Academic literature on the topic 'Existential mobility'

Mobility is, of course, a huge subject matter extending from the movement cycles and patterns of the primordial human settlements of the world, the great expeditions and the European re-discovery of the world, to our characteristic bi-petal motion and horizontal gaze, and the mobility implied by countless human modes of livelihood, production and communication. This theme also contains matters such as our embodied mode of experiencing the world through constant motion, the fundamental human right of mobility as specified in the Declaration of Human Rights, and the significance of mobility for human interaction both on cross-cultural as well as social and intimate levels. The significance of human mobility also evokes essential ecological and ethical questions; we have already reached the very limits of unlimited and irresponsible mobility. We should not exclude the limitations in mobility caused by cultural conditions, gender, forced restrictions, economy, and physical incapabilities. I will, however, focus on the dimensions of mobility that are closest to my personal interests as an architect, cultural observer and frequent traveller: the notion and consequences of geographic mobility and, particularly, of motorized and increasingly accelerated movement that is one of the foundational phenomena of our concept and reality of modernity. I am intentionally going to valorize a very narrow strip of the spectrum of human mobility aware of the vastness of issues that I am excluding from my study.

The article argues for an intersubjective understanding of mobility among aspirant migrants in the Gambia. Among other factors, Gambian young men’s desire to reach Europe and other destinations may stem from an experience of dispersal and abandonment in migrant households. Emigration becomes a way of restoring the viability of relationships, in a socioeconomic sense of regenerating ties and flows between migrants and nonmigrants, as well as in an existential-kinetic sense of experiencing others as moving closer to oneself. By highlighting intersubjective mobility, the article contributes to widening the scope of an existential take on movement and stasis. It further revises popular and scholarly views on the role of families and migrants in shaping aspirations to emigrate.

This article attempts to theorise people’s balancing acts between conditions of movement and stasis. Drawing on a radical empirical reading of one critical moment that occurred while conducting ethnographic research among Eritrean unaccompanied minors living in a Swiss educational institution, it thinks through what happens when this equilibrium is thrown out of whack and life’s flow is suddenly experienced as a standstill. By focusing on the experiences of one young man, it explores the importance of education as a vectorial metaphor for moving forward in one’s life. Zooming in on one critical moment in Abel’s life, it sheds light on what happens when hopes of ‘movement-through-education’ clash with the reality of a restrictive asylum system that curtails young refugees’ hopes for forward movement. By showing the dialectical ways mobility and immobility enter into and envelop each other, the article highlights how an existentially oriented ethnography can be utilised as an avenue for theorising migrant im/mobilities.

Abstract This section introduction explores the imaginative dimension of mobility in two West African countries, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Building on literature that highlights the existential dimension of movement and migration, the authors explore three socio-cultural patterns that inform representations of im/mobility: historical continuities and the longue-durée perspective on mobile practices, the association of geographical mobility with social betterment, and the interaction between local aspirations and the imaginary of global modernity. The three individual contributions by Bedert, Enria and Ménard bring out the work of imagination attached to im/mobility both in ‘home’ countries and diaspora communities, and underline the continuity of representations and practices between spaces that are part of specific transnational social fields.

This article explores imagined selfhood, mobility and futurities through creative practice in ethnography. Globalisation allows people with varying socio-economic and geographical backgrounds to imagine themselves with more possibilities. How can creative practice such as improvisation in ethnofictions, storytelling and participatory animation be applied in ethnographic research to explore the imaginary realm of selfhood and expectations on being elsewhere? Drawing on fieldwork on migration from Africa to Europe, Brazilian transgender mobility and British youth in environmental transformation, the article will show how existential immobility inspires production of global horizons through imagination.

Our aim with this article was to explore the experiences of older people who participated in the evidence-based High-Intensity Functional Exercise (HIFE) Program during the first 3 weeks of rehabilitation after hip fracture surgery. Nineteen older people participated in the study. Data were analyzed using systematic text condensation. One overarching theme “Exercise is the key for regaining mobility and a sense of coherence (SOC) in everyday life” emerged from the analysis in addition to these five themes: (a) understanding the existential importance of mobility; (b) maintaining a positive self-image by regaining mobility; (c) regaining one’s old life and independence in everyday living; (d) maintaining interpersonal relationships through mobility; and (e) creating positive emotions by being able to move. The findings highlight the importance of exercise as a strategy for regaining mobility, illustrated by the essential role it played in the participants’ lives after suffering a hip fracture.

Abstract The mobility trope is a key aesthetic feature in Afropolitan fiction and it crystalizes as the act of travelling which has become an important subject-matter in postnationalist African fictions by women such as Chimamanda Adichie, Noviolet Bulawayo or Chika Unigwe as a way of intervention on the debate of the Afropolitan female quest for existential subjectivity in 21st century African fiction. This is against the backdrop of negative essentialism and the exertions of patriarchy evident in the representation of African women’s in 20th century African fiction. Drawing from the foregoing, this paper interrogates Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (Hence OBSS) to demonstrate how the writer deploys mobility trope which manifest as travelling as a signature of the Afropolitan female quest for existential subjectivity. I argue in this paper that, though existing studies on OBSS portray Efe, Sisi, Ama and Joyce as exported commodities in neoliberal sex market, their relocation however opens up a new vista to understanding their motivation and quest for new subjectivity, empowered fluid agency, individual autonomy and translation into Afropolitans. This is within Achille Mbembe’s phenomenological criticism of Afropolitanism and a methology that is based on qualitative content analysis of the text—OBSS. On the long run, the identity which travelling confers on the female characters is fluid, as they represent an African being in a globalized world and a strong sense of cultural mobility.

Ce travail de recherche a pour objectif de mieux comprendre le phénomène migratoire contemporain et son évolution, en adoptant un point de vue microsocial et phénoménologique axé sur les expériences vécues d'un groupe diversifié d'hommes d'origine subsaharienne arrivant pour la première fois en France. Ces individus avaient quitté leur pays d'origine dans l'espoir d'atteindre une mobilité sociale et existentielle qu'ils considéraient comme inaccessible autrement. L'auteur a suivi leurs parcours sociaux et administratifs lors de leur installation à Marseille, en participant sous des différentes manières à leurs expériences et en recueillant leurs témoignages sur les circonstances de leur départ et les expériences qu'ils ont vécues en cours de route.Ces trajectoires de voyage et d'installation mettent en lumière les liens complexes entre la formation des psychologies des acteurs et les forces globales qui structurent leurs contextes d’existence, se manifestant à l'échelle individuelle sous forme de contraintes et d’opportunités qui orientent les choix de conduite. À ce sujet, l'auteur souligne que la décision de rester à Marseille n’a pas été prise de manière définitive dès l’arrivée, mais a été renégociée au jour le jour en fonction des événements qui modifiaient leur situation de vie, et donc leurs perspectives d'avenir.Ce processus d’intégration sociale « par le bas » s’est déroulé à la fois en adaptant le contexte à leurs besoins grâce à des astuces et ajustant progressivement leurs aspirations à la réalité de leur condition. Malgré des situations parfois très contraignantes, ils ont réussi à dégager des espaces d'autodétermination, leur permettant de se sentir acteurs de leur parcours, d'envisager la possibilité de vivre une vie digne, et de spéculer sur le fait qu'ils avaient plus de chances de le faire sur place plutôt qu'ailleurs. De cette manière, en revanche, ces individus se sont progressivement éloignés des objectifs d’avenir qui avaient animé leur projet initial de migration, se rapprochant de celui que la société d'accueil leur avait prescrit en fonction de leur statut, parfois en restant enfermés dans des formes d'inclusion partielle et précaire.Dans ce cadre, la relation d’échange entre les enquêtés et l’enquêteur a joué un rôle important. Tout d’abord, ce dernier leur a fourni des ressources matérielles, des informations et des conseils, ce qui leur a donné plus de marge de manœuvre pour faire face aux imprévus du quotidien. Ensuite, elle a fourni un cadre propice à la co-construction d'un dispositif d'écoute qui a permis aux enquêtés de partager librement leur histoire tout en la revisitant, et donc de mieux se l’approprier. Ainsi, en négociant leur relation avec le passé à travers le récit, ils ont pu l'utiliser comme base pour élaborer de nouveaux projets pour l'avenir, à la fois réalisables à la lumière des contraintes imposées par le contexte actuel, et leur permettant de s'y reconnaître grâce à une continuité biographique reconstruite a posteriori, souvent en s'appuyant sur des métonymies identitaires. En résumé, cette thèse décrit comment ces personnes, bien que confrontées à des circonstances très contraignants, ont réussi à négocier des espaces d’autodétermination qui leur ont permis de garder les rênes de leurs vies, en utilisant ce que la société d'accueil essayait de faire d'eux comme point de départ pour en faire quelque chose de différent
This research aims to better understand the contemporary migratory phenomenon and its evolution by adopting a microsocial and phenomenological perspective focused on the lived experiences of a diverse group of men of Sub-Saharan African origin arriving in France for the first time. These individuals had departed from their home countries with the aspiration of attaining social and existential mobility that they perceived as otherwise impossible to reach. The author followed their social and administrative trajectories during their settlement in Marseille, actively participating in their experiences and collecting their testimonies about the circumstances of their departure and the experiences they had along the way.These travel and settlement paths underscore the intricate connections between the evolution of the actors' psychologies and the global forces shaping their life contexts. These forces materialize at the individual level through constraints and opportunities that mold their decisions. In this regard, the author emphasizes that the decision to stay in Marseille was not definitively determined upon arrival but, rather, was subject to daily renegotiation, influenced by evolving circumstances that impacted their living conditions and, consequently, their prospects and hopes for the future.This process of social integration from the bottom up involved tailoring their environment to their needs through resourcefulness and progressively aligning their aspirations with the realities of their circumstances. Despite facing occasional challenges, they succeeded in creating spheres of self-determination, enabling them to perceive themselves as actors of their destiny, consider the potential for leading dignified lives, and entertain the idea that their odds of achieving this were higher in that location than elsewhere. Conversely, in this process, these individuals gradually moved away from the future goals that had driven their initial migration project, instead aligning with the one prescribed by the host society based on their status, sometimes remaining trapped in forms of partial and precarious inclusion.In this context, the exchange relationship between the interviewees and the researcher played a significant role. Firstly, the researcher provided them with material resources, information, and advice, giving them more room to handle everyday contingencies. Secondly, it provided a conducive framework for co-constructing a listening mechanism that allowed the interviewees to freely share their stories and reinterpret them, facilitating better ownership of their narratives. By negotiating their relationship with the past through storytelling, they could use it as a foundation to develop new future projects that were both achievable in light of the constraints imposed by the current context, and allowed individuals to identify with them through a biographical continuity reconstructed retrospectively, often based on identity metonymies. In summary, this thesis describes how this group of people managed to maintain control over their lives by using what the host society tried to make of them as a starting point to create something different

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada no ISPA – Instituto Universitário para obtenção de grau de Mestre na especialidade de Psicologia Clínica.
Problema: Existem ainda lacunas nas investigações psicológicas que abordam as experiências de vida dos indivíduos de terceira cultura no contexto do nosso mundo atual, cada vez mais globalizado. Objetivo: Este estudo qualitativo pretende compreender a experiência vivida dos indivíduos de terceira cultura numa perspetiva fenomenológica/existencial. Método: Foram realizadas entrevistas qualitativas semiestruturadas, baseadas no método fenomenológico, com 5 participantes com idades compreendidas entre os 18 e os 26 anos, que viverem em dois ou mais países durante um período significativo dos seus anos de desenvolvimento. Resultados: Surgiram os significados psicológicos do impacto psicológico das mudanças, da convivência com a diversidade cultural, da quebra dos relacionamentos interpessoais, da construção do conceito de identidade, da definição de “casa”, do sentimento de pertença, da valorização do viajar e do confronto entre mobilidade e enraizamento. Discussão: Há uma clara conexão entre os significados psicológicos encontrados, que retrata como estes indivíduos percecionam as suas experiências de vida enquanto cresciam, e como influencia as suas vidas adultas no presente.
Problem: There are still gaps in the psychological investigations that address the life experiences of third culture individuals in the context of our current increasingly globalized world. Objective: This qualitative study intends to understand the lived experience of third culture individuals in a phenomenological-existential perspective. Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews, based on the phenomenological method, were conducted with 5 participants with the ages between 18 and 26, living in two or more countries during a significant period of their developmental years. Results: The findings revealed the psychological meanings of the psychological impact of the changes, the coexistence with cultural diversity, the loss of interpersonal relationships, the construction of the concept of identity, the definition of "home", the sense of belonging, the appreciation of travel and the confrontation between mobility and rooting. Discussion: There is a clear connection between the psychological meanings, which portrays how these individuals perceived their life experiences growing up, and how it influences their present adult life.

Rising inequality and widespread poverty, social unrest and polarization, gender and ethnic disparities, declining social mobility, economic fragility, unbalanced growth due to technology and globalization, and existential danger from climate change are urgent global concerns of our day. These issues are intertwined. They therefore require a holistic framework to examine their interplay and bring the various strands together. This book brings together leading academic economists and experts from several international institutions to explain the sources and scale of these challenges. The book summarizes a wide array of empirical evidence and country experiences, lays out practical policy solutions, and devises a comprehensive and unified plan of action for combatting these economic and social disparities. This authoritative book is accessible to policy makers, students, and the general public interested in how to craft a brighter future by building a sustainable, green, and inclusive society in the years ahead.

By virtue of their omnipresence and lived investment in the country, Egyptians are both heavily reliant upon and intrinsic to Kuwait, its citizenry, and its various forms of social, political, and economic production. In this chapter, drawing upon extensive interviews with Egyptians and Kuwaitis, we explore three main questions: How has Egyptian migration to Kuwait changed over time? In what ways do Egyptian migrants and their Kuwaiti hosts perceive and interact with one another against official ideology, and within the time limits placed on migrants’ lives in Kuwait? And what, if any, are the implications of political and socioeconomic instability in Egypt on the wellbeing and migration trajectories of Egyptian migrants in Kuwait? Implicit throughout the chapter is the framing paradox identified by Neha Vora in her study of the Indian diaspora in Dubai: namely, the ways in which Egyptians as impossible citizens suspended in a state of permanent temporariness experience, narrate and negotiate their existence in Kuwait. Lastly, we demonstrate ways in which Egyptians can and do navigate a degree of social and economic mobility in Kuwait, although these negotiations rarely succeed in extending or eroding the prejudices or existential time limits placed on their lives in Kuwait.

Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere proposes a new paradigm for Nordic film studies, as well as for other small national, transnational, and world cinema traditions. This book re-imagines Nordic cinemas as international, cosmopolitan, diasporic, and planet-connected from their beginnings in the early silent period on forward to their present 21st-century dynamics more than a century later. By identifying and engaging with a wide range of unknown, repressed, and overlooked stories (e.g., narratives of movement, mobility, interaction, synthesis, resistance, loss, reclamation, humanistic questing, etc.) inside and outside of established Nordic film traditions, this book introduces a new model of inquiry into a specific Scandinavian cultural lineage and into small nation and pan-regional cinemas more generally. In this way, the book also speaks to a range of traditions in world cinema. Its overarching goal is to breach entrenched structures and to invite more exploratory, rigorous, and unexpected readings. The volume advocates the intellectual and cultural ethos of cinemas of elsewhere, expanding on previous progressive, interpretive traditions such as cinemas of diasporic, exilic, postcolonial, accented, post-industrial, and existential identities. It is therefore not a study of Nordic cinemas comfortably situated within national brackets or self-enclosed borders. Drawing on the specificities, dynamics, and ambitious reach and scope of Scandinavian cinema production, circulation, and influence for over a century, Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere navigates and narrates a parallel, alternative history.

The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life. Infrapolitics thinks of itself as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding. It understands the intense politicity of its gesture while at the same time claiming an enabling distance from politics. It is a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life. It offers a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. This book provides a genealogy of the notion and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life.

What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with discrete sites or dwelling places on earth? In ancient Rome, the notion of a locale’s genius loci signaled recognition of its enchanted, enspirited identity. But in a digitalized America of unprecedented mobility, can place still matter as seed ground for the soul? Such questions had been broached already by “ecocritics” concerned with how place-inflected experience figures in literature and by theologians concerned with “ecotheology” and “ecospirituality.” Yet this book offers a uniquely integrative perspective, informed by a theological phenomenology of place, that takes fuller account of the spiritualities associated with built environments than ecocriticism typically does. Spirits of Place blends theological and cultural analysis with personal reflection while focusing on the multilayered witness presented by American literary texts. Its interpretive readings range across texts by an array of both canonical and lesser-known writers. Along the way, it addresses themes such as the religious implications of localism versus globalism; the diverse spiritualities associated with long-term residency, resettlement, and pilgrimage; what seems to hallow some sites more than others; and how the creative spirit of Imagination figures in place-identified apprehensions of the numinous. This study grants that, whether in Christian or other religious terms, no discrete place matters absolutely. Yet it demonstrates, above all, how and why hallowed geography and the sacramentality of place have mattered throughout our cultural history. The book concludes with a case study of one collegiate experiment in place-making and contemplative learning.

The fictional works of the Chinese writer Xue Yiwei, who migrated to Canada in 2002, can be regarded as a byproduct of cross-border mobility and cultural displacement. This paper examines the relationship between the individual and the metropolis in four short stories from the collection Shenzheners, focusing on the impact of the writer’s transcontinental relocation on his representation of city dwellers and intercultural encounters. This research adopts an interdisciplinary framework, which merges textual analysis with the approaches of Cultural Studies and Literary Urban Studies, and places this theoretical construction within a transnational context. By investigating the multiple narrative forms Xue Yiwei uses to question stereotypical cultural boundaries and to build a bridge between Chinese and global literatures, the connection between his experience of mobility and his hybrid fictional microcosm will be explored.

AbstractThis chapter is about the kinds of inhabitation of the landscape that are made possible by outdoor access rights in Scotland, with reference to walking during the COVID-19 pandemic. Comparisons are also made to the Nordic practice of allemansrätten. The pandemic was a particularly acute example of how political and legal structures can shape the everyday experience of movement, and in some ways also brought to light the ways in which governance is reified and made real through ordinary life. In Scotland, outdoor access rights were severely curtailed during the pandemic, but at the same time they were enacted locally in distinctive ways. The perceived ‘margins’ of the landscape were no longer the remote rural parts of the country, but instead became the previously unthought-about and sometimes unnoticed surroundings in people’s immediate lifeworlds. Margins came much closer to home and the forms of mobility used to access them changed. I use Glick Schiller and Salazar’s concept of ‘regimes of mobilities’ to explore the regulation and surveillance of local mobilities in the pandemic, and Salazar’s distinction of essential and existential mobilities to explore people’s responses. Aesthetic relationships with landscape were also grounded in everyday, close to home movements.

This chapter reviews life stories that the author heard from refugees in Wellington and from Sierra Leoneans in London that resonated with his own destabilized sense of self. It describes the unsettled situation that affected the author's thinking and made him increasingly critical of the Procrustean categories into which academics typically compress and solidify the flux of human experience. It also talks about the author's fieldwork with African migrants in Copenhagen and Amsterdam that made him acutely aware of their ever-changing relationships to the world in which they were struggling to survive and the worlds from whence they came. The chapter explores how Jackson reflected the function of the term “migrants” or “refugees” in media and academic discourse. It looks at the symbolic violence involved in reducing tens of thousands of human beings to an anonymous mass comparable to a migrating herd, a plague, a flood, a pathology, or a problem.

This chapter focuses on migrants’ journeys from their countries of origin to Morocco. The text analyses how phases of mobility and immobility are interdependent parts of the complex migration trajectories of my migrant research subjects. It explores the variety of obstacles that migrants encounter during travel towards Morocco, and the ways in which they continue to negotiate their social locations with respect to mobility along the way. By reviewing the variety of regulatory authorities (market, state and family) that structure their movement, I will show how aspirations and capabilities to migrate are produced and reproduced not only at the point of departure, but also along the way. Thus, rather than transiting through different places, the data shows how migrants’ journeys are best described as “fractured stays” in various places. These stays and the ways in which people travel do not leave them unchanged. Instead, it has a profound impact on themselves and their future migratory project. The migratory experience becomes a way of life which influences every other aspect of their identit

The epilogue revisits the tension between individual and collective strategies for living the good life, situating this discussion within larger debates about mobility futures and mobility justice. Drawing on concepts from recent scholarship in mobilities studies, such as the “mobile commons,” “autonomobility,” and “existential mobility,” it lays out a vision of the “good mobile life.” The good mobile life is an aspiration that focuses less on the individual strategies that prepare children for an uncertain future and more on the collective project of creating a just and sustainable mobility future for all.

One of contemporary society’s acute problem is moral state of its members, which needs a perfecting through permanent education of ethic standards. Art, as other domain, tackles this problem, but from its own view point. It reflects different moral ethic ideals during its development stages, which influence conscience of respective epoch people. In this way, art presents it self in double hypostasis – to reproduce the moral state of human society in a certain historical moment, and to help the speading of ethic ideas that will contribute to its spiritual education and development. The work of art becomes an object of study for the general viewer and requires him to mobilize his intellectual faculty to understand the proposed „message”. Art is the privileged way to remove man from the conflict zone of life, caused by various historical and social factors. Existential drama, expressed through moral suffering, is present in various genres of art with an emphasis on historical, religious composition, etc., but it is also avoided by artists who paint static natures, landscapes, nudes. Artists of the contemporary period, captivated by plastic and non-figurative technological effects, avoid analyzing the current social impact, rediscovering moral and ethical values and reflecting them in his work.