economy across the region. The documents list names, genealogies, statuses, and clan names of a wide variety of people—Africans, Indians, and Arabs; men and women; free and slave—who bought, sold, and mortgaged property. Through unprecedented use of these sources, McDow moves the historical analysis of the Indian Ocean beyond connected port cities to reveal the roles of previously invisible people.

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A Chinese Beggars' Den
Poverty and Mobility in an Underclass Community
David C. Schak
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
In this fascinating study of a community of Chinese beggars, David Schak offers evidence that challenges widely held theories on poverty. It is a path-breaking, systematic anthropological study that challenges long-held beliefs about poverty, and is one of the few works on beggars available.

Over a period of seven years, Schak's fieldwork uncovers a structure of leadership, organizational methods, and alms-getting tactics. Moreover, certain members became upwardly mobile and able to leave this lifestyle. The severe stigma of gambling, adultery, and failure to marry proved the stimulus for a younger generation to leave begging behind.
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A Colonial Lexicon
Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo
Nancy Rose Hunt
Duke University Press, 1999
A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the “colonial encounter” paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu’s Zaire.
Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa.
With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexiconwill interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women’s and cultural studies.


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Cross-border Marriages and Mobility
Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men
Avital Binah-Pollak
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
*Cross-border Marriages and Mobility: Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men* focuses on cross-border marriages between mainland Chinese women and Hong Kong men, a phenomenon which is of critical importance to the transformation of Hong Kong. By examining the women’s motivations for migration and lived experiences in relation to the discursive, political, economic, and social circumstances of mainland China and Hong Kong, Avital Binah-Pollak demonstrates how these marital practices are causing the expanding and blurring of borders, so that there is a much wider strip of border in which the dichotomies of the rural/urban, periphery/center, and hybrid/national identities become more complex and negotiable. While this is particularly interesting and valid in the case of the border between mainland China and Hong Kong because of the particular nature of the relationship between these two societies, it may also apply to borders between many other societies worldwide.
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Dancing out of Line
Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture
Molly Engelhardt
Ohio University Press, 2009

Dancing out of Line transports readers back to the 1840s, when the craze for social and stage dancing forced Victorians into a complex relationship with the moving body in its most voluble, volatile form.

By partnering cultural discourses with representations of the dance and the dancer in novels such as Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Daniel Deronda, Molly Engelhardt makes explicit many of the ironies underlying Victorian practices that up to this time have gone unnoticed in critical circles. She analyzes the role of the illustrious dance master, who created and disseminated the manners and moves expected of fashionable society, despite his position as a social outsider of nebulous origins. She describes how the daughters of the social elite were expected to “come out” to society in the ballroom, the most potent space in the cultural imagination for licentious behavior and temptation. These incongruities generated new, progressive ideas about the body, subjectivity, sexuality, and health.

Engelhardt challenges our assumptions about Victorian sensibilities and attitudes toward the sexual/social roles of men and women by bringing together historical voices from various fields to demonstrate the versatility of the dance, not only as a social practice but also as a forum for Victorians to engage in debate about the body and its pleasures and pathologies.

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Finding Augusta
Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era
Heidi Rae Cooley
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
Winner of the 2015 Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Finding Augusta breaks new ground, revising how media studies interpret the relationship between our bodies and technology. This is a challenging exploration of how, for both good and ill, the sudden ubiquity of mobile devices, GPS systems, haptic technologies, and other forms of media alter individuals’ experience of their bodies and shape the social collective. The author succeeds in problematizing the most salient fact of contemporary mobile media technologies, namely, that they have become, like highways and plumbing, an infrastructure that regulates habit. Audacious in its originality, Finding Augusta will be of great interest to art and media scholars alike.
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From the Land of Ever Winter to the American Southwest
Athapaskan Migrations, Mobility, and Ethnogenesis
Deni J. Seymour
University of Utah Press, 2012

The Athapaskan departure from the Canadian Subarctic centuries ago and their subsequent arrival in the American Southwest has remained the subject of continuous debate in anthropological research. This book examines archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and traditional oral history data and brings them together in fresh ways, in many cases for the first time. With a backdrop of these new and interrelated lines of evidence, each subfield must now reevaluate its approach and the forms of evidence it uses to construct arguments.

The contributors here include the most knowledgeable scholars in each of the above fields, collectively providing the most up-to-date research on early Athapaskans and their movements and migrations. Each chapter approaches Athapaskan migration with data obtained from different regions, providing clarity as to the basis for individual arguments. Often, entrenched regional visualizations and localized conventions are clarified only when placed in juxtaposition to those of other regions. Because of this, conclusions rest on sometimes widely divergent theoretical and methodological underpinnings, thus expressing preference for and conveying weight to certain types of evidence and lines of reasoning. The goal of this volume is to expose these arguments in order to clarify appropriate directions for future research, making advances possible.
 

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The Future of Mobility
Scenarios for China in 2030
Liisa Ecola
RAND Corporation, 2015
Researchers developed two scenarios to envision the future of mobility in China in 2030. Economic growth, the presence of constraints on vehicle ownership and driving, and environmental conditions differentiate the scenarios. By making potential long-term mobility futures more vivid, the team sought to help decisionmakers at different levels of government and in the private sector better anticipate and prepare for change.
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Heritage Discourses in Europe
Responding to Migration, Mobility, and Cultural Identities in the Twenty-First Century
Laia Colomer
Arc Humanities Press, 2020
Debates about migration and heritage largely discuss how newcomers integrate into the host societies, and how they manage (or not) to embrace local and national heritage as part of their new cultural landscape. But relatively little attention has been paid to how the host society is changing culturally because its new citizens have collective memories constructed upon different geographies/events, and emotional attachments to non-European forms of cultural heritages. This short book explores how new cultural identities in transformation are challenging the notions and the significance of heritage today in Europe. It asks the questions: How far are contemporary Authorized Heritage Discourses in Europe changing due to migration and globalization? Could heritage sites and museums be a meeting point for socio-cultural dialogue between locals and newcomers? Could heritage become a source of creative platforms for other heritage discourses, better "tuned" with today’s European multicultural profile?
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Highways and Hierarchies
Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean
Luke Heslop
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This edited collection explores the contemporary proliferation of roads in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region, showing how new infrastructures simultaneously create fresh connections and reinforce existing inequalities. Bringing together ethnographic studies on the social politics of road development and new mobilities in 21st-century Asia, it demonstrates that while new roads generate new forms of hierarchy, older forms of hierarchy are remade and re-established in creative and surprising new ways. Focused on South Asia but speaking to more global phenomena, the chapters collectively reveal how road planning, construction and usage routinely yield a simultaneous reinforcement and disruption of social, political, and economic relations.
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Imperial Bodies in London
Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880–1914
Kristin Hussey
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Winner, 2022 Whitfield Prize for First Monograph in the Field of British and Irish History

Since the eighteenth century, European administrators and officers, military men, soldiers, missionaries, doctors, wives, and servants moved back and forth between Britain and its growing imperial territories. The introduction of steam-powered vessels, and deep-docks to accommodate them at London ports, significantly reduced travel time for colonists and imperial servants traveling home to see their families, enjoy a period of study leave, or recuperate from the tropical climate. With their minds enervated by the sun, livers disrupted by the heat, and blood teeming with parasites, these patients brought the empire home and, in doing so, transformed medicine in Britain. With Imperial Bodies in London, Kristin D. Hussey offers a postcolonial history of medicine in London. Following mobile tropical bodies, her book challenges the idea of a uniquely domestic medical practice, arguing instead that British medicine was imperial medicine in the late Victorian era. Using the analytic tools of geography, she interrogates sites of encounter across the imperial metropolis to explore how medical research and practice were transformed and remade at the crossroads of empire.

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The Insecure City
Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut
Monroe, Kristin V
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Fifteen years after the end of a protracted civil and regional war, Beirut broke out in violence once again, forcing residents to contend with many forms of insecurity, amid an often violent political and economic landscape. Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, The Insecure City captures the day-to-day experiences of citizens of Beirut moving through a war-torn landscape.
 
While living in Beirut, Kristin Monroe conducted interviews with a diverse group of residents of the city. She found that when people spoke about getting around in Beirut, they were also expressing larger concerns about social, political, and economic life. It was not only violence that threatened Beirut’s ordinary residents, but also class dynamics that made life even more precarious. For instance, the installation of checkpoints and the rerouting of traffic—set up for the security of the elite—forced the less fortunate to alter their lives in ways that made them more at risk. Similarly, the ability to pass through security blockades often had to do with an individual’s visible markers of class, such as clothing, hairstyle, and type of car. Monroe examines how understandings and practices of spatial mobility in the city reflect social differences, and how such experiences led residents to be bitterly critical of their government.
 
 
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Ireland's Farthest Shores
Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World
Malcolm Campbell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Irish people have had a long and complex engagement with the lands and waters encompassing the Pacific world. As the European presence in the Pacific intensified from the late eighteenth century, the Irish entered this oceanic space as beachcombers, missionaries, traders, and colonizers. During the nineteenth century, economic distress in Ireland and rapid population growth on the Pacific Ocean's eastern and western shores set in motion large-scale migration that exerted a deep political, social, and economic impact across the Pacific.

Malcolm Campbell examines the rich history of Irish experiences on land and at sea, offering new perspectives on migration and mobility in the Pacific world and of the Irish role in the establishment and maintenance of the British Empire. This volume investigates the extensive transnational connections that developed among Irish immigrants and their descendants across this vast and unique oceanic space, ties that illuminate how the Irish participated in the making of the Pacific world and how the Pacific world made them.
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Latina/os and World War II
Mobility, Agency, and Ideology
Edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and B.V. Olguín
University of Texas Press, 2014

The first book-length study of Latina/o experiences in World War II over a wide spectrum of identities and ancestries—from Cuban American, Spanish American, and Mexican American segments to the under-studied Afro-Latino experience—Latina/os and World War II probes the controversial aspects of Latina/o soldiering and citizenship in the war, the repercussions of which defined the West during the twentieth century. The editors also offer a revised, more accurate tabulation of the number of Latina/os who served in the war.

Spanning imaginative productions, such as vaudeville and the masculinity of the soldado razo theatrical performances; military segregation and the postwar lives of veterans; Tejanas on the homefront; journalism and youth activism; and other underreported aspects of the wartime experience, the essays collected in this volume showcase rarely seen recollections. Whether living in Florida in a transformed community or deployed far from home (including Mexican Americans who were forced to endure the Bataan Death March), the men and women depicted in this collection yield a multidisciplinary, metacritical inquiry. The result is a study that challenges celebratory accounts and deepens the level of scholarly inquiry into the realm of ideological mobility for a unique cultural crossroads. Taking this complex history beyond the realm of war narratives, Latina/os and World War II situates these chapters within the broader themes of identity and social change that continue to reverberate in postcolonial lives.

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Meanings of Mobility
Family, Education, and Immigration in the Lives of Latino Youth
Leah Schmalzbauer
Russell Sage Foundation, 2023
Over the past twenty years, elite colleges and universities enacted policies that reshaped the racial and class composition of their campuses, and over the past decade, Latinos’ college attendance notably increased. While discussions on educational mobility often focus on its perceived benefits – that it will ultimately lead to social and economic mobility – less attention is paid to the process of “making it” and the challenges low-income youth experience when navigating these elite spaces. In Meanings of Mobility, sociologist Leah C. Schmalzbauer explores the experiences of low-income Latino youth attending highly selective, elite colleges.
 
To better understand these experiences, Schmalzbauer draws on interviews with 60 low-income Latino youth who graduated or were set to graduate from Amherst College, one of the most selective private colleges in the United States. The vast majority of these students were the first in their immigrant families to go to college in the U.S. She finds that while most of the students believed attending Amherst provided them with previously unimaginable opportunities, adjusting to life on campus came with significant challenges. Many of the students Schmalzbauer spoke with had difficulties adapting to the cultural norms at Amherst as well as with relating to their non-Latino, non-low-income peers. The challenges these students faced were not limited to life on campus. As they attempted to adapt to Amherst, many felt distanced from the family and friends they left behind who could not understand the new challenges they faced.
 
The students credit their elite education for access to extraordinary educational and employment opportunities. However, their experiences while in college and afterward reveal that the relationship between educational and social mobility is much more complicated and less secure than popular conversations about the “American Dream” suggest. Many students found that their educational attainment was not enough to erase the core challenges of growing up in a marginalized immigrant family: many were still poor, faced racism, and those who were undocumented or had undocumented family members still feared deportation.
 
Schmalzbeauer suggests ways elite colleges can better support low-income Latino students and lower the emotional price of educational mobility, including the creation of immigration offices on campus to provide programming and support for undocumented students and their families. She recommends educating staff to better understand the centrality of family for these students and the challenges they face, as well as educating more privileged students about inequality and the life experiences of their marginalized peers.
 
Meanings of Mobility provides compelling insights into the difficulties faced by low-income Latinos pursuing educational and social mobility in America’s elite institutions.
 
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Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth
Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Janet C. Gornick, Barry Johnson, and Arthur Kennickell
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A collection of twenty-three studies that explore the latest developments in the analysis of income and wealth distribution and mobility.

Economic research is increasingly focused on inequality in the distribution of personal resources and outcomes. One aspect of inequality is mobility: are individuals locked into their respective places in this distribution? To what extent do circumstances change, either over the lifecycle or across generations? Research not only measures inequality and mobility, but also analyzes the historical, economic, and social determinants of these outcomes and the effect of public policies. This volume explores the latest developments in the analysis of income and wealth distribution and mobility. The collection of twenty-three studies is divided into five sections. The first examines observed patterns of income inequality and shifts in the distribution of earnings and in other factors that contribute to it. The next examines wealth inequality, including a substantial discussion of the difficulties of defining and measuring wealth. The third section presents new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the mechanisms that underlie it. The next section considers the impact of various policy interventions that are directed at reducing inequality. The final section addresses the challenges of combining household-level data, potentially from multiple sources such as surveys and administrative records, and aggregate data to study inequality, and explores ways to make survey data more comparable with national income accounts data.  
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Mobility and Integration in Urban Argentina
Córdoba in the Liberal Era
By Mark D. Szuchman
University of Texas Press, 1981

Between the 1870s, when the great influx of European immigrants began, and the start of World War I, Argentina underwent a radical alteration of its social composition and patterns of economic productivity. Mark Szuchman, in this groundbreaking study, examines the occupational, residential, educational, and economic patterns of mobility of some four thousand men, women, and children who resided in Córdoba, Argentina's most important interior city, during this changeful era.

Through several kinds of samples, Szuchman provides a widely encompassing social picture of Córdoba, describing, among others, the unskilled laborer, the immigrant bachelor in search of roots and identity, the merchant seeking or giving credit, and the member of the elite, blind to some of the realities around him. The challenge that the pursuit of security entailed for most people and the failure of so many to persist successfully form a large part of that picture.

The author has made ample use of quantitative techniques, but secondary materials are also utilized to provide social perspectives that round out and humanize the quantitative data. The use of record linkage as the essential research method makes this work the first book on Argentina to follow similar and very successful research methodologies employed by U.S. historians.

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Mobility and Masks
Cultural Identity in Travel Literature
Elizabeth C. Goldsmith
Harvard University Press
Travelers have always experimented with disguise while observing the disguises of others. Each of the chapters in Mobility and Masks illustrates the strategies of concealment in the experience of travel: a seventeenth-century German aristocrat discovers new freedom as she travels incognito, Jesuits write home from China in the eighteenth century about how costume changes serve their mission, a Chinese opera star reflects on his own masked art during a tour of Russia in 1935. Masking can be a racial marker, as shown in two nineteenth-century accounts: an English woman encountering the creole culture of the West Indies and a French woman observing how cosmetic beauty is defined in Shanghai. Fictional representations of the masked traveler are illustrative, too: masked voices in the lyric poetry of Horace, the masked woman as an obstacle in classic adventure tales, the failure of cultural masking in the story of a modern immigrant.
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Mobility and Migration
East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629-1640
Roger Thompson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
During the 1630s, more than 14,000 people sailed from Britain bound for New England, constituting what has come to be known as the Great Migration. This book offers the most extensive study of these emigrants ever undertaken. Focusing on 2,000 individuals who moved from the five counties of eastern England, it provides historians with important new findings on mobility, family life, kinship networks, and community cohesion." "Roger Thompson reveals the personal experiences and ancestral histories of the emigrants. He follows them across the Atlantic and investigates their lives and achievements in the New World. Distinguising between such groups as gentry, entrepreneurs, artisans, farmers, and servants, he explores whether the migration tended to be a solitary uprooting from a stable and predictable world of familiar neighborhoods or simply a longer move among many relocations." "Thompson also sheds light on the issue of motivation: Were these settlers pulled by the hope of eventual enrichment or of founding a purified society, or were they pushed by intolerance and persecution at home? Did they see New England as a haven of escape or an opportunity to exploit? Did New Englanders seek to replicate "English ways," preserving traditional culture and society, or did they embrace change and innovation? Mobility and Migration provides a wealth of new evidence for historians of both early modern England and colonial America.
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Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities
M. Charlotte Arnauld
University Press of Colorado, 2024
Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities is the first focused book-length discussion of migration in central Mexico, west Mexico and the Maya region, presenting case studies on population movement in and among Classic, Epiclassic, and Postclassic Mesoamerican societies and polities within the framework of urbanization and de-urbanization. Looking beyond the conceptual dichotomy of sedentism versus mobility, the contributors show that mobility and migration reveal a great deal about the formation, development, and decline of town- and city-based societies in the ancient world.
 
In a series of data-rich chapters that address specific evidence for movement in their respective study areas, an international group of scholars assesses mobility through the isotopic and demographic analysis of human remains, stratigraphic identification of gaps in occupation, and local intensification of water capture in the Maya lowlands. Others examine migration through the integration of historic and archaeological evidence in Michoacán and Yucatán and by registering how daily life changed in response to the influx of new people in the Basin of Mexico.
 
Offering a range of critical insights into the vital and under-studied role that mobility and migration played in complex agrarian societies, Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities will be of value to Mesoamericanist archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and bioarchaeologists and to any scholars working on complex societies.
 
Contributors:
Jaime J. Awe, Meggan Bullock, Sarah C. Clayton, Andrea Cucina, Véronique Darras, Nicholas P. Dunning, Mélanie Forné, Marion Forest, Carolyn Freiwald, Elizabeth Graham, Nancy Gonlin, Julie A. Hoggarth, Linda Howie, Elsa Jadot, Kristin V. Landau, Eva Lemonnier, Dominique Michelet, David Ortegón Zapata, Prudence M. Rice, Thelma N. Sierra Sosa, Michael P. Smyth, Vera Tiesler, Eric Weaver
 
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Mobility and Modernity
Migration in Germany, 1820-1989
Steve Hochstadt
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Mobility and Modernity uses voluminous German data on migrations over the past two centuries to demonstrate why conventional assumptions about the relationship between mobility and modernity must be revised.
 
Thus far the changing total volume of migration has not been traced over a long period for any country. Unique migration registration statistics, both detailed and broadly geographical in coverage, allow the precise plotting of migration rates in Germany since 1820. Steve Hochstadt combines careful quantitative methods, easily understood numerical data, and social analysis based upon broad reading in German social history to show that current beliefs about the direction and timing of changes in German mobility, which have been based on late nineteenth-century anxieties about urbanization and industrialization, do not match the data.
 
Migration rates in Germany rose continuously throughout the nineteenth century, and have fallen during the twentieth century. Mobility, Hochstadt argues, was not an unprecedented accompaniment to industrialization, but a traditional rural response to specific economic changes. Hochstadt's more precise analysis of urban in- and outmigration shows the mechanism of urbanization to have been the migration of families rather than the much greater, but also more circular, migration of single men and women.
 
Hochstadt demonstrates the importance of examining historical behavior, powerfully justifying the methods of historical demography as a path to social understanding. The data and specific conclusions are German, but the methods and reinterpretaion of migration history have much wider application, both to other modern European nations and to currently developing countries. Those who study the modern social history of Europe, the mechanisms that formed urban working classes, and the methods of historical demography will be interested in Hochstadt's work.
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Mobility and Modernity
Panama in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Imagination
Robert D. Aguirre
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Mobility and Modernity: Panama in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Imagination rewrites the history of the Panama Canal, assessing for the first time the literary culture of the preceding decades. In this period, U.S. and British writers and visual artists developed sophisticated languages of mobility, time, and speed to cast the isthmus as an in-between place, a point of connection to more important destinations.  These discourses served an important role in their own day and laid the imaginative ground for the canal to come.
 
 
In this study, Robert D. Aguirre provides bold new interpretations of Anthony Trollope, John Lloyd Stephens, and Eadweard Muybridge and also recovers information about literary communities previously lost to history. Mobility and Modernity shows how Panama became defined as a site of incipient globalization and a crucial link of empire. Across this narrow strip of land people and things traveled, technology developed, and political forces erupted. The isthmus became a site of mobility that paradoxically produced varieties of immobility. Parting ways with histories that celebrate the canal as a mighty engineering feat, Mobility and Modernity reveals a more complex story of cultural conflict that began with the first gold rush news in the late 1840s and continued throughout the century.
 
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Mobility and the Small Town, 1900-1930
Norman T. Moline
University of Chicago Press, 1971

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Mobility as a Service
Its development, deployment, and future
Beate Kubitz
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a much-talked about term in the transportation industry and in transport policy. The goal of MaaS is a shift away from personally-owned modes of transportation and towards mobility solutions that are consumed as a service. Such solutions are typically enabled by digital technologies and platforms. MaaS systems might combine transportation services from public and private transportation providers, like train and carsharing services, through a unified portal to create and manage journeys, which users can pay for with a single account. MaaS offers travellers mobility solutions based on their travel needs.
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Mobility in French History, Volume 29
Carla Hesse and Peter Sahlins
Duke University Press

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Mobility in Transition
Migration Patterns after EU Enlargement
Edited by Birgit Glorius, Izabela Grabowska-Lusinska, and Aimee Kuvik
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Ten central and eastern European countries, along with Cyprus and Malta, joined the European Union in two waves between 2004 and 2007. This volume presents new research on the patterns of migration that resulted from the EU’s enlargement.

The contributors identify and analyze several new groups of migrants, notably young people without family obligations or clear plans for the future. Including case studies on migrants from Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Latvia—as well as on destination countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany—the resulting collection insightfully points towards future migration trends and sets guidelines for further research.
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Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency
The Routes of Terror in an African Context
Daniel E. Agbiboa
University of Michigan Press, 2022

In Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency, Daniel Agbiboa takes African insurgencies back to their routes by providing a transdisciplinary perspective on the centrality of mobility to the strategies of insurgents, state security forces, and civilian populations caught in conflict. Drawing on one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies, the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, this well-crafted and richly nuanced intervention offers fresh insights into how violent extremist organizations exploit forms of local immobility and border porosity to mobilize new recruits, how the state’s “war on terror” mobilizes against so-called subversive mobilities, and how civilian populations in transit are treated as could-be terrorists and subjected to extortion and state-sanctioned violence en route. The multiple and intersecting flows analyzed here upend Eurocentric representations of movement in Africa as one-sided, anarchic, and dangerous. Instead, this book underscores the contradictions of mobility in conflict zones as simultaneously a resource and a burden. Intellectually rigorous yet clear, engaging, and accessible, Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency is a seminal contribution that lays bare the neglected linkages between conflict and mobility.

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The Mobility of Modernism
Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America
By Harper Montgomery
University of Texas Press, 2017

Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2018

Many Latin American artists and critics in the 1920s drew on the values of modernism to question the cultural authority of Europe. Modernism gave them a tool for coping with the mobility of their circumstances, as well as the inspiration for works that questioned the very concepts of the artist and the artwork and opened the realm of art to untrained and self-taught artists, artisans, and women. Writing about the modernist works in newspapers and magazines, critics provided a new vocabulary with which to interpret and assign value to the expanding sets of abstracted forms produced by these artists, whose lives were shaped by mobility.

The Mobility of Modernism examines modernist artworks and criticism that circulated among a network of cities, including Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Havana, and Lima. Harper Montgomery maps the dialogues and relationships among critics who published in avant-gardist magazines such as Amauta and Revista de Avance and artists such as Carlos Mérida, Xul Solar, and Emilio Pettoruti, among others, who championed esoteric forms of abstraction. She makes a convincing case that, for these artists and critics, modernism became an anticolonial stance which raised issues that are still vital today—the tensions between the local and the global, the ability of artists to speak for blighted or unincorporated people, and, above all, how advanced art and its champions can enact a politics of opposition.

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Namibia Under South African Rule
Mobility and Containment, 1915–46
Patricia Hayes
Ohio University Press, 1998

The peoples of Namibia have been on the move throughout history. The South Africans in 1915 took over from the Germans in trying to fit Namibia into a colonial landscape. This book is about the clashes and stresses which resulted from the first three decades of South African colonial rule.

Namibia under South African Rule is a major contribution to Namibian historiography, exploring, in particular, many new themes in twentieth-century Namibian history. Here is exciting new work from a host of scholars and writers on a heretofore under-researched subject.

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A New Vision of Southern Jewish History
Studies in Institution Building, Leadership, Interaction, and Mobility
Mark K. Bauman, Foreword by Ronald H. Bayor
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Winner of the 2023 Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Award

Essays from a prolific career that challenge and overturn traditional narratives of southern Jewish history
 
Mark K. Bauman, one of the foremost scholars of southern Jewish history working today, has spent much of his career, as he puts it, “rewriting southern Jewish history” in ways that its earliest historians could not have envisioned or anticipated, and doing so by specifically  targeting themes and trends that might not have been readily  apparent to those scholars. A New Vision of Southern Jewish History: Studies in Institution Building, Leadership, Interaction, and Mobility features essays collected from over a forty-year career, including a never-before-published article.

The prevailing narrative in southern Jewish history tends to emphasize the role of immigrant Jews as merchants in small southern towns and their subsequent struggles and successes in making a place for themselves in the fabric of those communities. Bauman offers assessments that go far beyond these simplified frameworks and draws upon varieties of subject matter, time periods, locations, tools, and perspectives over three decades of writing and scholarship.

A New Vision of Southern Jewish History contains Bauman’s studies of Jewish urbanization, acculturation and migration, intra- and inter-group relations, economics and business, government, civic affairs, transnational diplomacy, social services, and gender—all complicating traditional notions of southern Jewish identity. Drawing on role theory as informed by sociology, psychology, demographics, and the nature and dynamics of leadership, Bauman traverses a broad swath—often urban—of the southern landscape, from Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore through Atlanta, New Orleans, Galveston, and beyond the country to Europe and Israel.

Bauman’s retrospective volume gives readers the opportunity to review a lifetime of work in a single publication as well as peruse newly penned introductions to his essays. The book also features an “Additional Readings” section designed to update the historiography in the essays.
 
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The Politics of Migration and Mobility in the Art World
Transnational Baltic Artistic Practices across Europe
Emma Duester
Intellect Books, 2021
This volume studies the movements of visual artists from the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, where a lack of opportunities makes migration necessary for career progression. Faced with such barriers, how do artists from the Baltic States break into the global art market? Emma Duester argues that these artists form an artistic diaspora of practice, forming communities across geographic and ethnic borders.

Offering a fresh perspective on art and the working lives of those who create it, this multidisciplinary work investigates patterns of migration and mobile working practices across Europe and discusses the implications of artists’ movements on conventional notions of home, mobility, and diaspora. Amid a global refugee crisis, a resurgence in negative portrayals of Eastern Europeans in mainstream media, and increasing anti-immigrant sentiment fueled by Brexit and the rise of protectionism, this is a vital work that shines important new light on diaspora, displacement, and what it means to belong. 
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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Opportunity, Mobility, and Increased Inequality
Katharine Bradbury
Russell Sage Foundation, 2016
Equality of opportunity—the idea that everyone should have the same chance at success, regardless of family background—has long been a bedrock American belief. Yet, as economic inequality has increased over the last several decades, it has become harder for many to climb the economic ladder. This issue of RSF, edited by Katharine Bradbury and Robert K. Triest of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, brings together a distinguished group of the nation’s leading social scientists to examine the extent of and the barriers to opportunity that exist today.
 
Several contributors investigate how rising inequality in parental investments in children, lack of public resources for low-income families, and the high cost of postsecondary education limit the futures of many.  Janet L. Yellen, Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, reviews trends in income and wealth inequality since the 1980s and shows how lack of access to key resources such as high-quality childhood education, affordable college, private business ownership, and inheritances for those in the lower half of the wealth distribution has significantly restricted economic opportunity in the U.S. Isabel Sawhill and Richard Reeves find that the socioeconomic status of one’s parents strongly predicts where one will end up on the income ladder as an adult, particularly for those at the very bottom and top of the income distribution. Timothy Smeeding shows that black men, children of never-married mothers, and children of parents lacking high school diplomas are likely to both begin life in the bottom quartile of the income distribution and remain there as adults.
 
Other contributors explore how inequality of opportunity begins in childhood, where family conditions and neighborhood quality influence children’s life outcomes. Katherine Magnuson and Greg Duncan show that even prior to kindergarten, low-income children lag behind their affluent peers in math and reading skills, in part because they lack access to high-quality preschool education. Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane find that affluent children’s advantages are further amplified during their school years, in part because their parents invest more time and resources in their educational and extra-curricular activities. They also show that increased residential segregation has led to higher concentrations of children with behavioral problems in low-income areas, which negatively affects their classmates’ ability to learn. Patrick Sharkey reviews research on the correlation between child neighborhood conditions and adult economic outcomes and confirms that the longer low-income children reside in bad neighborhoods, the more their disadvantages are compounded.
 
This issue of RSF offers new insights into how, despite our persistent belief in the American Dream, economic opportunity and mobility have stagnated for a growing number of citizens.
 
 
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The Sea of Learning
Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou
Steven B. Miles
Harvard University Press, 2006

In 1817 a Cantonese scholar was mocked in Beijing as surprisingly learned for someone from the boondocks; in 1855 another Cantonese scholar boasted of the flourishing of literati culture in his home region. Not without reason, the second man pointed to the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) as the main factor in the upsurge of learning in the Guangzhou area. Founded in the 1820s by the eminent scholar-official Ruan Yuan, the Xuehaitang was indeed one of the premier academies of the nineteenth century.

The celebratory discourse that portrayed the Xuehaitang as having radically altered literati culture in Guangzhou also legitimated the academy's place in Guangzhou and Guangzhou's place as a cultural center in the Qing empire. This study asks: Who constructed this discourse and why? And why did some Cantonese elites find this discourse compelling while others did not? To answer these questions, Steven Miles looks beyond intellectual history to local social and cultural history. Arguing that the academy did not exist in a scholarly vacuum, Miles contends that its location in the city of Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta embedded it in social settings and networks that determined who utilized its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.

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Sedentism and Mobility in a Social Landscape
Mesa Verde and Beyond
Mark D. Varien
University of Arizona Press, 1999
Research on hunting and gathering peoples has given anthropologists a long-standing conceptual framework of sedentism and mobility based on seasonality and ecological constraints. This work challenges that position by arguing that mobility is a socially negotiated activity and that neither mobility nor sedentism can be understood outside of its social context. Drawing on research in the Mesa Verde region that focuses on communities and households, Mark Varien expands the social, spatial, and temporal scales of archaeological analysis to propose a new model for population movement. Rather than viewing sedentism and mobility as opposing concepts, he demonstrates that they were separate strategies that were simultaneously employed. Households moved relatively frequently--every one or two generations--but communities persisted in the same location for much longer. Varien shows that individuals and households negotiated their movements in a social landscape structured by these permanent communities. Varien's research clearly demonstrates the need to view agriculturalists from a perspective that differs from the hunter-gatherer model. This innovative study shows why current explanations for site abandonment cannot by themselves account for residential mobility and offers valuable insights into the archaeology of small-scale agriculture.
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Social Stratification and Mobility in Central Veracruz
By Hugo G. Nutini
University of Texas Press, 2005

Since the Revolution of 1910, Mexican society has undergone a profound transformation, characterized by the disempowerment of the landed aristocracy and the rise of a new ruling class of plutocrats and politicians; the development of a middle class of white-collar professionals; and the upward mobility of formerly disenfranchised Indians who have become urban, working-class Mestizos. Indeed, Mexico's class system today increasingly resembles that of Western industrialized nations, proving that, while further democratic reforms are needed, the Revolution initiated an ongoing process of change that has created a more egalitarian society in Mexico with greater opportunities for social advancement.

This authoritative ethnography examines the transformation of social classes in the Córdoba-Orizaba region during the latter half of the twentieth century to create a model of provincial social stratification in Mexico. Hugo Nutini focuses on the increased social mobility that has affected all classes of society, especially the rural Indians who have taken advantage of education, job opportunities, and contact with the wider world to achieve Mestizo status. He also traces the transfer of power that followed the demise of the hacienda system, as well as the growing importance of the middle class. This description and analysis of the provincial social stratification system complements the work Nutini has done on the national class system, centered in Mexico City, to offer a comprehensive picture of social stratification and mobility in Mexico today.

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Street Fight
The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco
Jason Henderson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
Faced with intolerable congestion and noxious pollution, cities around the world are rethinking their reliance on automobiles. In the United States a loosely organized livability movement seeks to reduce car use by reconfiguring urban space into denser, transit-oriented, walkable forms, a development pattern also associated with smart growth and new urbanism. Through a detailed case study of San Francisco, Jason Henderson examines how this is not just a struggle over what type of transportation is best for the city, but a series of ideologically charged political fights over issues of street space, public policy, and social justice.

Historically San Francisco has hosted many activist demonstrations over its streets, from the freeway revolts of the 1960s to the first Critical Mass bicycle rides decades later. Today the city's planning and advocacy establishment is changing zoning laws to limit the number of parking spaces, encouraging new car-free housing near transit stations, and applying "transit first" policies, such as restricted bus lanes. Yet Henderson warns that the city's accomplishments should not be romanticized. Despite significant gains by livability advocates, automobiles continue to dominate the streets, and the city's financially strained bus system is slow and often unreliable.

Both optimistic and cautionary, Henderson argues that ideology must be understood as part of the struggle for sustainable cities and that three competing points of view—progressive, neoliberal, and conservative—have come to dominate the contemporary discourse about urban mobility. Consistent with its iconic role as an incubator of environmental, labor, civil rights, and peace movements, San Francisco offers a compelling example of how the debate over sustainable urban transportation may unfold both in the United States and globally.
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Tracking Europe
Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location
Ginette Verstraete
Duke University Press, 2009
Tracking Europe is a bold interdisciplinary critique of claims regarding the free movement of goods, people, services, and capital throughout Europe. Ginette Verstraete interrogates European discourses on unlimited movement for everyone and a utopian unity-in-diversity in light of contemporary social practices, cultural theories, historical texts, media representations, and critical art projects. Arguing against the persistent myth of borderless travel, Verstraete shows the discourses on Europe to be caught in an irresolvable contradiction on a conceptual level and in deeply unsettling asymmetries on a performative level. She asks why the age-old notion of Europe as a borderless space of mobility goes hand-in-hand with the at times violent containment and displacement of people.

In demystifying the old and new Europe across a multiplicity of texts, images, media, and cultural practices in various times and locations, Verstraete lays bare a territorial persistence in the European imaginary, one which has been differently tied up with the politics of inclusion and exclusion. Tracking Europe moves from policy papers, cultural tourism, and migration to philosophies of cosmopolitanism, nineteenth-century travel guides, electronic surveillance at the border, virtual pilgrimages to Spain, and artistic interventions in the Balkan region. It is a sustained attempt to situate current developments in Europe within a complex matrix of tourism, migration, and border control, as well as history, poststructuralist theory, and critical media and art projects.

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Tracking Modernity
India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility
Marian Aguiar
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
From Mohandas Gandhi’s nineteenth-century tour in a third-class compartment to the recent cinematic shenanigans of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, the railway has been one of India’s most potent emblems of modern life. In the first in-depth analysis of representations of the Indian railway, Marian Aguiar interprets modernity through the legacy of this transformative technology.

Since the colonial period in India, the railway has been idealized as a rational utopia—a moving box in which racial and class differences might be amalgamated under a civic, secular, and public order. Aguiar charts this powerful image into the postcolonial period, showing how the culture of mobility exposes this symbol of reason as surprisingly dynamic and productive. Looking in turn at the partition of India, labor relations, rituals of travel, works of literature and film, visual culture, and the Mumbai train bombings of 2006, Aguiar finds incongruities she terms “counternarratives of modernity” to signify how they work both with and against the dominant rhetoric.  Revealing railways as a microcosm of tensions within Indian culture, Aguiar demonstrates how their representations have challenged prevailing ideas of modernity.
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Unsettled
The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England
Patricia Fumerton
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Migrants made up a growing class of workers in late sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England. In fact, by 1650, half of England’s rural population consisted of homeless and itinerant laborers. Unsettled is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the everyday lives of these dispossessed people. Patricia Fumerton offers an expansive portrait of unsettledness in early modern England that includes the homeless and housed alike.

            Fumerton begins by building on recent studies of vagrancy, poverty, and servants, placing all in the light of a new domestic economy of mobility. She then looks at representations of the vagrant in a variety of pamphlets and literature of the period. Since seamen were a particularly large and prominent class of mobile wage-laborers in the seventeenth century, Fumerton turns to seamen generally and to an individual poor seaman as a case study of the unsettled subject: Edward Barlow (b. 1642) provides a rare opportunity to see how the laboring poor fashioned themselves, for he authored a journal of over 225,000 words and 147 pages of drawings. Barlow’s journal, studied extensively here for the first time, vividly charts what he himself termed his “unsettled mind” and the perpetual anxieties of England’s working and wayfaring poor. Ultimately, Fumerton explores representations of seamen as unsettled in the broadside ballads of Barlow’s time.

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Women and Change at the U.S.–Mexico Border
Mobility, Labor, and Activism
Edited by Doreen J. Mattingly and Ellen R. Hansen
University of Arizona Press, 2006
There’s no denying that the U.S.–Mexico border region has changed in the past twenty years. With the emergence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the curtailment of welfare programs, and more aggressive efforts by the United States to seal the border against undocumented migrants, the prospect of seeking a livelihood—particularly for women—has become more tenuous in the twenty-first century. In the face of the ironic juxtaposition of free trade and limited mobility, this book takes a new look at women on both sides of the border to portray them as active participants in the changing structures of life, often engaging in political struggles. The contributions—including several chapters by Mexican as well as U.S. scholars—examine environmental and socioeconomic conditions on the border as they shape and are shaped by both daily life at the local level and the global economy. The contributors focus on issues related to migration, both short- and long-term; empowerment, especially reflecting shifts in women’s consciousness in the workplace; and political and social activism in border communities. The chapters consider a broad range of topics, such as the changing gender composition of the maquiladora work force over the past decade and border women’s non-governmental organizations and political activism. In most of the studies, both sides of the border are considered to provide insights into differences created by an international boundary and similarities produced by cross-border interactions. Together, these chapters show the border region to be a dynamic social, economic, cultural, and political context in which women face both obstacles and opportunities for change—and make clear the vital role that women play in shaping the border region and their own lives. This collection builds on Susan Tiano and Vicki Ruiz’s groundbreaking volume Women on the U.S.–Mexico Border by continuing to show the human face of changes wrought by manufacturing and militarization. By illustrating the current state of social science research on gender and women’s lives in the region, it offers fresh perspectives on the material reality of women’s daily lives in this culturally and historically rich region.
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