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Hadeel AlkhayerRoutes of Redemption: Urban, continental and transatlantic mobility in Colum McCann's fictionPatterns of mobility that track waves of human migration and communication could rarely be better reflected than in the fiction of an Irish author who went on a bicycle trip across the US in the late 1980s. Born and raised in Ireland, Colum McCann has been exposed to the tension of motion and stasis in the everyday life of a country inflicted by political, social and economic crises that affected its population structure. Being a mobile author himself, his themes of domesticity and locality evoke bleak images of illness and disability; whereas second chances emanate from promises of cultural interaction and boundary crossing. In this paper, I look at three novels by Colum McCann, This Side of Brightness (1998), Zoli (2006) and Transatlantic (2013), which reveal opposing views on twentieth century mobility. The first novel is set in New York City where class and ethnic discrimination lies at the heart of the city’s capitalistic system. Being the key means of transportation, the tunnels become later a residence for New York’s homeless. My analysis reveals an exploitative aspect of urban mobility that serves the power discourse of the elite. The poor and people of colour descend to live in the city’s subway where “so slowly time passes,” in order to numb and subvert the city’s constant motion. The other two novels see mobility as a journey for emancipation. Zoli, set in Central Europe, is based on the life of the Romani poet Papusza. Once supported by her ethnic group and representatives of the communist government, Zoli is later renounced by both sides. As an exile, she walks on foot across countries of Central Europe eliminating borders in her pursuit of freedom. The paper concludes with Transatlantic, a recent novel that offers several examples of past and present travel routes across the Atlantic. With Frederic Douglas – an emancipated slave who visited Ireland to fight slavery – as its central character, mobility in this novel is associated with escaping Irish famine, abolitionism and development of the global postal system. It also includes various methods, from walking, to sailing and flying. Leila AouadiMobility, Nationhood, and Resistance in Palestinian Women’s Literature in EnglishWhere should the birds fly after the last sky?The iconic poet of Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish, lived his country’s absence as an overwhelming presence. Perhaps his poem, “Earth is Closing on Us”, captures the essence of mobility, the quintessential Palestinian experience of pain, exile, and banishment inside the occupied territories, in Israel, in the neighboring Arab countries, and across the world. In Palestinian art, mobility is a state of non-belonging, a coerced condition that started in 1948, the Nakba. This seminal event marked the loss of Palestine, the birth of Israel, and transformed Palestinian lives beyond recognition. The Nakba is still unfolding because Israel’s existence depends on the systematic eviction of Palestinians from their lands, the confiscation of more lands in an attempt to stem out national resistance against Israeli colonial presence.Mobility is lived and endured by Palestinians within or without what used to be their homeland. Border-crossing and mobility are ways and forms of self-awareness, resistance, and a primary constituent of the essence of being Palestinian. The author I’m going to talk about in this paper was a Palestinian refugee, and is now an American passport holder, an activist, a doctor, and a novelist. Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010), and The Blue between Sky and Water (2015) explore Palestinian concerns inside the occupied land, Gaza, and the USA whereby the Mobility of characters is the direct result of Israeli policies of settlement-building and land confiscation. In both novels, female characters take lead roles in maintaining family ties and strengthening the social fabrics of Palestinian communities. Mobility for Palestinian women is powerlessness that leads to armed resistance: women in the novels not only give birth to sons but also urge them to die fighting for Palestine.This paper argues that the geography of loss and alienation is lived by all characters of the novels, including the Israeli, but is better dramatized by Amal, and Noor, the protagonists of the novels, who live in the USA and are coerced into visibility because of terrorist charges, in the case of Amal, and because of traumatic experiences of sexual abuse, in the case of Noor. Their lives in the USA are juxtaposed with the lives of their families inside the occupied land and the return of Amal to die in Jenin during the Jenin massacres of 2002 foregrounds the transnational nature of Palestinian fight and resistance. This paper defines mobility and maps out its major traits by showing its articulations in Mornings on Jenin where the narrative dives into the past of the conflict to ponder its present and future. In The Blue between Sky and Water the narrative focuses on Gaza and celebrates its fighters as justice seekers against the evil of extreme poverty, and dispossession. Neil ArcherScience Fiction Cinema and Eco-Politics: Case Studies in the Estranged Mobile GazeThis paper argues for the importance of a science-fiction aesthetics to representations of mobility in the 21st century. While science fiction film is often discussed in terms of special effects and other-worldly spectacle, and therefore distanced from the more overtly realist concerns of other film types, insufficient attention has been given to its capacity to register or critically engage with questions of mobility. While attention has often been given to the genre’s focus on digital or virtual highways, this paper focuses on the possibilities for science fiction cinema’s ‘estranging’ gaze to represent alternative viewing positions, and to challenge or subvert the politics of the mobile cinematic gaze both affectively, and to critical effect.Looking in particular at a number of recent science fiction films, including War of the Worlds (2005), Children of Men (2006) and Monsters (2010), this paper draws attention to the way such films subject their mobile protagonists, and in turn ourselves as viewers, to a reconfigured framework of vision, via the careful manipulations of point of view, mise-en-scène and generic tropes. In particular, such films work to re-orient their predominantly white, western and male protagonists within alternative contexts of mobility, especially through the challenge to their ‘naturalised’ depictions of automotive movement. By constructing a challenge to the hegemony of motorised transport both culturally and cinematically (all these films are to an extent ‘road movies’ as much as science fiction), these films exemplify a type of ecological viewpoint in contemporary science fiction film; as well as evincing a highly political interest in re-configuring the dominant viewpoints, and viewing positions, around mobility in the developed world and its cinema.Karen Baker, Dr. Oliver Betts, and Ellen TaitThe Perfect Places for Crime? Researching and Presenting Crime and Mobility in the National Railway Museum ‘…as I did it came to me again in a flash: not the underpass this time, but the steps; stumbling on the steps, and a man taking my arm, helping me up. The man from the train…’For Rachel, one of the protagonists of Paula Hawkins’s recent best-selling thriller, The Girl on the Train, half-witnessing a crime throws her usual morning and evening commute into horrifying new light. Although the mobility of her journey, and the view it affords each day, casts her as the witness it is the spaces and sites of her travels, the stations and platforms, underpasses and shadowy paths, which act as a trigger for her shattered memories. The spaces and places of railway travel have long been a source of conflicted excitement and fear, with real life and fiction echoing each other from the 1850s onwards, but the majority of scholarship on the subject has focused purely on the interior of the carriage as the sole locus of dramatic tension. Yet this is to ignore the geographies of mobility formed and inhabited by the railways through which trains passed, which became embodiments of the anxieties of travel. The 1905 Merstham Tunnel murder, for example, gripped public imagination when a series of marks on the wall left by a victim were immediately compared by newspapers to those featured in A Study in Scarlet. Working back from modern railway crime novels, such as The Girl on the Train, this paper will demonstrate that the complex geography of the railways was, and still is, important to both the readers and writers of mobility in crime fiction, both “true” and imagined. Drawing on textual sources and material objects, it will reflect not only on how these spaces resonated in the popular imagination, but also the challenge of interpreting this for the Museum’s Crime and Adventure season where the excitements and terrors of these spaces of mobility will be on display in a setting that, by its very nature, is static.Sonali Barua Mobility and the Music Guru This paper takes up three English novels by authors of Indian origin who use these novels to focus on the learning of music in a transnational context. Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) inhabits the world of ’60s rock, with an Indian born protagonist – loosely based on the character of Freddy Mercury – moving to the West to find his calling. Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music (also 1999) floats between the concert halls and training rooms of London and Vienna, the hero struggling for a toehold as a chamber music violinist. Finally, in Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag (1993), a PhD student at Oxford reminisces lyrically about his Indian classical music teacher back home and attempts to keep up with daily singing practice in a very different environment. Did Rushdie and Seth, both already well recognized internationally, choose rock and chamber music to be able to retain their global readership? I argue that this is not the case. I argue that all three authors wrote in deeply felt response to the convention of guru or master worship within the Indian musical establishment. In the case of Rushdie and Seth, it is a rejection of the mores and preoccupations characteristic of Indian music traditions, and a search for forms that offer the possibility of emancipation from the demanding yoke of the guru, for a relatively unmediated connection with music. For Rushdie’s hero Ormuz, this comes through instinctive songs that teach themselves even as they are created; the novel thus seeks to circumvent the formal pedagogical process altogether. In Seth’s case, power moves from tyrannical teacher to text: the classical score, with its dead composer glimmering behind it, is accorded the ultimate position of authority. Chaudhuri alone expresses the customary Indian reverence for the guru, though – as he shows us in his 2010 novel, The Immortals, a rather more clear-sighted and complex revisiting of the same themes as Afternoon Raag – the modern music guru, hard put to make ends meet by the traditionally approved means, is much more a fund-raising impresario and international networking adept than the unworldly, almost saintly, elder of old. Justin BattinA Portrait of Havana / Un Retrato de La Habana In the summer of 2016 I traveled to Havana to begin preliminary work on an interdisciplinary visual ethnography project intended to last three years. While venturing primarily on foot, I took hundreds of high-resolution photographs and interviewed people at random across several localities about their daily routine, their neighborhood, and their expectations about what was to come following the normalizing of relations with the United States. Of the utmost importance to this work was the special attention granted to the immediate geographic locale where each photograph and interview took place, a choice that permitted me to contextually situate the documented practices within particular locations, yet also explore how they link with practices elsewhere within the city. This approach is driven by Tim Ingold’s notion of the meshwork, a term that encapsulates the fluid and active connections between people, practices, and locations. Inspired by Ingold, I will rely on this preliminary work, as well as the work forthcoming, to explore and present Havana as a meshworked environment, one enduring rapid change brought on by the vast increase in tourism and infrastructural investment, both external and internal, that is expected to accompany the now re-established relationship with the United States. At the conference in Lancaster I will not only present a portion of the already conducted fieldwork, but also invite the audience to discuss how the data gathering and dissemination strategy employed for this project can offer an innovative path to further link cultural geography and anthropology with mobility studies. During my talk I will introduce my concept of an online interactive webspace, one accessible via mobile and desktop platforms, that will present the geographic layout of Havana with hundreds of clickable points, with each providing a photograph and written commentary. Filters will be available for users to narrow the available search options. As tourism from North America to Havana intensifies, this project will increasingly request user submissions from academic and non-academic participants. Such firsthand documentation from multiple vantage points will allow researchers across the social sciences an avenue to explore stories and images situated within the changing spatio-temporal landscape of the city, both in situ and in transit. In my view, this form of investigation can offer a unique contribution to the discipline in terms of new knowledge on how we engage with mobile methods of data collection, dissemination, and consumption, and a new insight into how we understand, interpret, and grapple with the spatio-temporal impact of inter-connected mobilities on environments. Emma BondMoving stories: The work of embodied migration in contemporary narrative‘Begin, though, not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in – the body.’ Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’Building on Rich’s ‘politics of location’ (1984), this paper explores how narrative representations of the body can work to express the effects of mobility and movement on subjectivity. The narrative corpus I reference (so-called ‘migration’ literature written in Italian) is trans-national by nature, and yet pays rigorous attention to the local – starting precisely from the intimate terrain of the body. These works identify the body as a privileged site of lived subjectivity, yet also as a means of experiencing the local and the global simultaneously. For the body occupies the here-and-now of lived embodiment, but also functions as a carrier of memories and imprints from other times and spaces. Corporeal expression and representation thus become an important hinge of meaning within a mapping of the trans-national, since they allow the global to be filtered through the lens of the ‘particular’ and the ‘micro’ (cf. Cronin 2012). By highlighting the physical journeys implied within body morphologies such as inscriptions (tattoos, self-harming), privation or excessive consumption, the subversion of traditional gender allocations, maternity, and even corporeal disappearance, this paper situates mobile embodiment within a phenomenological framework. I develop Merleau-Ponty’s belief that the body is never just an object in the world, but the very medium whereby our world comes into being. I will also use affect theory to explore the link between individual body stories and wider axes of motion and emotion that transform these narratives into stories that move in a different way. Arguing that creative and fictionalized accounts can recount mobility within a space of experimental play, thereby triggering affective bonds between author and reader, I will conclude that this joint work of ‘imaginative thickening’ (Rigney 2014) repositions corporeality as a vital interpretative lens to access new social and cultural constellations of movement. Works cited:Michael Cronin, The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of Microspection, John Hunt, 2012.Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’, in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985, W. W. Norton, 1996 pp. 210-231. Ann Rigney, ‘Ongoing: Changing Memory and the European Project’, in Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, eds. De Cesari & Rigney), Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 339-359.Robert BraunKinotopic fictions: autonomous vehicles in imagination of early twentieth century American writers Autonomous mobility (AM) is not utopia, but present innovation reality with unprecedented potential societal impacts. Autonomous vehicles are versions of Foucauldian heterotopias: kinotopias (moving spaces) that, potentially, will have a deep impact on our future societies by profoundly rearranging geometries of power as well as the politics of interconnectedness. Technology innovation with such important and deep societal impacts requires a new politicization of technology and innovation research. Responsible research and innovation is an approach that anticipates and assesses potential (political) implications and societal expectations with regard to research and innovation, with the aim to foster the design of socially inclusive and sustainable innovation processes. To conceptualize the power implications of the ?post-car” world of AM as well as appraise social imaginaries of driverless cars to inform a reflexive, inclusive and responsive vison of research and innovation in autonomous mobilty we may turn to visions of autonomous cars as captured by the imagination of writers in the early 20th century. Autonomous vehicles appear on the pages of science fiction books such as Isaak Assimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Miles J. Breuer. David Keller’s 1935 story "The Living Machine" is thought to be the first book to mention driverless cars. The paper will look at such visions of autonomous vehicles and the societies/politics (and the power geometries) that are presented in these works. The paper will also attempt to draw conclusions and potential learning for present day innovation and research practices as well as research ethical policies in autonomous mobility. Una BroganCycling and narrative structure: H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Maurice Leblanc’s Voici des ailes.By means of a parallel analysis of two seminal texts in cycling literature from each side of the Channel, H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance (1896) and Maurice Leblanc’s Voici des ailes (1898), I point to several ways in which cycling as a mode of transport introduced a new means of engaging with and structuring texts. These contemporary novellas helped open the doors of the literary establishment to two young authors, who would become famous as fathers of science fiction (Wells) and detective fiction (Leblanc) in their respective countries. Both works offer a compelling opportunity for an examination of the bicycle’s literary role, since the vehicle is central to each narrative. Wells’s story recounts the draper Hoopdriver’s ten-day cycling holiday in the south of England, while Leblanc’s tale relates two Parisian couples’ cycling tour over several weeks in Normandy and Brittany. The subjective experience of cycling, being intimately connected to the contours of the land and the steady movement of the body and the machine, sets the pace in both these novellas. Wells and Leblanc focus on the utopian time of the cycle journey as a means to explore alternative social and temporal realities. The intense physical and sensory experience of movement on two wheels invites an altered experience of space and time, which these writers seek to convey in writing. At the same time, Wells and Leblanc explore various new means of structuring and punctuating their texts according to the rhythms and interruptions of journeys by bicycle. Sagnika ChandaThe Precarious Mobility of the Digital Brown WorkerIn my paper, I argue for the precarious power of the nomadic, disembodied subjectivity of the brown virtual body. The digitized brown body of the Silicon Valley Worker creates a resistance through its capacity to transcend border control and detention technology of the current global formation by means of which capital controls the mobility of labor. In Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission the title signals that in the age of late global networking and distributive sensibility, scapes are dissipated into nodal points of convergence amongst patterns of information flow and exist in virtual interconnectivity with other scapes, whether we speak of the transportation of goods, the mobility of humans, the communication of information or the satellite transmission of signals. The novel features the configuration of technospace via the transference of the characters across the virtual geographies described by Zygmunt Bauman in his account of liquid modernity, a stage that, in the Polish sociologist’s view, is abandoning the “heavy,” “hardware” strategies of panopticist containment/insulation/sedimentation and flaunting practices of mobility/flexibility/velocity associated with a “light,” “software” post-panopticist strand of modernity. Convergent with this account of posthuman transmissibility is Rosi Braidotti’s notion of nomadic articulations of space that may lithely traverse these shifting cartographies. The protagonist, Silicon Valley Worker Arjun Mehta’s disappearance at the end of the novel, reinstates the hope inherent in Braidotti’s nomadic subjectivity as a possibility for the precarious virtual worker to reject the mortal victimization of his fluid network of identities by the capitalistic nexus of a virtual globality. Transversing a host of identities that are external to his subjectivity and yet situate his corporeality in particular ways for the global state to practice its violence on, Arjun Mehta’s final act of disappearance combined with his sporadic sightings in different parts of the world makes him the embodiment of the digital migrant worker’s potential to become an example of the precarious, nomadic worker by embracing Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theory of death.Nidal ChebbakEARLY ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN MOROCCAN TRAVELERS AND EUROPEANS IN 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES EUROPE: ACCEPTANCE OR REJECTION? Migration and cultural encounters are not new phenomena that are restricted to the modern era. In fact, the way to cultural encounters between Morocco and Europe has been paved several centuries ago by Moroccan travelers who crossed to the other shore on diplomatic missions. The duties that these distinguished travelers had to fulfill did not prevent them of their desire to expand their knowledge about their cultural other and to transgress all cultural and religious barriers. In my paper, I will discuss the literature produced by Moroccan travelers about Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries which formed a unique genre that provided accounts of their cultural encounters as well as their interactions, perceptions and impressions of the host societies/cultures. I will also discuss the role these travelers played as travelling identities to Europe and how their identity intervened in all encounters despite the open-mindedness that they tried to maintain during their travels.Hannah-Marie Chidwick ‘The military step’: speed and space in the Roman army This paper will theorise the mobilisation of late-Republican Roman troops within a framework of how praxes of movement perpetuate military unity and identity, and this movement’s consequential spatial impact. I will read selections from Latin literature in parallel with cultural and biopolitical philosophies central to ‘non-representational’ theory. Riffing on the double-entendre of mobilisation, the ‘military step’ specific, and its representation in the Latin language, is resultantly worth closer analysis. Roman military campaign principally expanded the ager Romanus (‘Roman land’) via movement, like a virus infiltrating foreign terrain with the potentiality of violence-production. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze, I will firstly discuss how the army (trans-historically) conducts a process of de- and reterritorialisation, disrupting civic space to overcode it as warzone, then as conquered land (using Virgil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Civil War as Roman examples). This infiltration generates alteration, dispersion and, most contentiously, Roman citizenship or allies.The crux of my argument is that this movement not only expands political territory, but also dynamically perpetuates the discrete space of the military community (cf. Manuel DeLanda) and the soldierly body. Alongside drills and marches (Vegetius’ On Military Service, Polybius’ Histories 6), military mobilisation is necessary for both the embodiment of martial discipline, and also to prevent ‘stagnation’ setting in – for instance, Lucan’s Civil War 5 narrates a mutiny caused by prolonged inactivity. Latin idioms for the army predominantly connote movement; whereas the civic toga is synonymous with peace, the army is with cursus (‘a rushing’) and caligati (‘marching boots’). Speed is vital: contemporary instruction dictates that an army marches for five hours a day, covering twenty miles, and Julius Caesar’s armies were infamous for their alacrity producing success (Suetonius’ Caesar 57).To conclude, I will open up my study to compare current military theory, and pose questions concerning how the incorporation of new technologies and extensive prior training modifies the significance or strain of movement for twenty-first-century soldiers. The nature of the Roman army as primarily cultivated in battle and on the march renders it an exemplary mobilised corpus for discussion. Elsa Court“Stationary Trivialities”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and the Great American Roadside Much has been said of Vladimir Nabokov’s treatment of postwar America’s cultural and material landscape in the novel that brought him to international fame. Motels and roads but also magazine culture, roadside attractions, replete with souvenirs for sale, drive-in theatres, soda fountains and general suburban spatial etiquette form a vivid ba ckdrop for Lolita’s dark narrative of abuse and curtailed freedom. While much of this world seems enchanting, through the narrator’s mildly cynical eye but also through various expressions of his young captive’s ‘ideal’ consumer appetite, some depictions of incidental roadside furniture in the novel are imbued with a strong, unexpected, and often comical, sense of dread. From public toilets and wayside picnic tables to fire hydrants on the suburban sidewalk, roadside architecture and street furniture in the many public places visited by the cosmopolitan sex offender and his American victim become disturbing reminders of the community whose law Humbert Humbert violates. Relying on a close reading of representations of roadside structures and signage in the novel as well as on the cultural history of postwar America’s road planning, this paper will demonstrate the relevance of the highway landscape to Nabokov’s vision of America as a mobile nation. Looking at the text conjointly with the author’s unpublished travel journals from 1948 to 1953, this paper will finally demonstrate that through a first-hand experience of the American roadside industry Nabokov became a forensic analyst of America’s mobility culture, while the all-welcoming, democratic roadside accommodation provided his fiction a paradigm for social exclusion and moral strandedness. Nadeen DakkakHostile Sand Dunes and Cunning Dust: Migrant workers’ Mobility and Geographic Alienation in Literature on the Arab GulfMigrant workers in the Arab Gulf are often associated with the continuous movement of people that has come to shape Arab Gulf countries. In the eyes of transnational companies that import and export migrants, these workers are truly mobile. However, looking at it from a micro perspective, migrant workers' experience of the Gulf often gets primarily reduced to a complex status of immobility that varies according to different factors, such as ethnicity, religion and gender. The fact that their existence in the Gulf is transient deprives them of having sufficient authority over the land, which accordingly disables them from connecting with their material surroundings. From an economic and political perspective, migrant workers are conveniently mobile, and thus exploitable, but from an anthropological and social perspective, they are subjugated to the material world they are placed in. This is evident in two literary representations of migrant workers' experience of the Gulf: Taleb Alrefai's ?ill Al-Shams and Benyamin's Goat Days. The two novels demonstrate the effects the materiality of the Gulf environment has on migrant workers. Material elements such as dust and sand are visible in both texts and play a role in both hindering the characters' movements and increasing their sense of alienation and exclusion from their surroundings, not only geographically, but also socially. Through using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper aims to explore the material elements in these two novels and understand their role in manipulating migrant workers' mobility in the Gulf. By using different theoretical methods that fall under Non-representational Theories and stem from the Mobilities and Materiality turn in Humanities, I will demonstrate how the characters’ sense of alienation and belonging in the texts are strongly influenced by their movements and their material surroundings. I accordingly aim to generate a discussion of how such literary texts can be used as an extensive resource for Sociologists and Human Geographers to contemplate the relationship between migrant workers and the Gulf environment.Nour Dakkak‘She lost all sense of space’: Embodied Mobilities and Direct Experiences in E. M. Forster’s Fiction‘Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable, and desirable, and strong.’ (E. M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’, 1909)E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’ is one of many other examples in which Forster highlights the human’s embodied experience in movement. Forster’s characters are always on the move, they walk, stroll and trail. They drive motorcars, ride trains and airships. It is in the characters’ everyday movements that Forster contemplates their experiences of places and perception of themselves and the world. Forster’s criticism has often viewed the places depicted in his works as static entities that are detached from the human body and viewed from distance. However, the characters’ experiences in Forster’s novels and short stories are strongly embodied and are shaped by the way they move and the physical environment in which they move in.Written in the early twentieth century, Forster’s work depicts the different bodily sensations that accompanied the changes in the technology of transport and contemplates how it affects the human’s experience of the modern world. My paper will give a brief introduction to Forster’s representation of movement in his fiction. It will explore his depiction of the characters’ sensual perception of places during their movement in his short story ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909) and novel Howards End (1910). My discussion will engage with the Mobilities and Materialities turn across the different disciplines such as Human Geography and Anthropology in order to analyse the dynamic relationships between the characters’ moving bodies and the environments they move in. Ananya DasguptaChanging Tracks: a study of the Indian railways in cinema Paul Theroux describes the experience of boarding a train in India as at times akin to attending a leisurely seminar on the national character and at times close to being assaulted by the nation’s monstrously typical. Makers of both fiction and non fictional works have read the railways as a miniature portrait of the nation and the nation as the expansion of the national character Theroux found so apparent in the trains. This paper attempts to analyse the cinematic use of trains as settings, motifs, symbols etc. to shed light on some aspects of modernity, mobility and nationhood in India, and understand how the vast technosocial system that is the railways relates to making and remaking Indian postcolonial society.The rapidly promoted and imperially motivated introduction of the railways to the Indian colony was hailed by the English on both economic and social grounds. Championing at once the increasingly machine driven economic progress and the secular, humanistic ideas of English Enlightenment, the railways were posited as a cure for the self-sufficient economic inertia that Indian provinces were allegedly suffering from and the social evils of communalism, casteism and misogyny that restricted the mobility of specific groups of people in society. The paper will thus attempt to look at the argument that the railways have facilitated socio-economic processes of importance both before and after independence, through the study of a set of films.Bollywood has utilized the railway station as a setting for wish fulfilment -- both romantic and otherwise -- and the trains often symbolize the mobility of a melodramatic desire that is both transporting and transfixing. Alternatively, in films about India, intended for a foreign audience, the trains signify the expectations of an exotic journey to the East vested with spiritual meaning. The paper will attempt a study of these meanings of and narratives about the Indian railways in cinema.In the first section of the paper, the essay will try to examine the TV adaptation of R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days and the two-part film Gangs of Wasseypur. The paper will explore Richard Cronin’s contention that the railway station is what regulates the economy of Narayan’s fiction and also saves Malgudi from being an entirely fictional construct, connecting it to Madras, rooting it to a nation. In Gangs of Wasseypur, the railways become the point of violent contention in 1941 for a family feud that eats through three generations. Two generations later, Wasseypur of contemporary times is conceived as a cut-throat universe where resources and positions of power are still limited and violence as a survival strategy is normative. The railways in the film are thus variously embedded either as the point of contention, the site of murder/revenge or the marker of familial strife and hardship in an economy of violent mobility. In the second part, the paper examines Slumdog Millionaire, Darjeeling Limited and The Lunchbox as cinema about and/or of India that is globally accessible and presently relevant to examine the role of the railways in fashioning a mobile culture in the city of Mumbai and the country at large. In the parallel development of the protagonist (Jamal) and his city that the film Slumdog Millionaire follows, the railway facilitates, hosts and marks Jamal’s movement through his life in the city—its opportunities and failings. In The Lunchbox, the train supplies the logic of coincidences that fuel the story, as also the unique community of the dabbawallahas that lie at the heart of it. In Darjeeling Limited, the Indian audience glimpses a version of India that is understood and experienced in terms of the American tourist and self evidently so. This understanding and experience, as the paper will discuss, is neither entirely untrue nor without value.Thus, through these crisscrossing narratives, the paper will attempt to see the Indian railways as a highly ambivalent space for the playing out of ever-evolving tensions between ideas of tradition and modernity that actively resists a homogenous definition of either term. Anna Despotopoulou “Monuments of an artless age”: Hotels and women’s mobility in the work of Henry JamesMy paper will examine the mobility of women in the fictional work of Henry James, scrutinizing their precarious affiliation with place, on a national, international, and domestic level. On the one hand, James’s female characters are women of the world, cosmopolitan figures, roaming freely in foreign lands, but on the other they are migrants, restlessly moving from place to place, not quite fitting in any, with citizenship, nationality, culture, and home indefinitely deferred. In their transatlantic wanderings, they often reside in hotels, which become precarious anchoring spaces in a world where mobility, transit, speed, and publicity have become the norm. In his autobiographical work James was often critical of the “hotel-spirit,” especially of the monumental hotels that he witnessed in the US on his visit there late in life. The hotels, symbols of commerce, consumerism, publicity, and ephemerality, are juxtaposed to old buildings, historical sites, and ruins which suggest the endurance of liveable space in time. My paper will look at The Ambassadors, “An International Episode,” and “The Siege of London,” all of which feature American women who experience the transitoriness of hotel space and who partake in the fluidity of identity that such settings foster. I will also consider the social and legal reasons for women’s precarious mobility in the late nineteenth century (e.g. US legislation on the citizenship status of American women marrying or divorcing a foreigner), considering the setting of the hotel as a symbol of their contingent nationality. Like other spaces of transit, such as the railway, the hotel blurs the boundary between privacy and publicity and becomes a stage on which men and women reconfigure conventional rules of interaction, often experiencing “relationships as traffic,” in Raymond Williams’s words. James’s work is full of such attempts at relationships, and I hope to show that the hotel, as a space of transit, raises important questions about women’s potential for personal fulfilment, transnational or cosmopolitan citizenship, and cultural expansion. Sara DominiciA new movement of people and images: the transformative character of tourists’ photography, 1890s-1900sThe end of the nineteenth century saw the intertwined development, in countries such as Britain, of new camera technologies and possibilities for mobility. Thanks to cheaper and easier to operate cameras, and to a greater availability of infrastructures, leisure time and disposable income, broader sections of the population could now participate in the experiences of photographing and travelling. This paper looks at how this new mobility influenced representational practices. Specifically, it shows how the first-hand experience of photographing and travelling brought with it a new familiarity with travel images that articulated a counter-narrative to the dominant visual culture of travel in Britain at this time. It does so by tracing the ways in which mobilities of travel were experienced through their interaction with emerging photographic technology; how this new movement of people and images created new possibilities for thinking about, thus producing, disseminating and consuming photographs; and how this clashed with the socially and economically hegemonic classes’ attempts at structuring the cultural practices of the subaltern classes. During the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, these interests underpinning the “rational recreation movement” aimed at regulating lower-class leisure through dominant middle-class ideology. The increasingly popular activities of photographing and travelling were accordingly subject to forms of guidance on how to behave both with a camera and when travelling: as Urry has influentially argued, the “tourist gaze” was thus “socially organised and systematized.” Conversely, this paper shows how a new movement of people and images in turn engendered cultural transformations in the ways in which representational practices could be performed, hence understood. Focusing on the views of self-appointed “serious” photographers, which generally reflected dominant middle-class values, this paper examines the moral expectations and values associated with photographing; how these were seen capable of contributing to the project of forming a modern citizenship, and considers what this meant for the uses and expectations concerning travel photographs; and how the photographic practices of new camera users could challenge these perspectives. Di DrummondRailways and the making of 'modern mobilities' in the British Imperial Imagination: The Writings of Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston (1858-1927)In 1892 Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, who was later to become the Special Commissioner in Uganda during the construction of the British East Africa Railway (1899-1901), argued that the proposed railway would not only introduce indigenous African peoples to modern forms of mobility, but would also open up Kenya and Uganda to British and Indian settlement. ‘Modern mobilities’ produced from working on railway construction and operation, and of settlers migrating, at least in part, by train were, according to Johnston, creating a new phase of interdependent mass migrations, not just in Africa, but across the ‘English-speaking World’. Johnston was not only highly influential in framing British imperial policy in Africa during and after the ‘Scramble for Africa’. His scientific and popular writings with this vision of ‘modern mobilities’ produced by ‘technologies of steam’ especially the railway, also helped transform how many in Britain imagined ‘their’ Empire. The proposed paper will explore Johnston’s extensive writings, such as Britain Across the Seas: Africa, a History and a description of the British Empire in Africa [London: National Press, 1910], and Early Settlers in Canada (1910), Early Settlers in Australia,….West Africa,…South Africa etc. Informed by historical, cultural and mobility studies, such as Marian Aguiar’s, Tracking Mobility: India’s Railways and the Culture of Mobility, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, and Duncan Bell’s, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future World Order, 1860-1900, Princeton University Press, 2007, the proposed paper will investigate how the increased speed and movement of rail travel, together with the ‘shrinkage of travel times’ that resulted from this, produced a ‘spatio-temporal [cognitive] shift in national and international consciousness’, transforming British understanding of mass mobilities and of ‘Empire’ for ever. (Bell, Idea, p.1.)The paper is part of a wider project, Railways and the British Imperial Imagination, 1840-1950.Angelos EvangelouRethinking the sea through literature Coming from an island (Cyprus), I found myself having to work with and around the concepts of remoteness and inaccessibility, as well as the distinction between centre and periphery when reflecting not only on the technicalities of mobility but also on questions of identity be this national, cultural or ideological. In this paper, I will first visit the conventional understanding of the sea as a natural border which creates a clearer and stronger boundary than the borders which are marked on land. Drawing from my background in Continental Philosophy and Literary Studies as well as from contemporary debates in the context of border studies, I will attempt to deconstruct the concepts of territory and border which have hitherto implied and reinforced notions of limitation and/or blockage of movement. Instead, I will make a case for the symbolic and aesthetic significance of the sea in destabilizing these conventional spatial categories and in reminding us of the porousness and the fragility of the land-marked territories. However, the events that are currently taking place in relation to the refugee crisis and more specifically the precarious movement of people fully or partly through the sea, forces us to consider at the same time, the imminent danger embedded in this space of fluidity which is—ironically—full of symbolic possibility for a better world. To illustrate these ideas, I will use a range of Greek, Cypriot-Greek and Cypriot-Turkish literary texts (prose and poems) which feature the sea and experiences of the sea in relation to contexts of conflicts, segregation and borders but also of existential reflection. A close analysis of these texts as well as their portrayal of the sea and the land will help me outline an alternative understanding of the experience of movement, as well as of the binaries between centre and periphery, home and foreignness, closeness and remoteness. This new understanding becomes possible only when one (re)considers the significance of the sea as a deterritorialised space of fluidity, openness, encounter and dialogue, but also, inevitably, of danger. David EvansRhythm Across Borders: Free Verse, Movement and Multilingualism in Valéry Larbaud’s Les Poésies de A.O. Barnabooth (1913) Throughout the nineteenth century in France, Victor Hugo represented a titanic, monolithic embodiment of the nation, shaping the national mood in poetry, theatre and the novel. His work was synonymous with Frenchness, a monumental cultural contribution to the late nineteenth-century’s self-conscious project of nation building. Yet from the 1880s onwards, with Paris establishing itself as the cultural capital of Europe, more and more poets based in the capital and writing in French came from other European countries or overseas. By the early years of the twentieth century, this cosmopolitan translingualism was inspiring a generation of important young experimental poets – Apollinaire, Cendrars, Larbaud – to look beyond the nation towards a new, modern poetics of mobility. Amid rapid developments in global transport networks and the concomitant broadening of experiential horizons, Valéry Larbaud’s fictional poet A. O. Barnabooth sets off on a restless wandering around Europe and further afield, rejecting the somnolent stasis of his fellow countrymen:These people who never travel, but who remainNear their excrement without ever getting boredContinuing their narrow lives, their ideas and their business (‘Night in the port’)Barnabooth argues instead for a life of constant movement in which this ‘vagabond heart’ refuses to settle within the confines of sedentary localism. Much like the poet of Apollinaire’s Alcools, who celebrates his unquenchable thirst – ‘I am drunk on the whole universe’ – Barnabooth harbours similarly limitless ambitions: ‘Oh! to learn everything, oh! to know everything, all languages!’ (‘Europe’). His poetry presents a multilingual collage in which the francophone poet also sings in Spanish, and in which the polyglot subject thrives. The soundscapes of international travel provide a constant accompaniment to the poems’ multiple voices, and the noise of the world permeates the texts which cross over geographical borders:Ships’ noises: voices in a corridor,The wood creacking, the swinging lamps squeaking,The rhythm of the machines, […]Shouts lost in the wind, which blurs the musicOf a mandolin playing ‘Sobre las olas del mar’ (‘Thalassa’)In this paper I will read the major formal innovation of twentieth-century French poetry – a free verse belonging to no single national canon – in light of this dynamic mobility. While opening up a pluralistic textual space, it incorporates numerous fragments of metrical verse, embodying the tensions between late nineteenth-century nation-statehood and new, transnational modes of being through which the poet resists belonging. As such, new textual forms are required which might capture something of the transient, constantly unfolding experience of the voyage. Ultimately, the poet’s enthusiastic performance of statelessness as both mode of being and mode of writing inspires him to surrender control of his text, suggesting compelling parallels between the stateless meandering of the transient subject and what we recognise as the permanent openness, or bringing-into-being, of the modernist poetic text.Kerry FeatherstoneA Case of Guatemalan Scotch: Whisky, Travel Writing and GlobalizationThis paper is drawn from my current research for a monograph on contemporary travel writing and cultural globalization. The interdisciplinary research examines how travel writing has mapped process of cultural globalization since 1980; a period in which a rise in the popularity of the genre has coincided with an acceleration of cultural globalization.The paper focusses on the globalization of whisky as a product that has been given mobility by global trade, and on the ways in which travel writers have described their encounters with whisky in a range of locations, from India to South America. The title is taken from an incident in Ronald Wright’s Time Among the Maya (Abacus, 1989): “Last night I drank something called “Guatemalan scotch” and we ate hamburgers at a dive called, I think, La Caverna de la Carne.” ‘Scotch’ is a specific marker of a local product; local in this instance referring to Scotland. The idea of Guatemalan Scotch is contradictory: if the drink was made in Guatemala, it can’t be Scotch. What this points to is the fact that ‘Scotch’ as a globalized product has reached Guatemala, and that the appellation has become associated with a drink of quality. So in order to associate a local product with that globalized idea of quality, the word ‘Scotch’ has been added to create name for another local product, actually produced far from Scotland. This paper will look at several examples, comparing how Scotch is considered, consumed and appropriated by local cultures. These will include writing by Rosemary Mahoney, Peter Hessler, Will Randall and Christopher Robbins – writing about India, Egypt, China and Kazakhstan, - amongst others. I will argue that, although clearly a marker of cultural globalization, Scotch in these texts can also be read as a local response to global products. Both travel writers and globalized products rely on mobility: the products, however, are not received passively, and the writers frequently do not expect the ways in which the products are consumed.Chloe Flower Toy Soldiers and the Male Body in Mr. Britling Sees it ThroughThis paper examines H.G. Wells’s material conception of the masculine self as a body that feels no pain in his 1916 novel, Mr. Britling Sees it Through. I read Well’s wartime novel in the context of his lifelong fascination with toy soldiers, and specifically, as substantially revising the model of masculine subjectivity set forth in the toy battle guidelines he published on the cusp of World War I: Little Wars (1913). Spanning the months between July 1914 and the end of 1915, Mr. Britling minutely chronicles the major events of the war as experienced by a small Essex community. As the central drama of young men setting off for the front gets under way, a secondary shadow narrative of the war plays out as Mr. Britling’s youngest sons periodically mobilize a huge set of toy soldiers, often directly in response to some major event. I argue that in his war-gaming texts, Wells originally understood these metal figures as modeling a subjectivity that saw no essential difference between boy and man; much as the substance of a lead soldier might be melted and recast, the substance of the self remained the same irrespective of bodily form. For Wells, the consequence of this model of the self is a fantasy of pain free aggression—a model that subsequently undergoes crisis in Mr. Britling as casualties amass and questions of free will and consent arise preceding the implementation of conscription in 1916. In his final letter, Mr. Britling’s eldest son Hugh writes: “You once wrote that all fighting ought to be done nowadays by metal soldiers. I perceive…that all real fighting is." Hugh’s equation of real soldiers with the cheaply mass-produced ones that his brothers own ironizes an infantilized vision of warfare, as it presages the mass production of graves. Teresa FrancoCuando pase el temblor: Fictional narratives of walking through Mexico City in the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake Fictional narratives provide one of the many resources we have to understand how cities have changed throughout time. They give testimony of life-changing events whilst reflecting on the experiences, causes, responses and consequences of such events. The 1985 earthquake in Mexico City was one such life-changing experience for the city and its citizens, as we can notice in the (fictional) narratives produced around the city from that year on. Mexico City, in the world of its most famous chronicler Carlos Monsiváis, became the post-apocalyptic city, where the worst had already happened. Even though some research may suggest so, it is surprising to find that the fictional narratives that engage with the earthquake and its consequences are scarce, given the importance of the event. A careful review of contemporary Mexican fiction explains how the difficulties of narrating such an event have created, within fictional narratives, different ways to engage with the earthquake, its importance and the consequences it had on the city- life. This paper will explore how, by reviewing the fictional narratives that somehow engage with the earthquake, we can understand the radical change of tone in the (fictional) narratives that have portrayed Mexico City since 1985 and that have tried to make sense of the physical, emotional, social and political changes of the city. Furthermore, by specifically exploring the fictional narratives that account for the experiences of walking through the city right in the aftermath of the earthquake, I will show how the body is forced to understand the city through sounds, smells, touch and so on, particularly in such moments of distress. The paper will particularly underline the narrative resources used to make sense of such experiences. With this, the paper will aim to contribute to the ongoing debate of how (fictional) narratives can be used as a methodological resource for mobility studies. Paul Frazer‘To Rome(o) with Love: Shakespeare, Forced Mobility, and Political Allegory’This paper explores Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in light of the movement of people in Elizabethan England – to and from its neighbouring European territories. Shakespeare wrote this play at a time of widespread religious displacement, within which Christians of all stripes were moving across national borders in pursuit of sanctuary. Yet despite the xenophobic and nationalistic energies that were often associated with the popular theatre at this time, Shakespeare’s works tend to resist any stable confessional allegiances. Here I argue that the feud between the Capulets and Montagues is framed as religious and political in nature, and that the young lovers’ tragic demise can be read as a political allegory for the reintegration of English Catholicism within a wider system of reform. Romeo and Juliet sympathises with the experiences of both English Catholic and European Protestant refugees, urging tolerance and integration upon the divided (and transient) London audiences that first received it.Alberto GabrieliThe Linguistic Contact Zones of the Global and the Nineteenth Century BookTrade: Victorian Cosmopolitanism? ?The paper examines the specific modalities of operation of the nineteenth century book trade in three distinct areas: the transnational market of cheap reprints, the Australian colonies, and the continental centres incorporated in the Leipzig book industry. Rather than sketching a history of the book industry that starkly opposes the regime of piracy that circulated cheap reprints and the post-copyright model that enhanced the emergence of the national publishing empires, the paper shall articulate different phases and entanglements in the development of the nineteenth century book industry. The discursive category of the ?Victorian’ appears to be an increasingly fluid ?contact zone’ where linguistic homogeneity is challenged by the very operating structures of global trade. When crossing borders, print commodities acquire a new meaning in each context: shifting market demands, free and at times illegal entrepreneurial practices, and local production processes all contribute to redefining the original system of relations that made possible the production of print commodities. The format of the book, moreover, acquires an equally unstable typology, a hybrid materiality that reveals how the forces of incorporation into the axial division of labor of the culture industry at the end of the century redefined the material medium of literature that has been further normalized by literary studies and by the canonization of specific material objects. Raquel García-Cuevas “Matrilineality in Exile in Charlotte Bront?’s The Professor and Villette”The Brussels novels mark the beginning and the end of Charlotte Bront?’s mature literary career. Published posthumously, The Professor advances a narrative of liminality and exile that will be revisited in Villette through the perspective of a female character. Both novels have been amply studied in relation to their autobiographical and, more recently, transnational quality. However, since these novels focus on Britain as much as they focus on the Continent, placing the stress on the Belgian chapters to the detriment of the English ones, as some critics have done, can obscure the full meaning of the characters’ attitudes to their “homeland”.In a period marked by Britain’s flourishing, there was a strong tendency among emergent anthropologists such as McLennan or Tylor to see Victorian England and its social arrangements, i.e. patriarchy, as the prime example of development and civilization; a view which, I argue, Charlotte Bront? questions in these novels through the stress on the importance of matrilineality. I suggest that reading these works as tales of foreignness and alienation at home, while paying attention to the gender-related differences in the experience of exile, provides a productive picture of how Bront? negotiates with the image of England as mother, and uses the trope of the British Promised Land on both sides of the Channel.This paper will focus on how mother England is experienced by William Crimsworth and Lucy Snowe who, being orphans, destitute, and homeless, are shown to feel estranged in their own country. England’s failure to provide for her children is, however, articulated differently in each novel: while The Professor shows a constant longing for the return to the mother and the trope of the Promised Land ultimately fulfils the ideal, Villette, participating in the “Redundant Women” debate, offers the portrait of a disowned daughter. Finally, I will also pay attention to the tensions between matrilineality and patrilineality that arise from the novels’ endings. Whereas both narratives develop around the image of the mother as key to identity and affect, the endings may be argued to favour the traditional role of “man as provider”, thus problematizing the intended proto-feminist undertone in both works. Sarah GibsonTownships, Trains and the Figure of the StaffriderSouth Africa has a complex history of racialized and gendered (im)mobilities. During apartheid, the space of the township emerged as a space of immobility, a space of control and surveillance that functioned to contain the Black population outside of the ‘White’ city. However, the economy was dependent upon the movement of the Black migrant labourer from the township to the city as a ‘temporary sojourner.’ This daily commute was enabled through the construction of public transportation systems and commuter railways, and these township trains were a key factor in materialising South Africa’s racially segregated cities under apartheid. The figure of the ‘staffrider’ emerged with these township trains, who travelled as if part of the railway staff. Staffriders were typically male figures who took to travelling on the outside of commuter trains and were seen to epitomize freedom and revolt.Following the Soweto uprisings of 1976, a new magazine was produced in 1978 with the title Staffrider, a non-racial magazine dedicated to the publication of ordinary people’s life experiences. A number of poems, short stories, and photographs published in Staffrider focus specifically on representing the railway system, the space of the train, and the embodied, everyday mobilities of its passengers. Analysing a selection of literary, documentary, and visual texts published in Staffrider (1978-1996) together with the recent documentary film Surfing Soweto (Sara Blecher, 2010), this paper explores how the symbol of the township train and the mobile figure of the staffrider have been mobilized in the South African cultural imagination during both the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.Pascal Gin Nukable mobiles: reading mobility in ?lisabeth Filhol’s La CentraleIntrinsic to various strands of scholarship around mobility issues is the notion that contemporary mobilities are radically shifting what the social is made of. This certainly applies to wide-angled approaches tracing mobility systems to posthuman geographies and the sort of collective interactions they structure. Yet, this is equally true of subject-focused modes of enquiry attentive to self-mobility and social agency. Amongst the various ways in which contemporary literary production is likely to engage with issues and topics of mobility, the social resonance of mobilities features therefore as a highly relevant area of enquiry. Focused on a single case study, this paper intends to probe this very resonance as it is framed in ?lisabeth Filhol’s 2010 novel La Centrale. Turning to 21st century French literary narratives is a fitting choice when considering, from the angle of cultural production, a wide range of contemporary issues. Bent on the referential density of contemporary experience but also inscribing plots with a clearly social telos, these narratives attest to what was aptly dubbed both a retour du réel and a retour du social. As it applies to Filhol’s debut novel, this convergence overlaps closely with concerns over mobility. La Centrale provides indeed a fictional account of itinerant maintenance workers who move about the national network of facilities, servicing nuclear plants across France. The paper will initially consider to what extent collective representations in the novel do actually stray from tropes of containment to shift towards an interplay of flux, networks and nodes. This initial reading will specifically address how contemporary thinking around Risk Society (U. Beck) can possibly provide literary scholarship with a renewed frame of sociological understanding. As a secondary focus, the paper will turn to social discourse in the novel to determine how self-narratives of mobility frame representations of social formation, drawing from this purpose on issues of motility (V. Kaufmann) and Anthony Gidden’s analysis of subjectivity in late modernity. So as to proceed from these limited readings to a broader self-reflection around literary approaches to mobility studies, Bruno Latour’s metacritical account on the conduct of social investigations will be given some consideration. Lynsey Hanley"They're so strange here, the trains": public transport and the cultural imagination Are those reliant on public transport automatically disadvantaged in a car-dominated society, or is the quality of their everyday lives enhanced by public transport use more than it is diminished? My talk takes three quotes, or epigrams, as its starting point. The first is the (possibly apocryphal) quote by Margaret Thatcher that 'a man who finds himself travelling on a bus after the age of 26 can consider himself a failure in life.' The second is the geographer Doreen Massey's observation, in response to a media- and academy-led perception that intercity and international mobility is becoming a part of everyday life, that 'most people actually live in places like Harlesden or West Brom. Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the first world, still consists of waiting in a bus shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes.'? The third is taken from the literary and social critic Raymond Williams' landmark essay, Culture is Ordinary, in which he writes about a bus journey across the Welsh-English border to visit Hereford Cathedral, where the Mappa Mundi is held. In it Williams notes that the driver and conductress are 'deeply absorbed in each other', so familiar is the journey, and that such absorption is indicative of the extent to which the landscape surrounding them is also part of them, and they of it.I will set out the role and representation of public transport forms and their use in everyday life: beyond the practical role they play in enabling local, everyday activities and into the realm of how they are talked about in everyday conversation, their identity and status in a car-dependent society, and their ability to facilitate a rich interior life of daydreaming, eavesdropping and heightened awareness and knowledge of their users' immediate surroundings. I am also interested in how public transport is seen and represented in British culture, including popular songs, films, books, news media and advertising, and in the central role of public transport in facilitating the fast pace of city life, which in turn makes cities attractive, economically dynamic and places of excitement and possibility in the popular imagination, examining historical writings on public transport use by writers such as Joseph Roth and Robert Walser.Dr Syrine HoutNovel(istic) Realities in/of An Unsafe Haven: Crossroads for Refugees and Scholars At a time when the global Syrian refugee crisis has become a time-sensitive and critical research item in the social and health sciences, as well as from humanitarian and legal perspectives, presenting it in a fictional format offers a new and insightful perspective, one that was made available to the public in August 2016, when Nada Awar Jarrar, a Lebanese Australian author and former journalist, launched her fourth novel titled An Unsafe Haven (HarperCollins) at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.This novel is the first in the canon of post-civil war Anglophone Lebanese fiction to incorporate, i.e., to memorialize, this crisis by furnishing a wealth of socio-historical, economic, and political information about the situation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. My research question is interdisciplinary: what can and does a literary text contribute to humanistic and social scientific knowledge about an issue featured daily in print and electronic journalism?I believe that literature, resulting from an author’s imaginative engagement with a collective problem, is a free intellectual enterprise wherein multiple disciplines (can) intersect, thus yielding more than a pattern, statistics, or predictions. A social-realist novel projects a fictional(ized) universe wherein characters, representative as they may be of actual groups, are made to interact in such a manner as to spotlight more nuanced psychological truths as well as methodological blind spots in other disciplines that study similar phenomena; for example, a novel may choose to do more than (re)present the plights of a disadvantaged group by highlighting the stresses an out-group character (say, a fictional researcher) undergoes while interacting with its members. I argue that An Unsafe Haven advances novel realities about (at least some) Syrian refugees – some related to their mobility in the region – by dealing creatively with ‘positionality’, i.e., with the main character’s (a female Lebanese journalist’s) position of ‘power’, but also with those of comparable others, vis-à-vis the newly displaced. I focus on the ways in which education, class, gender, language, and nationality inform narrative ploys, modes of writing, and dialogical encounters among different constituents in order to illustrate how these help redraw ‘traditional’ insider/outsider demarcation lines. As my subtitle suggests, while Lebanon is ‘an unsafe haven’ for refugees, the novel is the verbal space wherein different scholars can meet and learn. Colin HowleyThe Aesthetics of Sporting Mobilities in J?rgen Leth’s A Sunday in Hell and Tim Krabbé’s The Rider Since the emergence of the so-called ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences and other academic disciplines the connection between the structural organization and the cultural performance of mobility within society has undergone significant re-evaluation (Urry, 2007). This paper takes its critical lead from recent theorization of mobility to examine the representation of cycle racing within cultural texts of documentary filmmaking and literature. Through a comparative analysis of the Danish filmmaker J?rgen Leth’s documentary A Sunday in Hell (1977) and Dutch author Tim Krabbé’s autobiographical novella The Rider (1978), the paper explores the status of cycling as ‘rolling signifier’ in order to evaluate the meaning-making potentiality of sport within the study of mobilities (Withers & Shea, 2016).Each of the texts examined are structured around the events of a one-day cycle race from the European calendar of professional and amateur circuits. For instance, in A Sunday in Hell, the race is the prestigious Paris-Roubaix and in The Rider the lesser-known French Tour of Mont Aigoual. Such real-life sporting contexts are important to the texts and facilitate the shaping of distinctive narratological frameworks – simultaneously foregrounding the various representative techniques employed in the depiction of a cycle race and the immersive experience (both in visual and textual form) of situating audience and reader inside the dynamic racing environment of the peloton. These features are realized in a variety of different ways to prompt critical interpolation of mobilities within sporting cultures: Leth’s filmic use of observational and poetic ‘genealogical modes’ (Nichols, 2010) often engenders an impressionistic intimacy to the visceral nature of professional sport, while Krabbé’s unusual coalescence of authorial interior monologue and present tense third-person narration embeds subjective reflections in between descriptions of the protagonist’s confrontation with the nature of Cartesian suffering in the race (van Oostrum, 2003). This paper argues that the use of experimental documentarian and literary techniques within these two texts produces radical representations of the embodied practice of competitive cycling – or what can be referred to as the ‘aesthetics of sporting mobility.’ Moreover, this paper concludes that the cultural work of these aesthetics open critical pathways through which to examine the wider meanings of socialization and identity located within the dynamics of sporting mobility practices. Su-ching HuangAsian Bodies in Motion: Sonic and Visual Identities in Hollywood MoviesFrom Mary Pickford’s Cio-Cio San in Madame Butterfly (1915) to Tilda Swinton’s The Ancient One in Dr. Strange (2016), Hollywood has a long history of replacing Asian characters with Caucasian ones, often resulting in stereotyping, caricaturing, and maintaining white dominance in the film industry. Both yellow face and whitewashing continues the monopoly of having non-Asian bodies control what it means to be Asian on the silver screen. This paper focuses on yellow face and explores the nuances between audial and visual representation in an attempt to tease out the complexity of authenticity claims proffered by Asian American critics and their allies. Yellow-face casting almost always incurs objections; however, having a white actor play the voice of an Asian character seems to meet with less resistance. Take two Hollywood animation features set in China for instance. Mulan (1998) has Chinese American actors play the voices of Mulan and Captain Shang (Mina Wen and BD Wong), while Kung Fu Panda (2008) has its supposedly Chinese leading roles (Po, Tigress, and Shifu) voiced by white actors (Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, and Dustin Huffman). Both films were box office hits. Even though critics had qualms about the pan-Asian (read failure to distinguish between Chinese and Japanese) features of the characters and landscape in Mulan, the predominantly Asian cast seems to gloss over the inauthenticity concerns. Compared with Mulan, Kung Fu Panda actually got away with a white majority cast; granted Lucy Liu, Jackie Chan, James Hong, and Randall Duk Kim did the voices for the supporting roles (Viper, Monkey, Mr. Ping, and Oogway), they are by no means the focus of the film. The deracination of Asian characters seems to have been received without contention when the characters are anthropomorphized animals rather than humans. The deracination is also enhanced by white voice actors speaking without any Chinese/Asian inflections. Noting the deracination of sonic identities in the Kung Fu Panda series contrasted with the hyper-racialization of visual identities in yellow face movies, this paper compares Hollywood animations with movies with real actors and attempts to ask if and how erasing the major character’s ethnic and racial markings may be seen as a neutral practice rather than whitewashing, and how such practices could signify in the increasingly transnational context of film production.Roman KabelikMoving Middle Grounds: Mobility and Bourgeois Subjectivity in German Literature Following Moreti’s account of the bourgeois as a culturally hegemonic figure and recent calls to focus on ‘mediated mobilities’, this paper traces the roles of mobility for middle-class subjectifcation as articulated in narrative fiction. Mobility – understood as a dispositif – regulates fows of people, objects, and ideas along states of urgency. Ergo, national-political and socio-economic structures play a decisive role in forming individual movements, be it through infrastructure, national demarcations, or laws on trade and migration. Far from being socially detached as mere aesthetic products, narratives reflect and contribute to this arrangement through specifc techniques, such as perspectivism, spatial and temporal order, and narrative frequency. As case studies, I will look at two seminal novels of German literature, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s epistolary-novel Sorrows of Young Werther, a prime example of sturm und drang from 1774, and Teodor Fontane’s late work of poetic realism Ef Briest from 1894. Both texts take up historical changes in increasingly global systems of communication and transport (two notions that once shared similar meanings) and afford new forms of imaginary mobility. Methodologically, I will use concepts from historical discourse analysis, narratology and geocriticism, while also broaching cognitive poetics. Combining these approaches pays tribute to both textual forms as meaningful and ideological constructions and material circumstances under which literary representations have been produced, circulated, and received. The aim is to demonstrate how these narratives use mobility as a structural frame for modelling subjectivity through representations of transport, everyday practices and communication, e.g. strolling around, dancing, carriage-driving, letter-writing, and oriental(ised) picture-books. Werther, for example, illustrates a type of sensitive middle-class envoy in search for small-scale places to dwell rather than making long journeys; a kind of mobility well suited for the territorial patchwork that was the Holy Roman Empire. Altogether different, Ef longs for urban Berlin and short-term leisure-trips by train that take her to remote places within the German Empire. As the novels in question come from different historical contexts, their comparison shows how narrative fiction directs and is directed by certain ways of moving, communicating and looking, thus offering variable models of mobilised subjectivity. Neha KapoorWriting the City: the Flaneuse and her Contested Mobility in the Late Nineteenth Century Literature and CultureMy paper would set out to examine the figure of the cosmopolitan woman as she emerges out of the discourses generated by the literature, material culture and historical forces of late nineteenth century Britain. This century sees the emergence of Baudelaire’s “flaneur”-a fritterer, an observer, a walker in the streets- who puts his observation of the urban cityscape into either words or pictures. While an enormous celebration of this figure sees the delineation of modern sensibilities and the cult of urban spectacle, it seems to be equally fraught with gender tensions because of its primary centrality on man as the subject. While cosmopolitanism on the one hand signified a world unimpeded by boundaries, traditions and cultures, the idea also implicated oppression and violence even as it celebrated liberty and diversity. However, this is not to say that an alternative to flaneur was not present. She is flaneuse, the female traveller, a walker, who elicits both fear and attraction through her mobility in the late nineteenth century British literature and culture. On the one hand where the male cosmopolitanism finds an acceptance as well as celebration in the literature and readership of late 19th century literature, the female form of cosmopolitanism becomes a contested site of negation as well as expression. The task is that of identifying fictional female characters who become the active agents exercising mobility and spectatorship in the urban arena.Further, the paper also investigates the multiple forms of mobility that were available to the cosmopolitan female self at the turn of the nineteenth century. From the dynamic act of physical travelling to a divergent stationary act of reading, this paper will engage with cosmopolitanism through various female subjects. Mobility will also be studied through the images of places and peoples encountered in the media; and virtual travel, transcending geographical and often social distance through the production of a plethora of magazines in the late nineteenth century. Within this context, James Tissot’s paintings particularly The Traveller will also act as a point of engagement. Mobility and spectatorship are thus two significant tropes applicable to women’s spatial and visual explorations of the cosmopolitan city. To situate my thesis within a literary context, I would like to pick up certain authors who portray the cosmopolitan women and the complexities surrounding such a state. These include Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, George Du Maurier’s Trilby, Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Grant Allen’s The Typewriter Girl. Since my thesis would stand at the crossroads of theory, history, literature and material culture (visual culture), it will substantiate itself with the collection of archives, magazines, and historical records that put this image forward. Nicola KirkbyImagination and Reverberation: The Channel Railway and La bête humainelines are seen drawing together apparently by some attraction, stretching out their iron arms as if they would embrace, when, lo! they have stopped.(Chalmers)Extensive though Europe’s railway network had become by the second half of the nineteenth century, one very vital connection remained unrealised: direct passage by rail between Britain and Continental Europe. By 1860, the ABC Railway Guide advertised a daily service running from London Bridge to Paris, with no mention of the portion of the journey undertaken off the tracks by ferry. To draw attention to this breach in an almost complete network would be to expose the railway’s limits when compared with parallel systems.Imaginatively the connection had already been long forged, helped in part by constant telegraphic transmissions of information, news, literature, and cultural commentary across the Channel. This paper begins by questioning the cultural assumptions underpinning The Channel Railway, a popular 1860 pamphlet by James Chalmers, which offered plans for the materialisation of such a link. Though it claims to be an ‘exposition of engineering skill’, Chalmers’s defence of his plans relies much more heavily on ideological and social arguments than engineering. By the end of the nineteenth century, enthusiasm for a Channel Railway had waned due to security concerns. Exploring the resilience and capacity of imaginary railway connections, the second part of this paper investigates a French railway text that circulated in Britain: Emile Zola’s La bête humaine (1890). Constantly reverberating rails draw distant localities in this novel together to form a cohesive, claustrophobic railwayscape. Yet through reverberation – an unwanted side effect of infrastructure – the rails could also carry information along and far beyond the tracks to those well-attuned to such rumblings. This movement was bilateral; it could alert the listener to approaching events as well as the rumblings of a train just past. In La bête humaine the railway can almost communicate in its own right. As ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010) infrastructural components of a railway a connection between Britain and France could not be assumed to be neutral. Hayatte Lakra?Narratives of mobility and mobile narratives : literary and visual expression of migration across camps in Northern France The so-called “refugee crisis” has aroused heated debates regarding the international political response to this unprecedented humanitarian crisis and the designation of the displaced people as “refugees” or “migrants”. This paper moves beyond existing designations of displaced people. By drawing upon Edward Said’s notion of the ‘exile’, this paper demonstrates how the camp-space gives rise to this perspective and modality of being. This paper tries to capture the experience of migration as inscribed through ‘refugees’s life stories, poetry, prose, videos and reflect on the methodological issues that arose when attempting to trace the relationship between mobility, culture, identity and language in literary and visual expression. It demonstrates how the camp-space concentrates the visible and current experience of exile. Because of its contradictions, it exercises constraints on exiles’ bodies, habits, mobility and actions, as well as actors they come into contact to (‘citizens’, volunteers, activists, policemen, border officials, academics). The exile is now the immigrant and the emigrant who has lived or is still ‘living’ in a so-called “humanitarian camp”. By telling their stories in this particular space and time, the exile becomes the ‘author’. The camp forces the exiles and the researcher to de-center – hence the perspective on literary-mobility studies. Visiting three camps in the North of France (the so-called “Calais jungle”, Norrent-Fontes and Grande-Synthe) in 2016, has provided me with a unique insight into how the exiles construct their stories. They choose to tell and share some part of their intimacy through pictures, songs, poetry and through a language that they also choose. This paper looks at a short-documentary made by two Afghan refugees while living in the Calais camp as well as texts written by refugees in this particular time-space. This paper also raises question around untranslatable literary-mobility narratives and reflects on the position of the researcher as witness. Michael Lehman‘Flotsam of Humanity’: Organs Without Bodies, Bodies Within BordersOn September 2, 2015, Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed ashore in Turkey. Before his name was known, the toddler’s image spread across social media with the hashtag “Flotsam of Humanity.” In essence, the body became a transnational commodity. Better known for his red shirt, blue pants, Alan is presented more as a commodified image than as a person. Thus, there is a slippage in the hashtag “Flotsam of Humanity.” In maritime law, “flotsam” is waste unintentionally discarded that can be claimed by the owner while “jetsam” can be claimed by anyone who discovers it. Thus, this “waste” of humanity becomes attached to the origin, or the nation state. Only in death does Alan have a claim to a global/transnational citizenship. His body as waste--segmented on the surface by his known representation: red, blue, brown--is the battleground for current debates of migration and diasporic communities. In his digital form, Alan is a segmented representation. But if the discourse of migration is brought to bear on his physical body as waste, who has claim to this waste? Here, the current debate on transnational organ banks problematizes the theorization of transnational/global citizenship and subjectivity. If the body can be claimed, who has the rights to the organs and lifesaving material of the body? In this regard, when praxis is brought to bear on a theorization of the “rights” to/of the body, a neocolonial world is re-produced in which the North always owns access to the resources of the South, but in this case the “ore/organs” migrate on their own following the same digital/technological migratory route into the North as the “Flotsam of Humanity” and the material of the body is only able to cross borders in strange ways. In this paper, I propose that in using the discourse of transnational organ banks with literary tropes of transplants, it is necessary to rethink the nation-state as the organizing structure of the planet in the terms of a futurity present in a global literary imagination.Li ZouHuman body and the spaces of mobility in Chinese diasporic writers’ English novels set in WWII China The space provides context and frames for the forms of body. It is the site for the body’s cultural saturation, its transformation by images, representational systems. It also affects the subjects’ forms of corporeal exertion. The effect of space on its muscular structure, its nutritional context, provides the most elementary forms of material support and sustenance for the body. In Chinese diasporic writers’ English fiction set in WII China, characters moved and sojourned in different spaces, including the city, rural area, battlefront and hospital. These spaces together with their social cultural environments produced forms of body rich in social and cultural meanings. This paper aims to study the cultural and social meaning of human body produced by different spaces in the novels, how does these spaces with their socio-cultural environments produce these meanings and how does the writer negotiates with the diasporic ideological and cultural contexts while representing the human body in these spaces. The works this paper examines include Anor Lin’s War Tide (1944), Adet Lin’s Flame from the Rock (1943) and Helena Kuo’s Westward to Chungking (1944). The three English novels are set in WWII China and are mainly about how the Chinese families were forced to move from one place to another during the war. Maria LombardExploring Narratives of Attachment: Textiles, Gendered Mobility, and BabywearingThis presentation will discuss textiles as mobile machines for mothers. The possibilities textiles offer to mothers come from the concept of babywearing. Babywearing in the modern world aligns with attachment parenting philosophies that encourage close connections between the parent and child. Farther back in human history, attachment parenting meant survival. Babywearing is the use of a woven textile to wrap a small child on the back or front of the mother, or other parent or caregiver. As I begin to deconstruct the notion of movement in motherhood, I will discuss the concept of the stroller, or pram, push-chair, or baby carriage, all names for a detached method of moving a child around. The origins of this plastic and disposable vehicle are class-based, Western, and technology-driven. As this presentation suggests a shift from the cyborg stroller, to a third-wave feminist notion of the mother, or parent, as a self-defined identity free from the encumbrances of social constructs and materialism of parenthood.In rural Bhutan, I saw mothers walking through rice fields, wearing their toddlers on their backs. The children were wrapped around the mothers, attached with a colorful woven fabric. I saw this scene repeated as I boarded a ferry from Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam, a Tanzanian mother wrapping her young son on her back with a textile. These examples are of mobile babies, mobile mothers, moving through spaces that they could not otherwise go with a small child. Over the last decade, mothers in Western countries like Germany, the UK and the US have found that wearing a child presents an opportunity for attachment that the stroller does not.Hannah LucasWhirling heretics: Reading ecstatic movements in the vitae of the Low Country beguines‘[C]orpusque ejus velut trochus ludentum puerorum in vertiginem rotabatur, ita quod ex nimia vehementia vertiginis nulla in corpore ejus membrorum forma discerni posset.’ Christina ‘Mirabilis’ of Sint-Truiden (c. 1150-1224) is here ‘rapiebatur a spiritu’, experiencing a trance state that signifies a union with the divine. The ‘rotationes’ of this rapture are representative of a wider mystical movement of turning away from the self, a process of ecstasy – or ex stasis, literally standing outside the self – which allows the subject to become an intercessor with God. This paper will take this spatial turn as an integral aspect of the performative devotional practices adopted by the early beguines of the Liège diocese. As uncloistered laywomen, they are idiosyncratic in their defiance of convention; their semi-religious manner of living positioned them on the limen (or threshold) between orthodoxy and heresy. It has been asserted in scholarship that male ecclesiastical authorities employed hagiographic literature to defend the emerging beguine movement against criticism of heresy, using it as part of their own anti-heretical campaign against the Albigensians or Cathars. I will extend this discourse to include the Eastern Crusades, suggesting that the ecstatic circular movement is a cross-cultural phenomenon that typifies the affective deposition of language in favour of bodily, experiential worship. This will demonstrate how the widespread use of this semiosis provoked anxieties concerning the potential threat to the crusading binary of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire against the anti-Christian ‘other’. By applying a feminist methodology and recent work on performance theory, this paper will investigate the male hagiographer’s partisan desire to claim the beguines’ devotional practices for the Church, and how this constrains the potential for social mobility and liberation from gendered experiences offered by ecstatic movement.Churnjeet MahnQueer mobilities in Michael Luongo’s?Gay Travels in the Muslim WorldThis paper offers an example of how travel writing negotiates the complexities surrounding the naming and identifying of queer lives in transnational contexts. With ‘LGBT(Q)’ gaining international currency as a way of understanding non-heteronormative lives, debates amongst academics and activists have focussed on the way Anglophone and predominantly ‘western’ identity frameworks have been used to elide the specificity and difference of queer lives across the globe. Michael Luongo’s edited collection?Gay Travels in the Muslim World?(2007) crosses national, racial and ethnic boundaries to assemble a range of largely gay-identified men in Islamic cultures where same-sex intimacy has a history not bound to the LGBT movement. What happens when gay-identified men ‘locate’ or ‘identify’ other men as gay in this context? The ambitious volume collects a range of voices which move from the middle-east and the African continent to Afghanistan. This paper traces some of the ways in which queer lives are recognised and misrecognised and how this facilitates the mobility of subjects (who gets to travel?) as well as subjectivities (which ‘naming’ categories allow queer lives to be more ‘liveable’ or access mobility?).Daryl MartinTwo women walking, two cities telling: the animation of urban colours, tones and tonics This paper draws on two recent films directed by the documentary maker and cinema historian Mark Cousins to outline the use of colour, sound and mobilities in his work. In doing so, I attempt to understand how the interconnections of these elements build distinctive urban atmospherics and spatialities that resonate with the cultural narratives of the cities in which they are set. The first of these films, ‘I Am Belfast’ (2015), follows a somewhat spectral ten thousand years old woman, named after the city, as she moves through its streets, recounting its historical events and addressing its political pasts, often in elliptical ways. The second film, ‘Stockholm My Love’ (2016), follows a younger woman as she walks the Swedish capital in an attempt to revisit and move on from a traumatic accident that she was previously involved in. In both films, Cousins’s camera drifts through urban spaces and cityscapes, capturing the images and sounds of everyday streets and sites that typically fall under our radar. Both films are attentive to the colours infused, reflected and refracted throughout their urban environments, prompting an understanding of the cities as intense studies in colour, light and luminosity. The films are also sound archives, documenting the sonic geographies of their cities and presenting them as collages of local accents, historical news reports and technological hums. Empirically, the films make manifest the mobilities of each city, tracing the quotidian movements of trains, trams, buses and people and folding them into longer urban and social histories. Formally, taken together, ‘I Am Belfast’ and ‘Stockholm My Love’ concertedly constitute a re-activation of the city symphony cinematic tradition; affectively, the two films choreograph recognitions of the urban as potentially a space of enchantment, emotion and care. This paper offers the beginnings of a reflection on the significance of Cousins’s work in recalibrating our urban imaginaries and reactivating a sense of cities as somehow more malleable than we typically sense them, of spaces shaped by us as we move round them.Annabella Mei MasseyImaginary travel: journeying through the urban landscapes of Yang Yongliang and Jia Zhangke In post-reform era China, extensive demolition has given rise to new urban landscapes, and alongside this, new imaginative perceptions and re-renderings of the city. Many creative producers call upon traditional Chinese aesthetics to comment on their urban reality today. One of the main techniques of doing so, I argue, and one which prompts a fresh exploration of city space, is taken from the handbook of traditional Chinese landscape painting (shanshui hua). Famously elucidated by Southern Song monk Zong Bing, landscape paintings were regarded as objects which could send one’s mind on imaginary journeys through infinite natural worlds. This psychological state of mobility was called woyou (‘mind-travel’) As artists confront the new and often alienating reality of widespread urbanisation across China, some still probe the transcendental capacity of mind-wandering, but this time, across a new man-made spatial order. To explore these representations of new urban landscapes and mental mobility, I refer to the deceptive photo-collages by Yang Yongliang (b.1980), a digital landscape painter, and the 2006 film Still Life by director Jia Zhangke (b.1970), a profoundly intermedial cinematic text shot entirely in high-definition digital video and punctuated by surreal narrative glitches. Although these artists work primarily in the digital medium, both draw heavily upon the tradition of Chinese landscape painting. I suggest that, by deploying the technique of woyou – traditionally associated with transcendence, the soaring spirit and the self, and a Daoist ‘oneness’ with nature – these contemporary artists aim to induce a similarly meditative mindset in the viewer, yet simultaneously disrupt this state by bringing in ambiguous emblems of urban modernity. Drawing upon these two case studies, this paper explores how digital artists today are reworking the cognitive effects that the Chinese landscape painting tradition is said to induce in the viewer to reform our perceptions of urban space and the imaginary city, and our own mobility within these realms. Eva Grace Lamb?McGrath?Movement through the waters: sound, song and symphony in Herman Melville’s?Moby-Dick.Herman Melville, as a sailor, spent months ‘cruising after the sperm-whale […] tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific — the sky above, the sea around and nothing else’ (Weaver, 166): exposed to sounds of the crashing waves and cries of the sailors. Whilst forming?Moby-Dick?years later, such chaotic movement on the vulnerable boughs of the Pequod was incorporated into his narrative.?Continuously through the form of song, sailors persuasively reorientate their shipmates from a nostalgic reflection of?land relationships towards following the moving whale, accompanied by “there she blows” ditties. A ship, as ‘a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion’ (Gilroy, 4) which moves through the sea thus deliberately resists stable networks on land, rather seeking to capture and contain the whale, below the surface of the deep.?Whilst Moby was imaged as a ‘musical rippling’ form that ‘flowed’ through the water at a distance, upon encounter, his form disrupts the patterns of mobility. Yet precisely in the moment when the ‘enchanted eyes’ of the crew are set upon Moby, the musical fantasy which characterised earlier descriptions, popular sailor songs and congregational hymns, breaks down.?In its place are chaotic vibrations, which cannot be notated: as Moby repetitively and uncontrollably moves his ‘vibrating’ head from ‘side to side’ in a fit of ‘malice and ‘vengeance’. Mind numbingly, these vibrations destabilise all that was once held together, namely the Pequod, a vessel which once enabled the crew members to travel across the ‘Atlantic, Pacific and Indian’ (29) oceans. They float, passively quivering along the surface particles of water, vibrations shattering form as they are beyond it. It has to be understood as a larger reflection on underwater, mobile sound, which ‘vibrates and travels endlessly’ (Urick, 159): ‘entirely different to way than above the surface’ (Bass and Clark, 19)The Pequod’s movement through waters are a means through which Melville can articulate the sounds of mobility: in its compressed disorientation and exposed natural elements. In climaxing with the whale surfacing upon the deep, he brings to the attention to otherwise ‘unsounded sea’, whose rhythms surround the ship in motion.?Bass A. H. and Clark?Christopher,?The Physical Acoustics of Underwater Sound Communication?(New York: Springer Verlag 2002)?Gilroy Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993)Melville, Herman,?Moby-Dick?(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)Urick Robert,?Principles of Underwater Sound?(New York: McGraw Hill, 1983)Weaver Raymond,?Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic?(USA: George H. Doran Company, 1921)Nilanjana Mukherjee From D'Oyly to Amitav Ghosh: Crossing the Sea of PoppiesCharles D'Oyly was an East India Company appointed Salt and Opium Magistrate stationed in Patna and other centres in North India in the early 19th?Century. Though he was an amateur artist, yet his large corpus of realistic sketches and paintings represent the contemporary colonial and native scenes surrounding opium production and transport. Scenes of roads, pathways and river landscapes hold an overbearing presence. His series of etchings,?Sketches of the New Road from Calcutta to Gyah?(1820),?celebrates the construction and commencement of the new roadway which connected the existing Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta, the colonial capital, with Gaya, a town in Bihar?and a centre of opium production. His work tracks the colonial advancement into the innermost recesses of the countryside and villages and bringing those under a new circulatory regime. While these images draw the colonial gaze from Calcutta inwards into the hinterlands?delineating also a new scopic regime, Amitav Ghosh's?Sea of Poppies?(2008)?reverses such a gaze and the order too, beginning its narrative from the poppy fields thereby tracking the journey of human/animal bodies and objects which inhabited?the?innermost recesses of Bihar. These lives?get irredeemably entwined?and become the dramatis personae in the global plot of a colonially induced mobility, both social and spacial. The colossal uprooting of community life occurred due to the transport of cheap labour forces?from the erstwhile opium producing belt adjacent to the Ganges which ran dry due to the Opium War between the British East India Company and China. Unforeseen miscegenations, hybridisations, transgressions and friendships are forged as a shipful of?girmityas?travel from Bihar to the port of Kolkata destined?for the Marich Dweep or Mauritius.?In my paper, I will?collocate?these two works,?as also juxtapose image and word in an attempt to read narratives of mobile networks operating in the region.Elia Ntaousani Theorising artistic and insider research into contemporary cultures of (im)mobilitesOr how an observer became me, the active correspondent Cultural studies makes use of a wide range of theories in order to investigate home, tourism, migrant cosmopolitanism and other cross-cultural phenomena. Focusing more on the conditions or processes of generating and disseminating cultural meaning than in the historical categorisation and geographical classification, it could be claimed that cultural studies is interdisciplinary in the sense of crossing borders between fields and thinking across them, yet retains its activity within the (academic) sphere of critical writing. Drawing on Bercovitch who makes a point about how the emphasis on a bricolage of methodologies leaves this problem of context unresolved, this paper focuses on what it takes to work beyond the edges of disciplines and calls for a renewed sense of relevancy, to the contemporary conditions of augmented reality, hybrid identities and increasingly interpenetrating societies.Two streams of thought emerge with regard to possible ways of undertaking a truly inter-disciplinary study that reviews the relation between the literal and the cultural as well as addressing the intersection between the critical and the personal. First, I consider cultural study in relation to theory, and challenge the notion of research as a creative systematic activity that takes place both in and beyond the academia. I then explore diverse ways of writing about (im)mobilities and stress the importance of plurality and farsightedness, whilst foregrounding the benefits of criss-crossing between scholarship and variations of autobiography. The former approach highlights the rapidly expanding area of artistic research, while the second refers to a writing that acknowledges the researcher’s positioning (as a migrant, traveller or expat) and the challenges that this entails. My premise is that a single strategy followed widely reproduces a disciplinary-like pattern – I am rather interested in undoing methodology as a normative framework and addressing the benefits of freely mixing genres or changing voices, in the space of a single work. Looking at examples of insider and artistic research, this paper ultimately puts forward an interartive approach that shifts attention from narration to accountability – and from my personal story or idiosyncratic understanding of living and leaving to critical or intersubjective accounts of mobility and immobility.Alex Pavey‘He respects no boundary lines’: Suspect Mobility, Criminalistics and the Hard-boiled NovelThis paper considers the relationship between mobility and transgression in the early-twentieth century American city. This relationship, as framed by the criminological theory of the time, served to justify specific law enforcement tactics and inspire the development of new investigative techniques. It was also both reiterated and critiqued in contemporary cultural works, particularly narratives of crime and detection.As the form of the modern metropolis took shape in the nineteenth century, the increased potential for individual anonymity within urban space placed new demands on the emerging disciplines of criminology and criminalistics. The conditions of urban modernity necessitated new technologies that might enable the state to combat this fluidity of identity, such as photography, anthropometry and, at the turn of the century, fingerprinting. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, North American criminologists were increasingly concerned not just with identity, but with mobility. Movement – across municipal, state and national boundaries and at previously unimaginable speeds – was also a condition of modernity seen to challenge the authority and effectiveness of law enforcement. As one of the most significant figures in twentieth century US criminalistics wrote, the lawbreaker could now harness ‘the twentieth-century speed of communication and transportation which has made it possible to express distance in terms of seconds, minutes, or, at most, hours [...]. Equipped with the “latest” inventions, he respects no boundary lines’ (Vollmer 1936: 4).Referring to criminological textbooks and police handbooks of the period, I will illustrate some of the ways in which this anxiety over suspect mobility was manifested in the theory and practice of US criminal investigation. I will then consider the cultural construction and interrogation of these practices in a distinctively twentieth-century American form, the ‘hard-boiled’ novel, taking Raymond Chandler as a case study. The investigations of Philip Marlowe, ‘the first motorized private eye in the most thoroughly motorized city in America’ (Fine 2000: 120), rely upon his fluid, adept navigation of the streets and neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Marlowe’s mobility, however, is by no means unproblematic, and disruptions to it frequently expose the limitations of his investigative method.Works CitedFine, David M. (2000), Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Reno: University of Nevada Press).Vollmer, August (1936), The Police and Modern Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).Anita PerkinsEast German Travel Ideals: Two responses to a space of enforced immobilityHow does the experience of travel transform culture over time? This is the question is at the heart of a book based on my PhD, ‘Travel Texts and Moving Cultures’, which brings together two main areas of scholarship: the cultural analysis of German literature and film and the emerging field of mobilities studies. This presentation focuses on one aspect of this book, the travel desires of East Germans pre-Wende.By the beginning of the 1980s, the vast majority of East Germans have been trapped behind the Berlin Wall for twenty years in a society with strictly enforced travel restrictions. This presentation, a comparative analysis of two travel texts from a cultural mobilities perspective, sheds light on why Fernweh, or the strong desire to travel elsewhere, is a powerful and widespread sentiment in the extreme political context of the German Democratic Republic. Specifically, I draw on the responses of two East German figures who both yearn to travel beyond the East German border: First is the protagonist of Erich Loest’s novel, Zwiebelmuster (1985), an historian and writer called Hans-Georg Haas who makes numerous applications to the Ministry of Culture to try and secure a travel visa. This text is largely informed by the autobiographical experiences of Loest, who is imprisoned and sentenced to a writing ban (Schreibverbot). Second, is Friedrich Christian Delius’ novella, Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus (1995) [The Journey/Excursion from Rostock to Syracuse]. This narrative recounts the story of waiter Paul Gompitz (based on real life figure, Klaus Müller), who escapes East Germany by sea in order to emulate the 1802 journey of his childhood hero, Johann Gottfried Seume. Over the course of both journeys, the idea of travel becomes more important than the destination itself. For example, Haas thinks, “It’s solely about the journey”/”um Reise schlechthin” (Loest 1985, 176), and Müller views his mobility “as my human right”/“als mein Menschenrecht” (Der Spiegel 1995, 176). Accordingly, I compare and reflect on the motivations, challenges and outcomes of Haas’s and Gompitz’s/Müller’s Fernweh, in order to try and define the seemingly paradoxical notion of an East German travel ideal. Delius, Friedrich Christian. Miquel Pomar-AmerSimply flit-lit? The Third Boom in Majorca and its texts Internationally known as a touristic destination, Majorca's tourism industry has been in vogue since the 1960s and records in the number of annual tourists are regularly hit since then, reaching almost 16.5 million tourists in 2015. These increasing figures have been complemented by what some geographers have called the "Third Boom", that is the explosion of residential tourism since the 1990s caused by the significant number of foreigners who purchased a house. Hence, ownership has contributed to making the distinction between the concepts of "tourist" and "migrant" rather blurry and the usage of "expat" as an alternative with its race and class implications might be useful but also problematic. This paper will analyse the literary production resulting from this mobility and, for this purpose, it will focus on a selection of autobiographical writings by British authors who have written on the process of refurbishing a Majorcan country house. These include Peter Kerr’s Snowball Oranges (2000), Anna Nicholas’ A Lizard in My Luggage (2006) and Selina Scott’s A House in the High Hills (2009) in order to identify common elements in these narratives of settlement and to reflect on how local culture is represented. In addition, this paper will also discuss how this phenomenon has been represented in some works by Majorcan authors. This double-sided analysis intends to shed light on the social consequences of this mobility from a an alternative perspective, certainly informed by sociology and geography studies but mainly from the perspective of cultural studies. Pavlina RadiaMobilizing Affective Brutality: Death Tourism and the Ecstasy of Postmemory in Contemporary American Culture While the twentieth century defined mobility primarily in terms of travel and geopolitical displacements, the twenty-first century has radicalized affect as a new culture of mobility. A peculiar marriage of globalization and hyper-consumerism, this culture has produced radicalized topographies of affect that centre on various, yet individual, impressions and fallacies of memory of both historically privileged and disadvantaged subjects. From touring the gas chambers at Auschwitz to taking selfies at the 9/11 National Memorial, the memories of the Shoah and 9/11 have been reduced to compulsive re-imaginings of what Marianne Hirsch (2012) refers to as “postmemory” or the “politics of retrospective witnessing” (3). Deploying America’s war memorials—be it the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C. or the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City—as sites of monumental but also affective mobilities, this paper examines how radicalized affect mobilizes the ethics (or lack thereof) of retrospective witnessing. Interrogating the ways in which death tourism participates in mobilizing affect as racial and ethnic tokenization, this paper brings death tourism in dialogic conjunction with literary texts by Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (2012), Alissa Torres’s graphic novel, American Widow (2008), and Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2012). But it also discusses how contemporary literature challenges the increasing commodification of what Auslander calls “Misery Olympics” by exposing the politics of retrospective appropriation of the Holocaust (76), or how Torres addresses the complexity of America’s obsession with visual economics and its appetite for “WE WANT IT RAW” in its treatment of 9/11 victims and their families (127). Echoing Auslander’s and Torres’s concern about America’s penchant for spectacle, Waldman queries death tourism through her consideration of the racial and cultural politics of 9/11. Drawing on the works of Marianne Hirsch, Sara Ahmed, and Alain Badiou, this paper asserts that affect becomes a form of radicalized mobility, if not weaponry, or what I call “ecstatic mobility.” Exploring contemporary American culture’s preoccupation with postmemory, this paper argues that, while promoting the imperative to remember, the so-called historical (and hysterical) re-imaginings risk mobilizing the ecstasy of mass forgetting whereby the spectacle becomes, to quote Alain Badiou (2006), “the obverse of imperial [and, as I suggest, affective] brutality” (31). Johannes Riquet Trains, Interrupted: 1930s Crime Fiction, Transcontinental Trajectories and the Disintegration of Europe This paper is part of a larger project on the poetics of interruption in British railroad fiction in which I trace a cultural history of the railway journey in literature, cinema and the visual arts as a multisensory and specifically modern experience of multiple accidents, interruptions and interferences. My research responds to Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s classic account of the railway journey as the epitome of Newtonian space and time; drawing on recent accounts of the fictional railroad by scholars like Matthew Beaumont and Laura Marcus, I intend to complement Schivelbusch’s account by foregrounding the potential of the train to disrupt (rather than regularise) spatio-temporal orders. My proposed paper for this conference addresses the significance of spatial, narrative and perceptual interruptions in the politically charged railway crime fiction and cinema of the interwar era. I will draw on three examples: Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins (1936), and the cinematic adaptation of the latter by Alfred Hitchcock, The Lady Vanishes (1938). All of these narratives revolve around transcontinental railway journeys that offer an oblique comment on the disintegration of Europe in a pre-WWII climate. The various interruptions and disruptions that mark these journeys provoke reflection on Europe’s failure to consolidate its spatial order. In Murder on the Orient Express, the Orient Express, whose trajectory through Europe had been of considerable geopolitical significance since World War I, is caught in a snowdrift in Yugoslavia, between East and West, failing to function as an unproblematic long arm of the European empires. In The Wheel Spins and The Lady Vanishes, the interruptions of the train journey and a multiplicity of perceptual uncertainties within the space of the train also figure a Europe that fails to function as a connected space. The Lady Vanishes radicalises the critique already present in White’s novel in the most spectacular interruption of the journey: as the train stops in a forest, the genre of the film changes abruptly and suggests the possibility of war, indirectly advocating British intervention. All of my examples, then, interrupt their railway journeys to reflect on Britain’s position within (or without) a disintegrating Europe. Alistair RobinsonMetropolitan Vagrancy: On Being Forced to Walk in Nineteenth-Century LondonIn an anonymous Slang Dictionary (1864) of Victorian ‘street phrases’ we are told that London is known as ‘The Start’ because it is ‘the great starting point for beggars and tramps’: the place that they were starting to, broadly speaking, was the country. Every year from early spring to late autumn London’s vagrant population would take to the roads, either to beg alms, hawk wares, or pick up fieldwork with the ripening harvest. These annual migrations were eagerly documented by middle class observers; the journalist James Greenwood, for example, sought to experience the ‘peculiar delights of tramp life’ for himself by following the indigent out of London and mapping their routes as he went. What went largely undocumented, however, were the movements of vagrants when they returned to the metropolis. As Henry Mayhew noted in London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62), winter brought tramps ‘back to London’ so that they could ‘avail themselves of the shelter of the night asylums or refuges’; this paper traces the paths that vagrants trod between these sites of refuge, arguing that the way in which charitable and parochial relief was structured engendered a specific type of urban walking, a distinctly metropolitan form of vagrancy. Walking in the city has recently re-emerged as a locus of academic interest with Matthew Beaumont’s Nightwalking (2015) and Lauren Elkin’s Fl?neuse (2016) challenging and developing traditional concepts of the nineteenth century fl?neur. Both of these studies, however, primarily deal with chosen forms of walking, rather than with those who are forced to walk city’s streets. Using legal, literary, journalistic and sociological texts from the period, I outline the circuitous and oscillatory species of walking that the houseless poor were forced to adopt in order to survive the winter. Restricted as to the number of nights that they could stay in any one workhouse or refuge; turned out into the cold every morning; and highly constrained, as Gareth Stedman Jones has argued, in the type of work they were eligible for, London’s vagrants were impelled to walk in certain ways: they were ever mobile, but with limited movement. Bernadette SalemMobile Futures: Spacejunk Vs. Junkspace in Disney Pixar’s WALL-E Space tourism as it is conceived of in science fiction is a symbolically rich cinematic and literary trope, offering critical inquiry not only into the latest technologies of mobility within the space industry, but also into the industrial climates fashioning these devices. Narrative accounts of cinematic spaceships invite us to consider the impact of the accelerated growth of technological landscapes on mobility. Using a close textual analysis of Andrew Stanton’s Disney Pixar animation, WALL-E (2008), which offers a glimpse of mobile futures through its portrayal of the inner-life and workings of a space station manufactured by the fictional tourism agency ‘Buy & Large Skyliners,’ I will consider the ways science fiction uses the trope of space tourism as a vehicle for exploring race and class disparity and the inequalities of mobility – as well as the social and environmental impact of consumer culture, which is exemplified by the material accumulation of Spacejunk, one of the film’s key visual and thematic motifs.To address the question of what space tourism in science fiction reveals regarding the impact of globalization on culture and mobility, I draw from literary accounts of space travel, using excerpts from J.G. Ballard’s anthology Memories of the Space Age – a text which blurs the distinction between the figure of the ‘astronaut’ and the citizen hidden within the spacesuit. Referencing the work of Dutch architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas, I will examine the practical and ideological limitations surrounding space tourism as it is conceived of by contemporary pioneers, taking into the consideration the dual issues of Spacejunk and its conceptual inverse, ‘Junkspace’ – the sprawling, industrial landscapes proliferating on Earth. Also discussed will be the paradoxes of space tourism with regard to the desire for travel, movement, and encounters with 'otherness' while remaining within a hermetically sealed container. Films such as George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) are evidence that depictions of space tourism are as old as cinema; as our notions of space travel are intrinsically cinematic, conceiving of space travel as if we were film protagonists furthers our understanding of the fantasies and imaginative limits underlying space tourism. Catarina Sales OliveiraMy trip in my words With roots in the slow movement (Honoré, 2004), slow travel is a recent concept with still scarce academic discussion (Markwell, Fullagar and Wilson, 2012). From a mobility perspective the choice of a clean transportation (Di-Clemente et al in Mondéjar-Jiménez et al, 2015) is a distinguish element of the concept. In this emphasis slow travel can be connected to the philosophy of soft mobility (LaRocca, 2010) and to studies that approach the choices and patterns of people in mobility (Sales Oliveira, 2015). On the other hand, slow movement is mainly about time and life options, defending that only in a slow mood life can be experienced in plenitude (Gardner, 2009). Slow travel seems therefore to be a new proposal of relation and experience of time and mobility. At the same time slow travel blogs appear to be playing an important role in this phenomenon. But how are this projects of slow travel expressing themselves and creating their own space and meaning in the context of a speeded and globalized world? What is the role of the slow travel blogging? In this research and using an exploratory and qualitative approach we addressed these questions by analyzing the discourse of a set of slow travelers that had in common two characteristics: to have made a trip that fits the concept of slow travel (an inclusive perspective was adopted) and have produced a blog about their travel. An analysis of the main motivations, concerns and characteristics of the individual projects and experiences of travel was conducted.The results allow us to understand that while there is a considerable diversity in mobility concerns and time perceptions among the travelers/bloggers studied, a common objective of promotion of an alternative lifestyle and mindset is present in most cases. We discuss in what measure this proposal can be consider a contra culture.Eleanor ShiptonAnthony Trollope's ‘Hybrid Assemblage’: Postal Surveying and Rural MobilitiesMy paper will examine the postal mobility of Anthony Trollope, arguing that the rural postal network, both in Britain and its colonies, becomes intimately tied to the body and transport. It will examine both the largely understudied details of Trollope’s work as a Postal Surveyor and his short story series Tales from All Countries (1861 and 1863), to establish the embodied experience of mobility, which is elaborated in the circulation network of the Post Office in his fiction. From 1841 to 1860, Anthony Trollope travelled to and through rural areas of Ireland, Britain, the Suez and the West Indies, as a Postal Surveyor. During this period, he was responsible for developing the efficient transportation of the postal communication in rural localities both ‘at home’ and overseas - a task that involved thinking specifically about bodies and transportation.?He also wrote prolifically – from 5.30-8.30 every day to strict quota, and travelled by rail, instead of horse, with writing-desk in tow. Trollope’s writing, I will argue, becomes an extension of his postal work: it is efficient, speedy, circulating, and mobile. Drawing upon John Urry’s conception of the ‘hybrid assemblage’, and archival research undertaken at the Postal Museum, this paper will argue that Trollope’s work as a Postal Surveyor demonstrates his knowledge of the ways in which the postal network remade rural landscapes - both linking them to a globalised communications network, whilst making them reliant on runners and emphasising their rural-ity. It will focus on moments of packet-ed transportation to and from Britain in Tales from All Countries, the structures of rural route-ways, and their relationship with the circulation of people and the post. Using a foundation of mobility theory, this paper will aim to open new perspectives on Trollope. As he is posted across the country and the colonies, so too do his characters get packed into steamships, carried away and even race mail-runners across the jungle. Trollope’s postal travel and writing, this paper will argue, creates a postal ‘body,’ which both enacts and writes the mobile body as it is entangled with the globalised institution of the General Post Office.Emma ShortPassing Through: The Hotel Lobby in Interwar FictionAlways a space of movement across boundaries, the hotel lobby can itself be understood as a boundary between the street and the inner spaces of the hotel. This paper explores the various ways in which the lobby is figured as a space of transition in three interwar novels – Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel (1927), Jean Rhys’ Quartet (1928), and Henry Green’s Party Going (1939). As a space of transition, the lobby is inevitably a space of anticipation for these characters – both the anticipation of the kind of space into which they are moving, and of the future movements for which this space holds the potential. The opening pages of Bowen’s The Hotel, for example, show Miss Pym scanning the letter-racks in the lobby for clues regarding forthcoming arrivals, anticipating future romance and passion. However, this sense of anticipation, and its powerful association with waiting, can also develop into stagnation, lack of purpose, and an absence of hope, in line with Siegfried Kracauer’s positioning of the hotel lobby as a ‘space of unrelatedness’ characterised by ‘an aimless lounging, to which no call is addressed’. The lobby in Green’s Party Going, for example, is compared by one character both to a doctor’s waiting room and purgatory, and I argue that the palpable sense of disillusionment conveyed by the lobby’s links to illness, death, and lack of mobility is here indicative of the anxieties of late 1930s Britain as it edged ever closer to war. Published towards the end of the previous decade, the hotel lobby in Jean Rhys’s Quartet is also a space of anxiety, though the anxiety in this case stems from Marya Zelli’s awareness that her movements are constantly monitored from the desk of the patronne, signifying the scrutiny of marginalised subjects in interwar Europe. This paper considers the way in which, though this focus on movement and mobility, the hotel lobby is figured variously – and often simultaneously – across modernist fiction of the interwar period as a space of anticipation, anxiety, and paralysis.Stephanie SoderoNarrating materials: Following blood in fiction and ethnography Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier (2017, Knopf) recounts a soldier’s experience of war in Afghanistan from the perspective of objects: a tourniquet, a bag of blood, a prosthetic leg. As a social scientist interested in following the material – specifically the movement of blood in humanitarian contexts – I explore how this fictional account can inform my multi-sited and mobile ethnography. In my research, I examine how vital mobilities are achieved in the context of increased atmospheric and logistical turbulence that define the Anthropocene, focusing on the commercial transport of blood by drone in Rwanda. Working at the intersection of the mobilities paradigm and the material turn, I draw on Urry’s work on carbon constraint, Sheller’s research on the islanding effects of disaster, as well as Bennett’s vibrant matter and Latour’s Actor Network Theory. From this theoretical orientation, I examine the cultural representation of vital mobilities and related technological transformations in fiction and my research, exploring potential methodological and theoretical insights. Jen Southern, Samuel Thulin, Mark LochrieComposition in motion: Locative art as a collaboration with time, place and participant. Mobility brings the materiality of humans, things and experiences into new and evolving relationships. For artists the composition of these new material relationships, their nature and the way in which they are arranged has become a new form of aesthetics. ?In this paper we use the case study of a locative sound work, concerned with letters sent during WW1, to think through the mobile aesthetics of an expanded form of relationality. ?The nature of these relations is not smooth, they are often fragmented, there is discontinuity that breaks apart a sense of flow in time and space. We focus on three aspects of this fragmentation: The conceptual site specificity of the work that offers a partial view of war through Preston archives and Somme battlefields; the technical production of the work using Bluetooth that responds to location and environment in unpredictable ways; and the audience’s situational navigation of the work in relation to physical environment, social interaction and environmental conditions such as weather.These various aspects of fragmentation do not, however, make the work fall apart. Instead, within the building of a locative sound work, fragmentation becomes central to composition. Fragments are tied together, not into a smooth flow, but into a textured experience, as sound is used as a connective tissue bringing disparate elements into relationships. Field recordings from the Somme cemeteries, letters read by local students, and sonified GPS data are mapped to spaces in Preston in such a way as to both connect and cause friction between past and present, near and far, bodies and monuments. We therefore suggest that by focusing on a new materialist reading of mobile relationality in sound art, fragmented relations can be seen as both leading to composition and simultaneously being produced by its situated nature.?Amy SpencerWalking Ambient LiteratureThis paper examines walking as a feature of ambient literature, an emerging literary form. The Ambient Literature project is a 2 year AHRC funded research programme led byUWE Bristol, Bath Spa and Birmingham to investigate the potential of situated literary experiences delivered by pervasive computing platforms, responding to the presence of a reader to deliver story. Such literary experiences operate both spatially and temporally and a reader is brought into contact with a physical location as part of the narrative. The project has commissioned three works of ambient literature from established writers to understand the form, the experiences of its readers and the process of its authoring.This paper will examine works of ambient literature that use the act of walking as a narrative feature. It will draw on the rich heritage of walking as a motif in contemporary literature and examine what happens when the reader is asked to walk as part of a situated work. As a situated literary experience, a work of ambient literature does not need to be bound by a material form, such as a book. Without such a framing device, and with its position embedded in the physical world, the boundaries of this narrative form are often in flux and the boundaries between reader and text?become more?porous. This paper will explore how a reader experiences an ambient form through walking as they are asked to simultaneously navigate both a physical and imaginative world and are?embodied in a narrative.David StewartNarrative Fluidity in the Romantic Borders: Walter Scott and James HoggLiterature of the Romantic period has often seemed to present the problem that theories of mobility have sought to overcome: an understanding of space as fixed, stable, and under the colonising command of a disembodied eye. This paper will claim that the work of James Hogg and Walter Scott, specifically the prose narratives they developed in response to the Anglo-Scottish borders, can help us rethink Romantic mobility. Scott and Hogg developed a series of unusual narrative experiments in the early nineteenth century that allow them to test out what a landscape might mean as it is experienced by embodied subjects moving through a region that refuses to conform to the kids of detached meanings - cartographic, picturesque, nationalist - that are imposed on it. Both writers draw on Enlightenment forms of knowledge and Romantic ideas of picturesque tourism, but their experience of the Borders emerges from personal contact with its boggy ground and its living, socially diverse communities. Rather than the discovery of deep truths buried in the land associated with Romanticism (and still influential in contemporary psychogeography and nature writing), these writers offer us an extension of Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005). The narrative forms they develop unfold temporally as the narrators move across the land on foot or horseback. The fluid, boggy land of the Border region transforms the kind of story they can tell: the singular narrative line is multiplied in their encounter with the land, the weather, the people and other agents within it. Narrative form offers a method of understanding place as composed of the multiple rhythms that Henri Lefebvre describes. Their semi-fictional writing offers us a form of knowledge of landscape that allows us to perceive the environment, as Tim Ingold and Doreen Massey suggest, as a region of multiple becoming.Kai Syng TanRunning: metaphor, methodology, material?More than two million people run weekly in England, but many of us may not know that two million years ago, running was a tool for survival. Our ancestors, the Homo erectus, ran after antelopes, in order to hunt for them as food. And for writer Joyce Carol Oates, running is a metaphor for transgression. What are the ways in which running could be considered beyond a sport or exercise, and instead be activated as a methodology and metaphor to think about the world around us? In this presentation, I will run through a handful of examples of new or recent works by artists and writers who took part in a programme I curated with two other female researcher-artist- runners in November 2016. The interdisciplinary RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale 2016: Running as Metaphor and Methodology took place in Leeds, London and Cardiff and featured 27 artists, academics and charitable organisations. Over films, live art and readings, we asked: How does running (dis)connect people across borders? How does running (dis)connect people with the city? How does running people (dis)connect with their bodies? The series ended on a high, at the stunning National Indoors Athletics Centre in Cardiff with an evening of new, live art (including by international performance maker Eddie Ladd) and readings (such as by BBC writer Catrin Kean). With a special focus on works by female artists, an aim of the Biennale and my presentation is to provide an update to the well-trodden paths created by the canon of walking which has often focused on the very white, very male and sometimes drugged-out (see Baudelaire, Benjamin, Richard Long and Will Self). Just as women have always walked, they have always run, and run well. The Biennale’s line-up of females and males activate running as creative and critical toolkits to engage with the body, and to engage with other bodies in the city and across borders. This speaks loudly of the richness of research, practice, action and activity out there that are not just heroic, territorial, logocentric, neurotypical, or white(-washed). In addition, it presents an antidote to the growing cottage-industry of work that feature the leitmotif of a solitary, self-serious and sensitive new male battling nature/the universe (think Caspar David Friedrich’s protagonist in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, add running shorts and Garmin and, voila, voila, you have a MAMIL or middle-aged man in lycra, who runs, and writes/talks). Joanna Taylor, Christopher DonaldsonWalking, rambling and wandering in the Lake District, 1622-1900After the publication of Thomas West’s highly influential Guide to the Lakes in 1778, walking was considered the proper mode of travel for anyone who wished to partake in a more authentic version of the Lake District. West had recommended walking as the pastime guaranteed to facilitate a long-lasting, spiritual connection with the Lakeland landscape: ‘[w]hoever takes a walk into these scenes,’ he wrote, ‘will return penetrated with a sense of the creator’s power and unsearchable wisdom, in heaping mountains upon mountains, and enthroning rocks upon rocks’. The walk into the mountains is, for West and for many walkers who followed him, a form of pilgrimage. This act of pilgrimage was about the discovery of two things: the landscape and the self. Walking grants the walker access to the hidden life of the mountains. In Nan Shepherd’s memorable phrase, the fell walker ‘walks the flesh transparent’; that is, they erode away the distinctions between self and scene, until the responses of the body to the mountain seem to make the walker part of the landscape. This paper will explore accounts of walking in the Lake District Corpus, a collection of eighty texts about the Lake District published between 1622 and 1900. It will consider how different terms for walking indicated different kinds of pilgrimage. The paper will demonstrate that different terms – including walking, wandering and rambling – were connected with specific locations throughout the Lakeland region and, moreover, that each term indicated distinct imaginative responses to place. Furthermore, it is interested in how using Historical GIS to visualise walking in the literature of the Lake District can enrich our understandings of the walk, the walker and the place in which that activity occurred. It aims to show that using HGIS to map the connections between place and the walking body can uncover hitherto concealed qualities in written accounts of walking in the Lake District. Anna-Leena Toivanen Hotels, Mobilities, and African travellers in Nigerian Diasporic Short Stories: Sefi Atta’s ”Housekeeping” (2010) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ”Transition to Glory” (2003) As Aedín Ní Loingsigh (2009: 2-3) has pointed out, African mobile subjects are only rarely recognised as travellers. This results from the fact that travel is a concept that is often associated with leisure, affluence, and whiteness. African mobilities are more frequently understood in terms of slavery and migration – forms of mobility that seem far removed from such privileged mobilities as business travel or tourism. Moreover, the paradigmatisation of the migrant figure in the field of postcolonial studies has generated a rather reductive understanding of mobility in the postcolonial context. This paper focuses on literary representations of African travels that fall beyond the scope of coerced mobility and migrancy. I analyse two recent Nigerian diasporic short stories, namely Sefi Atta’s “Housekeeping” (2010) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Transition to Glory” (2003). In these texts, the hotel – often conceived as a non-place (Augé 1992), a transfer point, and a place of in-between-ness (Sheller & Urry 2006) – serves as a central setting. Atta’s protagonist, a Nigerian doctor working in the USA, stays in a hotel during her weekend trip to Atlanta. The hotel in Atta’s short story is a chronotope that captures the complexities of a globalised and multicultural society. It serves as a setting for exploring the socio-economic differences between migrants and symbolises the protagonist’s sense of diasporic unbelonging. In Adichie’s short story, the hotel room is a central setting and symbol for an adulterous sugar daddy/girlfriend relationship. It is a space of transit and deviance in contrast to the institutionalised stability of the domestic/conjugal. The hotel is also represented from a touristic perspective during the couple’s holiday trip to London. Both texts remain sceptical about the liberatory potential of the transitory space that the hotel represents, and they articulate a metaphorical sense of longing for home. This paper explores the meanings of the hotel in Atta’s and Adichie’s texts and also looks into the ways in which the concept of mobility motivates and structures the narratives. Teja Varma Pusapati‘Stray Letters on Emigration’: The Promotion of Female Middle-Class Emigration in the Mid-Century Feminist Press. Believing that accurate and detailed information is the one thing needed to inaugurate a very extensive emigration among English women, and that letters describing the voyage to, or the condition of, particular colonies, are likely to be in some respects more satisfactory than information received in books, we again subjoin several letters from different parts of the world, addressed originally to different ladies connected with, or subscribers to this Journal, and whose names we also give as guarantees of the bona fide nature of the communications.‘Stray Letters on Emigration’, English Woman's Journal, 9 (April 1862 ), 109-118 (p.109).In the mid-nineteenth-century, single women in England far outnumbered their male counterparts. Many writers in the Victorian periodical press argued that the social ‘problem’ of ‘excess’ women, who were often rendered destitute for want of a husband, could be effectively solved by shipping such women to the colonies. Women like Mrs. Caroline Chisholm, who in 1849 founded the Family Colonisation Society, facilitated female emigration to Australia and provided critical advice to the British parliament in reviewing the Australian settlement. While Chisholm focussed largely on lower-class women and was particularly keen on ensuring that emigrant women found husbands in Australia, the feminist Maria Rye, who started the Female Middle-Class Emigration Agency in 1862 and contributed regularly to the feminist English Woman’s Journal (1858-64) helped both middle and lower class women find remunerative employment in the colony. As James Hammerton, Mary Poovey and others have shown, debates about female colonial emigration played a critical role in shaping contemporary notions of class, gender and nationhood. Drawing on Jude Piesse’s recent work on the Victorian periodical ‘as an inherently mobile form, which had an unrivalled capacity to register emigration’ (2016), this paper will examine the publication of letters and articles from the colonies in the English Woman’s Journal (1858-64). I will show that by publishing ‘bon? fide’ correspondence from the colonies, feminist periodicals like English Woman’s Journal not only emphasised the credibility of their proposed emigration schemes, but also provided a vital network of communication between feminist activists, would-be emigrants and potential colonial hosts. Occasionally, the journals reproduced private correspondence of emigrants writing back to their families in England. Such letters, are not only presented as a window to the private world of emigrants, but also offered as reassuring proof that emigrant Englishwomen could, despite living in a far flung colony, continue to be in close touch with their loved ones back home. These circulating ‘private’ letters of emigrants, reprinted in the press with the stated consent of the correspondents, calls into question any clear distinction between the private and public spheres, mobility and fixity, and encourages the readers of the feminist press to think of themselves as members of an extensive, yet closely-knit community. Erica WickersonSubjective Spaces in Franz Kafka’s Home-Coming, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival Franz Kafka’s short story Home-Coming (Heimkehr) of 1920, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis (2000) and Shaun Tan’s wordless novel The Arrival (2006) are creations from different perspectives, from different cultural backgrounds, in different languages and in different media. Yet they all explore the theme of departure and arrival, its cultural representations, its political significance and its personal ramifications. This paper will apply the theories of the geographer and space theorist Doreen Massey and those of the philosopher and phenomenologist Edmund Husserl to explore the ways in which these works construct spaces and the ways in which humans – both as characters and as readers – subjectively experience them. Kafka’s Home-Coming is barely a page long and apparently shows a lack of movement; the narrator simply stands on the threshold of his former home and watches and listens to the space beyond the door. Satrapi’s Persepolis is an autobiography written in French about the author’s Iranian childhood leading up to and living through the Islamic Revolution, her move to safety in Vienna and her eventual return to Tehran. Tan’s The Arrival combines realistic illustrations based on photographs with abstract symbolism to depict the story of immigration. The lack of words allows the novel to be both universally applicable by transcending language barriers, and at times indecipherable by creating a new form of visually symbolic language. I will discuss how linguistic and visual constructions of space may produce different phenomenological effects in the reader. We inevitably ‘see’ mimetic spaces that are visually painted for us differently from those that are simply conjured with words. But this paper will question the extent to which the abstract, symbolic visual representations of space and mobility also open up forms of psychic space that allow the reader/viewer to fill in the gaps. Despite biographical echoes and universal applicability, none of these works offers a literal representation of space or movement. All three focus instead on the subjective significance of space, mobility, and the social change that mobility brings. They conjure the greatest significance of space, namely what it means for human experience. ................
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