Cultural Mobility

Cultural Mobility
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2010
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0521863562

Cultural Mobility offers a model for understanding the patterns of meaning that human societies create. It has emerged under the very distinguished editorial guidance of Stephen Greenblatt and represents a new way of thinking about culture and cultures with which scholars in many disciplines will need to engage.

Landscapes of Mobility

Landscapes of Mobility
Author: Jennifer Johung
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317108078

Our world is unquestionably one in which ubiquitous movements of people, goods, technologies, media, money, and ideas produce systems of flows. Comparing case studies from across the world, including those from Benin, the United States, India, Mali, Senegal, Japan, Haiti, and Romania, this book focuses on quotidian landscapes of mobility. Despite their seemingly familiar and innocuous appearances, these spaces exert tremendous control over our behavior and activities. By examining and mapping the politics of place and motion, this book analyzes human beings’ embodied engagements with their built world and provides diverse perspectives on the ideological and political underpinnings of landscapes of mobility. In order to describe landscapes of mobility as a historically, socially, and politically constructed condition, the book is divided into three sections-objects, contacts, and flows. The first section looks at elements that constitute such landscapes, including mobile bodies, buildings, and practices across multiple geographical scales. As these variable landscapes are reconstituted under particular social, economic, ecological, and political conditions, the second section turns to the particular practices that catalyze embodied relations within and across such spaces. Finally, the last section explores how the flows of objects, bodies, interactions, and ecologies are represented, presenting a critical comparison of the means by which relations, processes, and exchanges are captured, depicted, reproduced and re-embodied.

French Connections

French Connections
Author: Andrew N. Wegmann
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807174572

French Connections examines how the movement of people, ideas, and social practices contributed to the complex processes and negotiations involved in being and becoming French in North America and the Atlantic World between the years 1600 and 1875. Engaging a wide range of topics, from religious and diplomatic performance to labor migration, racialization, and both imagined and real conceptualizations of “Frenchness” and “Frenchification,” this volume argues that cultural mobility was fundamental to the development of French colonial societies and the collective identities they housed. Cases of cultural formation and dislocation in places as diverse as Quebec, the Illinois Country, Detroit, Haiti, Acadia, New England, and France itself demonstrate the broad variability of French cultural mobility that took place throughout this massive geographical space. Nevertheless, these communities shared the same cultural root in the midst of socially and politically fluid landscapes, where cultural mobility came to define, and indeed sustain, communal and individual identities in French North America and the Atlantic World. Drawing on innovative new scholarship on Louisiana and New Orleans, the editors and contributors to French Connections look to refocus the conversation surrounding French colonial interconnectivity by thinking about mobility as a constitutive condition of culture; from this perspective, separate “spheres” of French colonial culture merge to reveal a broader, more cohesive cultural world. The comprehensive scope of this collection will attract scholars of French North America, early American history, Atlantic World history, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, and frontier studies. With essays from established, award-winning scholars such as Brett Rushforth, Leslie Choquette, Jay Gitlin, and Christopher Hodson as well as from new, progressive thinkers such as Mairi Cowan, William Brown, Karen L. Marrero, and Robert D. Taber, French Connections promises to generate interest and value across an extensive and diverse range of concentrations.

Against Meritocracy

Against Meritocracy
Author: Jo Littler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2017-08-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317496035

Meritocracy today involves the idea that whatever your social position at birth, society ought to offer enough opportunity and mobility for ‘talent’ to combine with ‘effort’ in order to ‘rise to the top’. This idea is one of the most prevalent social and cultural tropes of our time, as palpable in the speeches of politicians as in popular culture. In this book Jo Littler argues that meritocracy is the key cultural means of legitimation for contemporary neoliberal culture – and that whilst it promises opportunity, it in fact creates new forms of social division. Against Meritocracy is split into two parts. Part I explores the genealogies of meritocracy within social theory, political discourse and working cultures. It traces the dramatic U-turn in meritocracy’s meaning, from socialist slur to a contemporary ideal of how a society should be organised. Part II uses a series of case studies to analyse the cultural pull of popular ‘parables of progress’, from reality TV to the super-rich and celebrity CEOs, from social media controversies to the rise of the ‘mumpreneur’. Paying special attention to the role of gender, ‘race’ and class, this book provides new conceptualisations of the meaning of meritocracy in contemporary culture and society.

Megacity Mobility Culture

Megacity Mobility Culture
Author: BMW Group
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2013-01-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3642347355

What determines how cities move on? The ever-increasing challenges to urban mobility come in many forms, and approaches to address them range from the technically ingenious to attempts to change travel behaviour. Key amongst factors essential to the success of any such approach is whether the urban environment proves to be fertile ground for the desired progress. Another vital determinant of success is how well individual measures to engineer the transport system interact with other developments. This leads to the principal subject of Megacity Mobility Culture: the basic principles that determine the paths along which cities move. This book demonstrates that the concept of ‘mobility culture’ provides a framework for understanding the development of urban transport which transcends the boundaries between academic disciplines. Based on a discussion of the diversity of megacities worldwide, it provides help in navigating the complexity of megacity mobility culture. Experts from megacities around the world each take the reader on a journey to their own city and its mobility culture, giving a deeper insight into the unique evolutionary paths of mobility that these places have taken, and what lies before them. Whilst acknowledging the overwhelming diversity of cities worldwide, the authors also identify common denominators behind the evolution of urban transport systems – seven temperaments which are found in a unique mix in any given city, defining the character of its mobility culture. The Institute for Mobility Research is a research facility of the BMW Group. It deals with future developments and challenges relating to mobility across all modes of transport, with automobility being only one aspect among many. Taking on an international perspective, ifmo’s activities focus on social science and sociopolitical, economic and ecological issues, but also extend to cultural questions related to the key challenges facing the future of mobility. The work of the Institute is supported by an interdisciplinary board of renowned scientists and scholars, and by representatives of BMW, Deutsche Bahn, Lufthansa, MAN, Siemens and The World Bank.

Mobility, Space, and Culture

Mobility, Space, and Culture
Author: Peter Merriman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0415593565

Over the past 10 to 15 years there has emerged an increasing concern with mobility in the social sciences and humanities. Here, Peter Merriman provides a contribution to the mobilities turn in the social sciences, encouraging academics to rethink the relationship between movement, embodied practices, space and place.

Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China

Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China
Author: Pál Nyíri
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2010-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295990163

Nyiri explores recent challenges to state authority as Chinese citizens become increasingly mobile as migrant workers, tourists, and students, both inside China and abroad.--Pal Nyiri is professor of global history from an anthropological perspective at the Vrije Universitiet, Amsterdam.

Making Cultural Cities in Asia

Making Cultural Cities in Asia
Author: June Wang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317535839

This book examines the vast and largely uncharted world of cultural/creative city-making in Asia. It explores the establishment of policy models and practices against the backdrop of a globalizing world, and considers the dynamic relationship between powerful actors and resources that impact Asian cities. Making Cultural Cities in Asia approaches this dynamic process through the lens of assemblage: how the policy models of cultural/creative cities have been extracted from the flow of ideas, and how re-invented versions have been assembled, territorialized, and exported. This approach reveals a spectrum between globally circulating ideals on the one hand, and the place-based contexts and contingencies on the other. At one end of the spectrum, this book features chapters on policy mobility, in particular the political construction of the "web" of communication and the restructuring or rescaling of the state. At the other end, chapters examine the increasingly fragmented social forces, their changing roles in the process, and their negotiations, alignments, and resistances. This book will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers concerned with cultural and urban studies, creative industries and Asian studies.

Cultural Capital, Identity, and Social Mobility

Cultural Capital, Identity, and Social Mobility
Author: Mick Matthys
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2012
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0415510279

This qualitative study explores the meaning of working-class origin in the life and career of university graduates. Matthys approaches social mobility as a trajectory of identity construction in which different classes are integrated, and uses the notion of identity capital to interpret and discuss the meaning of the individual drive in social mobility.

Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture

Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture
Author: Lewis Johnson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2014-02-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 113674715X

This volume offers a varied and informed series of approaches to questions of mobility—actual, social, virtual, and imaginary—as related to visual culture. Contributors address these questions in light of important contemporary issues such as migration; globalization; trans-nationality and trans-cultural difference; art, space and place; new media; fantasy and identity; and the movement across and the transgression of the proprieties of boundaries and borders. The book invites the reader to read across the collection, noting differences or making connections between media and forms and between audiences, critical traditions and practitioners, with a view to developing a more informed understanding of visual culture and its modalities of mobility and fantasy as encouraged by dominant, emergent, and radical forms of visual practice.