How aluminum enabled a high-speed, gravity-defying American modernity even as other parts of the world paid the price in environmental damage and political turmoil.Aluminum shaped the twentieth century. It enabled high-speed travel and gravity-defying flight. It was the material of a streamlined aesthetic that came to represent modernity. And it became an essential ingredient in industrial and domestic products that ranged from airplanes and cars to designer chairs...

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our dayWe are in the midst of a global climate crisis and experiencing the extreme challenges of urbanization. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of movement.Sheller shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement. She connects the body, street, city, nation, and planet in ...

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanization.Considering the climate emergency, economic t...

Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of "citizenship from below" to describe the contest between "proper" spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment. While acknowledging the internal contradictio...

In Island Futures Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe. Drawing on fieldwork on postearthquake reconstruction in Haiti, flooding on the Haitian-Dominican border, and recent hurricanes, Sheller shows how ecological vulnerability and the quest for a "just recovery" in the Caribbean emerge from specific transnational political, economic, and cultural dynamics. Because fo...

Many places around the world are being produced, converted, interpreted and made fit for tourist consumption.This fascinating book analyzes tourist performances such as walking, shopping, sunbathing, photographing, eating and clubbing, and studies why, and indeed how, some places become global centres whilst others don’t. Arranged in four distinct parts, Sheller and Urry consider:Performing ParadisePerformances of Global HeritageRemaking Playful Places

From sugar to indentured labourers, tobacco to reggae music, Europe and North America have been relentlessly consuming the Caribbean and its assets for the past five hundred years. In this fascinating book, Mimi Sheller explores this troublesome history, investigating the complex mobilities of producers and consumers, of material and cultural commodities, including:foodstuffs and stimulants - sugar, fruit, coffee and rumhuman bodies - slaves, indentured labourers an...

New forms of transnational mobility and diasporic belonging have become emblematic of a supposed ‘global' condition of uprootedness. Yet much recent theorizing of our so-called ‘postmodern' life emphasizes movement and fluidity without interrogating who and what is ‘on the move'. This original and timely book examines the interdependence of mobility and belonging by considering how homes are formed in relationship to movement. It suggests that movement does not only happen when one leaves ...

In this book leading social science and humanities contributors in the field of mobilities research address the multiple issues generated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermaths. Contributors examine how the pandemic intensified the existing and uneven ways that we move at multiple scales, from the mobilities of viruses to global planetary movements.As the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world, outpacing public health efforts to contain it, many ev...

This book assesses the opportunities and outcomes for shared-action learning, participatory approaches, and university-community partnerships to support climate adaptation and climate justice in the US Caribbean. The authors explore the ways that project-based pedagogies and collaborative research can contribute not only to building climate resilience and social infrastructures, but more broadly to generating new modes of experimental climate creativity knowledge sharing. They investigate ...

Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America brings together scholars and artists across regions, generations, disciplines, and modes of expression to decenter the US-Mexico border as both a site and a concept. Calling for renewed attention to the spaces, identities, and conflicts that remain understudied and excluded from our hemispheric knowledge of forced movement, the volume reveals a wider diversity of migratory realities and considers race, ethnicity, and...

The new ‘mobilities turn’ has become a powerful perspective in social theory. John Urry’s oeuvre has been very influential in the emergence of this new field and has had lasting impacts on many scholars. This collection presents originally commissioned essays from leading scholars in the field who reflect on how Urry’s writing influenced the course of their research and theorizing.This volume gathers contributions in relation to John Urry’s path-breaking work. The new ‘mobilities t...