Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders examines how translocal, transnational, and internal borders of various kinds distribute uneven capabilities for moving, dwelling, and circulating. The contributors offer nuanced understandings of the politics of mobility across various kinds of borders and forms of cultural circulation, showing how people experience and practice crossing many different borders. Several chapters draw on interviews and ethnographic methods to analyze transnational migration, while others focus on material relations and cultural practices. Rather than the usual narrative of mobility as a kind of freedom, border crossing emerges here as an instrumental practice for building translocal livelihoods, a tactic for simply getting by, and a material practice potentially generating new forms of future sociality. Ultimately these diverse perspectives on crossing borders offer new ways to think about the mobility of political relations and the politics of mobile relations in a world of growing circulation across borders, but also flexible forms of (re)bordering. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research & Policy at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She is President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility and founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities. Her books include Aluminum Dreams; Citizenship from Below; Consuming the Caribbean; The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities; Mobility and Locative Media; Tourism Mobilities; and Mobile Technologies of the City.　

Kevin Hannam is Professor of Tourism Mobilities at Edinburgh Napier University, UK and research affiliate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a founding co-editor of the journals Mobilities and Applied Mobilities (Routledge); co-author of Understanding Tourism (Sage) and Tourism and India (Routledge); and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, Moral Encounters in Tourism (Ashgate) and Event Mobilities (Routledge).