The scene of Willy Wonka maniacally reciting this poem as he and his shipboard companions are whooshed downriver through a tunnel is perhaps the most disturbing thing in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (In a movie that features children getting dispatched in various ways and perhaps-enslaved, orange-skinned migrant laborers, that's saying a lot.) Wonka (Gene Wilder) begins his recitation in a singsong voice but modulates to an ever-greater intensity that reflects his increasing derangement and menace, as frightening images—a chicken being beheaded, a centipede crawling on a human face, a horned lizard eating an insect—flash on the tunnel walls. Visibly and vocally distressed, the people aboard are moving, out of control and at breakneck speed, toward something horrific.

The scene of Willy Wonka maniacally reciting this poem as he and his shipboard companions are whooshed downriver through a tunnel is perhaps the most disturbing thing in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (In a movie that features children getting dispatched in various ways and perhaps-enslaved, orange-skinned migrant laborers, that's saying a lot.) Wonka (Gene Wilder) begins his recitation in a singsong voice but modulates to an ever-greater intensity that reflects his increasing derangement and menace, as frightening images—a chicken being beheaded, a centipede crawling on a human face, a horned lizard eating an insect—flash on the tunnel walls. Visibly and vocally distressed, the people aboard are moving, out of control and at breakneck speed, toward something horrific.

This article investigates the relationship between photography, trams, and the construction of mobilityscapes in Portugal in the early years of the twentieth century. Merging methods and concepts from mobility studies, visual studies, landscapes studies, and history, it analyzes a collection of photographs printed in the Portuguese illustrated press (journals Occidente and Illustração Portugueza) and kept in public archives. This article shows how photography contributed to the naturalization of trams in the Portuguese urban- and mobilityscapes by veiling the disruption caused by its implementation and presenting its daily, safe, and harmonious utilization, while attaching abstract concepts of progress and modernity to the system. It also suggests a political intent behind those photographs, and it encourages further research on mobility with photography as the main source.

The scene of Willy Wonka maniacally reciting this poem as he and his shipboard companions are whooshed downriver through a tunnel is perhaps the most disturbing thing in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (In a movie that features children getting dispatched in various ways and perhaps-enslaved, orange-skinned migrant laborers, that's saying a lot.) Wonka (Gene Wilder) begins his recitation in a singsong voice but modulates to an ever-greater intensity that reflects his increasing derangement and menace, as frightening images—a chicken being beheaded, a centipede crawling on a human face, a horned lizard eating an insect—flash on the tunnel walls. Visibly and vocally distressed, the people aboard are moving, out of control and at breakneck speed, toward something horrific.

This article investigates the relationship between photography, trams, and the construction of mobilityscapes in Portugal in the early years of the twentieth century. Merging methods and concepts from mobility studies, visual studies, landscapes studies, and history, it analyzes a collection of photographs printed in the Portuguese illustrated press (journals Occidente and Illustração Portugueza) and kept in public archives. This article shows how photography contributed to the naturalization of trams in the Portuguese urban- and mobilityscapes by veiling the disruption caused by its implementation and presenting its daily, safe, and harmonious utilization, while attaching abstract concepts of progress and modernity to the system. It also suggests a political intent behind those photographs, and it encourages further research on mobility with photography as the main source.

The article reports on a reflection consisting in thinking of the object and the method of investigation in the same movement: deceleration. The author thus presents a methodological and ethical approach that allows for the study of the network of Italian Cittàslow while analyzing the slowness of the research process: the fieldwork journeys are made by bicycle. Through the feedback of this experience, he highlights issues that are rarely present in the scientific literature, as they are often relegated to the “kitchen of research”: the practical and ecological organization of a survey, the links between knowledge creation, work and travel rhythms, and the pleasure and passion that link the researcher to his object of study.

The scene of Willy Wonka maniacally reciting this poem as he and his shipboard companions are whooshed downriver through a tunnel is perhaps the most disturbing thing in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (In a movie that features children getting dispatched in various ways and perhaps-enslaved, orange-skinned migrant laborers, that's saying a lot.) Wonka (Gene Wilder) begins his recitation in a singsong voice but modulates to an ever-greater intensity that reflects his increasing derangement and menace, as frightening images—a chicken being beheaded, a centipede crawling on a human face, a horned lizard eating an insect—flash on the tunnel walls. Visibly and vocally distressed, the people aboard are moving, out of control and at breakneck speed, toward something horrific.

This article investigates the relationship between photography, trams, and the construction of mobilityscapes in Portugal in the early years of the twentieth century. Merging methods and concepts from mobility studies, visual studies, landscapes studies, and history, it analyzes a collection of photographs printed in the Portuguese illustrated press (journals Occidente and Illustração Portugueza) and kept in public archives. This article shows how photography contributed to the naturalization of trams in the Portuguese urban- and mobilityscapes by veiling the disruption caused by its implementation and presenting its daily, safe, and harmonious utilization, while attaching abstract concepts of progress and modernity to the system. It also suggests a political intent behind those photographs, and it encourages further research on mobility with photography as the main source.

The article reports on a reflection consisting in thinking of the object and the method of investigation in the same movement: deceleration. The author thus presents a methodological and ethical approach that allows for the study of the network of Italian Cittàslow while analyzing the slowness of the research process: the fieldwork journeys are made by bicycle. Through the feedback of this experience, he highlights issues that are rarely present in the scientific literature, as they are often relegated to the “kitchen of research”: the practical and ecological organization of a survey, the links between knowledge creation, work and travel rhythms, and the pleasure and passion that link the researcher to his object of study.

This article investigates fashion as a dynamic medium of cultural mobility, focusing on the role of the Indian diaspora in the circulation of clothing practices, motifs, and aesthetic traditions across borders. Drawing on mobility studies and Arjun Appadurai's concept of “ethnoscapes,” it conceptualizes diasporic fashion as both product and agent of deterritorialized cultural flows. Fashion is approached not merely as material adornment but as a mobile archive carrying histories, identities, and affective attachments from homeland to hostland. Through analysis of selected works by emerging diasporic Indian designers, alongside narratives accompanying their social media representations, the article demonstrates how garments become sites of negotiation between memory and modernity, tradition and adaptation. These designers blend inherited textile vocabularies with global styles, challenging fixed notions of cultural belonging. Ultimately, the article argues that diasporic fashion functions as a conduit of cultural transmission, revealing how mobility reshapes identity and expression in an interconnected world.

The scene of Willy Wonka maniacally reciting this poem as he and his shipboard companions are whooshed downriver through a tunnel is perhaps the most disturbing thing in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (In a movie that features children getting dispatched in various ways and perhaps-enslaved, orange-skinned migrant laborers, that's saying a lot.) Wonka (Gene Wilder) begins his recitation in a singsong voice but modulates to an ever-greater intensity that reflects his increasing derangement and menace, as frightening images—a chicken being beheaded, a centipede crawling on a human face, a horned lizard eating an insect—flash on the tunnel walls. Visibly and vocally distressed, the people aboard are moving, out of control and at breakneck speed, toward something horrific.

This article investigates the relationship between photography, trams, and the construction of mobilityscapes in Portugal in the early years of the twentieth century. Merging methods and concepts from mobility studies, visual studies, landscapes studies, and history, it analyzes a collection of photographs printed in the Portuguese illustrated press (journals Occidente and Illustração Portugueza) and kept in public archives. This article shows how photography contributed to the naturalization of trams in the Portuguese urban- and mobilityscapes by veiling the disruption caused by its implementation and presenting its daily, safe, and harmonious utilization, while attaching abstract concepts of progress and modernity to the system. It also suggests a political intent behind those photographs, and it encourages further research on mobility with photography as the main source.

The article reports on a reflection consisting in thinking of the object and the method of investigation in the same movement: deceleration. The author thus presents a methodological and ethical approach that allows for the study of the network of Italian Cittàslow while analyzing the slowness of the research process: the fieldwork journeys are made by bicycle. Through the feedback of this experience, he highlights issues that are rarely present in the scientific literature, as they are often relegated to the “kitchen of research”: the practical and ecological organization of a survey, the links between knowledge creation, work and travel rhythms, and the pleasure and passion that link the researcher to his object of study.

This article investigates fashion as a dynamic medium of cultural mobility, focusing on the role of the Indian diaspora in the circulation of clothing practices, motifs, and aesthetic traditions across borders. Drawing on mobility studies and Arjun Appadurai's concept of “ethnoscapes,” it conceptualizes diasporic fashion as both product and agent of deterritorialized cultural flows. Fashion is approached not merely as material adornment but as a mobile archive carrying histories, identities, and affective attachments from homeland to hostland. Through analysis of selected works by emerging diasporic Indian designers, alongside narratives accompanying their social media representations, the article demonstrates how garments become sites of negotiation between memory and modernity, tradition and adaptation. These designers blend inherited textile vocabularies with global styles, challenging fixed notions of cultural belonging. Ultimately, the article argues that diasporic fashion functions as a conduit of cultural transmission, revealing how mobility reshapes identity and expression in an interconnected world.

The article identifies the tools that Lee Child's popular Jack Reacher series employs for mobilizing readers emotionally and physically. It first explores how the novels’ thematic focus, mobile vigilante justice in an unjust world, is designed to put readers’ emotions in motion. Second, it proposes that the series’ narrative strategies, prose style, and linguistic-sensory realm create readerly embodied mobility. The fast reading experience becomes analogous to the mobile, able-bodied, and agentive corporeality and sensory attentiveness epitomized by the series’ nomadic protagonist. More broadly, the article proposes that text-based research enhances mobilities studies’ understanding of embodied mobilities and how literary texts may speak of and position mobilities, perform mobilities, and construct agentive readerly emotional and physical mobility.

The scene of Willy Wonka maniacally reciting this poem as he and his shipboard companions are whooshed downriver through a tunnel is perhaps the most disturbing thing in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (In a movie that features children getting dispatched in various ways and perhaps-enslaved, orange-skinned migrant laborers, that's saying a lot.) Wonka (Gene Wilder) begins his recitation in a singsong voice but modulates to an ever-greater intensity that reflects his increasing derangement and menace, as frightening images—a chicken being beheaded, a centipede crawling on a human face, a horned lizard eating an insect—flash on the tunnel walls. Visibly and vocally distressed, the people aboard are moving, out of control and at breakneck speed, toward something horrific.

This article investigates the relationship between photography, trams, and the construction of mobilityscapes in Portugal in the early years of the twentieth century. Merging methods and concepts from mobility studies, visual studies, landscapes studies, and history, it analyzes a collection of photographs printed in the Portuguese illustrated press (journals Occidente and Illustração Portugueza) and kept in public archives. This article shows how photography contributed to the naturalization of trams in the Portuguese urban- and mobilityscapes by veiling the disruption caused by its implementation and presenting its daily, safe, and harmonious utilization, while attaching abstract concepts of progress and modernity to the system. It also suggests a political intent behind those photographs, and it encourages further research on mobility with photography as the main source.

The article reports on a reflection consisting in thinking of the object and the method of investigation in the same movement: deceleration. The author thus presents a methodological and ethical approach that allows for the study of the network of Italian Cittàslow while analyzing the slowness of the research process: the fieldwork journeys are made by bicycle. Through the feedback of this experience, he highlights issues that are rarely present in the scientific literature, as they are often relegated to the “kitchen of research”: the practical and ecological organization of a survey, the links between knowledge creation, work and travel rhythms, and the pleasure and passion that link the researcher to his object of study.

This article investigates fashion as a dynamic medium of cultural mobility, focusing on the role of the Indian diaspora in the circulation of clothing practices, motifs, and aesthetic traditions across borders. Drawing on mobility studies and Arjun Appadurai's concept of “ethnoscapes,” it conceptualizes diasporic fashion as both product and agent of deterritorialized cultural flows. Fashion is approached not merely as material adornment but as a mobile archive carrying histories, identities, and affective attachments from homeland to hostland. Through analysis of selected works by emerging diasporic Indian designers, alongside narratives accompanying their social media representations, the article demonstrates how garments become sites of negotiation between memory and modernity, tradition and adaptation. These designers blend inherited textile vocabularies with global styles, challenging fixed notions of cultural belonging. Ultimately, the article argues that diasporic fashion functions as a conduit of cultural transmission, revealing how mobility reshapes identity and expression in an interconnected world.

The article identifies the tools that Lee Child's popular Jack Reacher series employs for mobilizing readers emotionally and physically. It first explores how the novels’ thematic focus, mobile vigilante justice in an unjust world, is designed to put readers’ emotions in motion. Second, it proposes that the series’ narrative strategies, prose style, and linguistic-sensory realm create readerly embodied mobility. The fast reading experience becomes analogous to the mobile, able-bodied, and agentive corporeality and sensory attentiveness epitomized by the series’ nomadic protagonist. More broadly, the article proposes that text-based research enhances mobilities studies’ understanding of embodied mobilities and how literary texts may speak of and position mobilities, perform mobilities, and construct agentive readerly emotional and physical mobility.

The geography of vehicle exports to Africa is shifting from established North–South circuits of second-hand automobiles to emerging East–South exchanges led by China and India. Unsettling long-standing geopolitical hierarchies, the growing influx of used cars and electric two- and three-wheelers from the Global East is reshaping mobility cultures and infrastructures, regimes of value, and livelihood across the continent. However, this influx risks exacerbating existing, or creating new socio-environmental burdens, related to road traffic crashes, toxic end-of-life vehicles, and electric vehicle batteries. These issues illuminate the tensions of low-carbon transitions globally, extending both access to affordable green mobility technologies and the associated human-environmental hazards. Africa's position within these evolving automotive geographies reveals the spatial and moral asymmetries of global mobility transitions.

The Mary Ann Morris Animal Society (M.A.M.A.S.) is a canine adoption operation that originated with a group of animal lovers in sparsely populated Bamberg County, South Carolina, which, for reasons I will go into below, has found itself perennially awash in stray dogs. Around 2000, the members of this group partnered with the county government to build a permanent animal shelter and develop an adoption pipeline to the populous Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States. The transport wing of the organization, M.A.M.A.S. On The Move, ferries dogs up the Interstate Highway 95 corridor, which begins in Miami, Florida, and runs all the way to Maine's border with Canada. Through adoption websites and the conscientious work of a phalanx of volunteers fanned out over the Eastern Seaboard, these northering rescue dogs find their “forever homes” in and around metropolises such as Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. My wife and I, who live in Baltimore, owe to the coordinated efforts of M.A.M.A.S. rescuers and transporters our dogs Cecil and Cassius, who, although they came from different litters and were adopted a year apart, were each found abandoned along Bamberg County's rural roads.

The Mary Ann Morris Animal Society (M.A.M.A.S.) is a canine adoption operation that originated with a group of animal lovers in sparsely populated Bamberg County, South Carolina, which, for reasons I will go into below, has found itself perennially awash in stray dogs. Around 2000, the members of this group partnered with the county government to build a permanent animal shelter and develop an adoption pipeline to the populous Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States. The transport wing of the organization, M.A.M.A.S. On The Move, ferries dogs up the Interstate Highway 95 corridor, which begins in Miami, Florida, and runs all the way to Maine's border with Canada. Through adoption websites and the conscientious work of a phalanx of volunteers fanned out over the Eastern Seaboard, these northering rescue dogs find their “forever homes” in and around metropolises such as Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. My wife and I, who live in Baltimore, owe to the coordinated efforts of M.A.M.A.S. rescuers and transporters our dogs Cecil and Cassius, who, although they came from different litters and were adopted a year apart, were each found abandoned along Bamberg County's rural roads.

Temporariness, precariousness, and uncertainty feature prominently in late capitalism, manifesting in temporary labor mobility from low-income to high-income countries and heavily burdening the lower migration strata. However, precariousness affects mobile workers unevenly. I advance the concept of a transnationally mobile labor aristocracy to capture the situation of skilled mobile Polish tradesmen who, due to their European nationality and the employability of their skills, gain high motility capital with which to navigate the uncertainty of temporary labor mobility and achieve socioeconomic advancement. Drawing on a 2007–2019 multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Nordic countries, Belgium, and Poland, the article applies an anthropological lens to labor mobility to show how the politically underpinned intersection between what people do and how they move produces stratified mobilities and contributes to the transnational remaking of class.

The Mary Ann Morris Animal Society (M.A.M.A.S.) is a canine adoption operation that originated with a group of animal lovers in sparsely populated Bamberg County, South Carolina, which, for reasons I will go into below, has found itself perennially awash in stray dogs. Around 2000, the members of this group partnered with the county government to build a permanent animal shelter and develop an adoption pipeline to the populous Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States. The transport wing of the organization, M.A.M.A.S. On The Move, ferries dogs up the Interstate Highway 95 corridor, which begins in Miami, Florida, and runs all the way to Maine's border with Canada. Through adoption websites and the conscientious work of a phalanx of volunteers fanned out over the Eastern Seaboard, these northering rescue dogs find their “forever homes” in and around metropolises such as Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. My wife and I, who live in Baltimore, owe to the coordinated efforts of M.A.M.A.S. rescuers and transporters our dogs Cecil and Cassius, who, although they came from different litters and were adopted a year apart, were each found abandoned along Bamberg County's rural roads.

Temporariness, precariousness, and uncertainty feature prominently in late capitalism, manifesting in temporary labor mobility from low-income to high-income countries and heavily burdening the lower migration strata. However, precariousness affects mobile workers unevenly. I advance the concept of a transnationally mobile labor aristocracy to capture the situation of skilled mobile Polish tradesmen who, due to their European nationality and the employability of their skills, gain high motility capital with which to navigate the uncertainty of temporary labor mobility and achieve socioeconomic advancement. Drawing on a 2007–2019 multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Nordic countries, Belgium, and Poland, the article applies an anthropological lens to labor mobility to show how the politically underpinned intersection between what people do and how they move produces stratified mobilities and contributes to the transnational remaking of class.

This article explores dogs’ mobilities in the context of canine adoption and rescue. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of adopting a Romanian dog and on my involvement in dog rescue in Switzerland, it examines how canine adoption is not a linear or purely logistical process but a form of interspecies im/mobility governed by intersecting regimes of mobility and categorization. The article highlights the complex nature of animal rescue routes and the embodied, emotional, and everyday negotiations they entail in the adoption process. It contributes to the growing field of mobility studies by positioning dogs’ im/mobilities as a compelling and emerging area of inquiry.

The Mary Ann Morris Animal Society (M.A.M.A.S.) is a canine adoption operation that originated with a group of animal lovers in sparsely populated Bamberg County, South Carolina, which, for reasons I will go into below, has found itself perennially awash in stray dogs. Around 2000, the members of this group partnered with the county government to build a permanent animal shelter and develop an adoption pipeline to the populous Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States. The transport wing of the organization, M.A.M.A.S. On The Move, ferries dogs up the Interstate Highway 95 corridor, which begins in Miami, Florida, and runs all the way to Maine's border with Canada. Through adoption websites and the conscientious work of a phalanx of volunteers fanned out over the Eastern Seaboard, these northering rescue dogs find their “forever homes” in and around metropolises such as Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. My wife and I, who live in Baltimore, owe to the coordinated efforts of M.A.M.A.S. rescuers and transporters our dogs Cecil and Cassius, who, although they came from different litters and were adopted a year apart, were each found abandoned along Bamberg County's rural roads.

Temporariness, precariousness, and uncertainty feature prominently in late capitalism, manifesting in temporary labor mobility from low-income to high-income countries and heavily burdening the lower migration strata. However, precariousness affects mobile workers unevenly. I advance the concept of a transnationally mobile labor aristocracy to capture the situation of skilled mobile Polish tradesmen who, due to their European nationality and the employability of their skills, gain high motility capital with which to navigate the uncertainty of temporary labor mobility and achieve socioeconomic advancement. Drawing on a 2007–2019 multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Nordic countries, Belgium, and Poland, the article applies an anthropological lens to labor mobility to show how the politically underpinned intersection between what people do and how they move produces stratified mobilities and contributes to the transnational remaking of class.

This article explores dogs’ mobilities in the context of canine adoption and rescue. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of adopting a Romanian dog and on my involvement in dog rescue in Switzerland, it examines how canine adoption is not a linear or purely logistical process but a form of interspecies im/mobility governed by intersecting regimes of mobility and categorization. The article highlights the complex nature of animal rescue routes and the embodied, emotional, and everyday negotiations they entail in the adoption process. It contributes to the growing field of mobility studies by positioning dogs’ im/mobilities as a compelling and emerging area of inquiry.

Research indicates that an increasing number of Vietnamese international students return to Vietnam after graduation, yet migrants’ return decision-making remains understudied. This article draws on eighty-six ethnographic interviews with highly skilled migrants in Vancouver and Paris who have considered or decided against returning to Vietnam, as well as with those who have already returned. Centering on migrants’ aspirations for the “good life” in Vietnam, the study takes a mobility studies approach, moving beyond traditional push–pull migration frameworks to offer a nuanced understanding of return decision-making. It considers not only economic motivations but also social and lifestyle factors, as well as agency and subjectivity shaped by intersecting personal circumstances and social markers such as class and gender.

The Mary Ann Morris Animal Society (M.A.M.A.S.) is a canine adoption operation that originated with a group of animal lovers in sparsely populated Bamberg County, South Carolina, which, for reasons I will go into below, has found itself perennially awash in stray dogs. Around 2000, the members of this group partnered with the county government to build a permanent animal shelter and develop an adoption pipeline to the populous Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States. The transport wing of the organization, M.A.M.A.S. On The Move, ferries dogs up the Interstate Highway 95 corridor, which begins in Miami, Florida, and runs all the way to Maine's border with Canada. Through adoption websites and the conscientious work of a phalanx of volunteers fanned out over the Eastern Seaboard, these northering rescue dogs find their “forever homes” in and around metropolises such as Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. My wife and I, who live in Baltimore, owe to the coordinated efforts of M.A.M.A.S. rescuers and transporters our dogs Cecil and Cassius, who, although they came from different litters and were adopted a year apart, were each found abandoned along Bamberg County's rural roads.

Temporariness, precariousness, and uncertainty feature prominently in late capitalism, manifesting in temporary labor mobility from low-income to high-income countries and heavily burdening the lower migration strata. However, precariousness affects mobile workers unevenly. I advance the concept of a transnationally mobile labor aristocracy to capture the situation of skilled mobile Polish tradesmen who, due to their European nationality and the employability of their skills, gain high motility capital with which to navigate the uncertainty of temporary labor mobility and achieve socioeconomic advancement. Drawing on a 2007–2019 multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Nordic countries, Belgium, and Poland, the article applies an anthropological lens to labor mobility to show how the politically underpinned intersection between what people do and how they move produces stratified mobilities and contributes to the transnational remaking of class.

This article explores dogs’ mobilities in the context of canine adoption and rescue. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of adopting a Romanian dog and on my involvement in dog rescue in Switzerland, it examines how canine adoption is not a linear or purely logistical process but a form of interspecies im/mobility governed by intersecting regimes of mobility and categorization. The article highlights the complex nature of animal rescue routes and the embodied, emotional, and everyday negotiations they entail in the adoption process. It contributes to the growing field of mobility studies by positioning dogs’ im/mobilities as a compelling and emerging area of inquiry.

Research indicates that an increasing number of Vietnamese international students return to Vietnam after graduation, yet migrants’ return decision-making remains understudied. This article draws on eighty-six ethnographic interviews with highly skilled migrants in Vancouver and Paris who have considered or decided against returning to Vietnam, as well as with those who have already returned. Centering on migrants’ aspirations for the “good life” in Vietnam, the study takes a mobility studies approach, moving beyond traditional push–pull migration frameworks to offer a nuanced understanding of return decision-making. It considers not only economic motivations but also social and lifestyle factors, as well as agency and subjectivity shaped by intersecting personal circumstances and social markers such as class and gender.

This article repositions digital nomads not as stateless figures of freedom but as central actors in evolving regimes of mobility governance. Moving beyond the lifestyle framing, we propose two lines of inquiry. First, we examine how race, class, and passport privilege shape differentiated access to mobility infrastructures co-produced by states and platforms. Second, we examine how nomads navigate and produce networked digital enclaves and cloud states—topological formations where territory is reconstituted through platforms, co-living hubs, and e-residency regimes. The article calls for scholarship that treats nomads not as exceptions to state power but as actors in its reconfiguration, where motion itself becomes a site of governance. By bridging political geography, mobility studies, and critical migration scholarship, this agenda seeks to theorize sovereignty beyond fixed borders and nomadism beyond neoliberal individualism.

The Mary Ann Morris Animal Society (M.A.M.A.S.) is a canine adoption operation that originated with a group of animal lovers in sparsely populated Bamberg County, South Carolina, which, for reasons I will go into below, has found itself perennially awash in stray dogs. Around 2000, the members of this group partnered with the county government to build a permanent animal shelter and develop an adoption pipeline to the populous Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States. The transport wing of the organization, M.A.M.A.S. On The Move, ferries dogs up the Interstate Highway 95 corridor, which begins in Miami, Florida, and runs all the way to Maine's border with Canada. Through adoption websites and the conscientious work of a phalanx of volunteers fanned out over the Eastern Seaboard, these northering rescue dogs find their “forever homes” in and around metropolises such as Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. My wife and I, who live in Baltimore, owe to the coordinated efforts of M.A.M.A.S. rescuers and transporters our dogs Cecil and Cassius, who, although they came from different litters and were adopted a year apart, were each found abandoned along Bamberg County's rural roads.

Temporariness, precariousness, and uncertainty feature prominently in late capitalism, manifesting in temporary labor mobility from low-income to high-income countries and heavily burdening the lower migration strata. However, precariousness affects mobile workers unevenly. I advance the concept of a transnationally mobile labor aristocracy to capture the situation of skilled mobile Polish tradesmen who, due to their European nationality and the employability of their skills, gain high motility capital with which to navigate the uncertainty of temporary labor mobility and achieve socioeconomic advancement. Drawing on a 2007–2019 multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Nordic countries, Belgium, and Poland, the article applies an anthropological lens to labor mobility to show how the politically underpinned intersection between what people do and how they move produces stratified mobilities and contributes to the transnational remaking of class.

This article explores dogs’ mobilities in the context of canine adoption and rescue. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of adopting a Romanian dog and on my involvement in dog rescue in Switzerland, it examines how canine adoption is not a linear or purely logistical process but a form of interspecies im/mobility governed by intersecting regimes of mobility and categorization. The article highlights the complex nature of animal rescue routes and the embodied, emotional, and everyday negotiations they entail in the adoption process. It contributes to the growing field of mobility studies by positioning dogs’ im/mobilities as a compelling and emerging area of inquiry.

Research indicates that an increasing number of Vietnamese international students return to Vietnam after graduation, yet migrants’ return decision-making remains understudied. This article draws on eighty-six ethnographic interviews with highly skilled migrants in Vancouver and Paris who have considered or decided against returning to Vietnam, as well as with those who have already returned. Centering on migrants’ aspirations for the “good life” in Vietnam, the study takes a mobility studies approach, moving beyond traditional push–pull migration frameworks to offer a nuanced understanding of return decision-making. It considers not only economic motivations but also social and lifestyle factors, as well as agency and subjectivity shaped by intersecting personal circumstances and social markers such as class and gender.

This article repositions digital nomads not as stateless figures of freedom but as central actors in evolving regimes of mobility governance. Moving beyond the lifestyle framing, we propose two lines of inquiry. First, we examine how race, class, and passport privilege shape differentiated access to mobility infrastructures co-produced by states and platforms. Second, we examine how nomads navigate and produce networked digital enclaves and cloud states—topological formations where territory is reconstituted through platforms, co-living hubs, and e-residency regimes. The article calls for scholarship that treats nomads not as exceptions to state power but as actors in its reconfiguration, where motion itself becomes a site of governance. By bridging political geography, mobility studies, and critical migration scholarship, this agenda seeks to theorize sovereignty beyond fixed borders and nomadism beyond neoliberal individualism.

Shortly after the American Civil War (1861–1865), a train snaked through the rolling mountains of Tennessee. As the locomotive thundered across the hills and valleys, a young girl sat alone in the finest car on the train. She was polite and impeccably dressed, but that did not stop a passenger from demanding that she be removed to the smoking car—a filthy cabin dominated by men of all sorts. She may have had a first-class ticket; however, her Black skin nearly relegated her to a second-class ride. The girl's predicament was resolved only after her hot-tempered father returned and threatened to shoot the conductor if they attempted to move his daughter to the smoking car. That little girl was Mary “Mollie” Church, later known as Mary Church Terrell, one of the future leaders of the NAACP. Her father was the influential Robert Church, perhaps the first African American millionaire from the South.

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

The association of morality with mobility transitions is a little investigated phenomenon, but it offers a particularly timely direction for scholarship located in Southern urban contexts. In this brief introduction, I begin by emphasizing the particular import of the terms of urban, transition, and morality guiding this special issue by decentering their implicit Eurocentrism. Building upon this base, I draw upon critical mobility theory (and the diverse interpretations of the field that contributors to this special issue have elaborated on) to examine what moralities and normativities accompany transitional urges in Southern urban contexts. I do so by employing three axes: spatio-temporal embeddedness that decenters Eurocentrism, questions of power and inequality, and shifts in valuations arising through the reimagining of mobilities rooted in lived experiences.

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

The association of morality with mobility transitions is a little investigated phenomenon, but it offers a particularly timely direction for scholarship located in Southern urban contexts. In this brief introduction, I begin by emphasizing the particular import of the terms of urban, transition, and morality guiding this special issue by decentering their implicit Eurocentrism. Building upon this base, I draw upon critical mobility theory (and the diverse interpretations of the field that contributors to this special issue have elaborated on) to examine what moralities and normativities accompany transitional urges in Southern urban contexts. I do so by employing three axes: spatio-temporal embeddedness that decenters Eurocentrism, questions of power and inequality, and shifts in valuations arising through the reimagining of mobilities rooted in lived experiences.

Various regions in the Global South have embraced the call to transition to low carbon mobilities, often accompanied by promises of sociotechnical solutions that aim to better existing mobility conditions. Building upon the work on decolonizing transitions research, this article takes the case of the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program in the Philippines—which aims to phase out old paratransit vehicles called jeepneys—to understand the implicit embedding of moral values based on Western narratives that drive such programs. Based on fieldwork with jeepney users in Metro Manila, the article argues that the casting of the program as “better” and “modern” advances a particular vision of transport and development, while obscuring other perspectives on the importance of jeepneys for the everyday mobilities of marginalized groups.

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

The association of morality with mobility transitions is a little investigated phenomenon, but it offers a particularly timely direction for scholarship located in Southern urban contexts. In this brief introduction, I begin by emphasizing the particular import of the terms of urban, transition, and morality guiding this special issue by decentering their implicit Eurocentrism. Building upon this base, I draw upon critical mobility theory (and the diverse interpretations of the field that contributors to this special issue have elaborated on) to examine what moralities and normativities accompany transitional urges in Southern urban contexts. I do so by employing three axes: spatio-temporal embeddedness that decenters Eurocentrism, questions of power and inequality, and shifts in valuations arising through the reimagining of mobilities rooted in lived experiences.

Various regions in the Global South have embraced the call to transition to low carbon mobilities, often accompanied by promises of sociotechnical solutions that aim to better existing mobility conditions. Building upon the work on decolonizing transitions research, this article takes the case of the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program in the Philippines—which aims to phase out old paratransit vehicles called jeepneys—to understand the implicit embedding of moral values based on Western narratives that drive such programs. Based on fieldwork with jeepney users in Metro Manila, the article argues that the casting of the program as “better” and “modern” advances a particular vision of transport and development, while obscuring other perspectives on the importance of jeepneys for the everyday mobilities of marginalized groups.

In this article we argue for attention to the everyday ethics of mobilities transitions, demonstrated through the example of possible everyday futures in a site of South–North encounter. Dominant transition narratives seek to leverage changes in mobility systems within calculated timescales by orchestrating diverse actors through technologically solutionist automated and electric mobility interventions. We reframe mobilities transitions through futures anthropology, to investigate how people, other species, environment, and tech- nologies configure in continually emergent, indeterminate, and unquantifiable or unmeasurable futures. We draw on design ethnography research undertaken in a multicultural and multispecies university precinct in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, to demonstrate how everyday ethics participate in, complicate, and offer new insight for possible future mobilities transitions.

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

The association of morality with mobility transitions is a little investigated phenomenon, but it offers a particularly timely direction for scholarship located in Southern urban contexts. In this brief introduction, I begin by emphasizing the particular import of the terms of urban, transition, and morality guiding this special issue by decentering their implicit Eurocentrism. Building upon this base, I draw upon critical mobility theory (and the diverse interpretations of the field that contributors to this special issue have elaborated on) to examine what moralities and normativities accompany transitional urges in Southern urban contexts. I do so by employing three axes: spatio-temporal embeddedness that decenters Eurocentrism, questions of power and inequality, and shifts in valuations arising through the reimagining of mobilities rooted in lived experiences.

Various regions in the Global South have embraced the call to transition to low carbon mobilities, often accompanied by promises of sociotechnical solutions that aim to better existing mobility conditions. Building upon the work on decolonizing transitions research, this article takes the case of the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program in the Philippines—which aims to phase out old paratransit vehicles called jeepneys—to understand the implicit embedding of moral values based on Western narratives that drive such programs. Based on fieldwork with jeepney users in Metro Manila, the article argues that the casting of the program as “better” and “modern” advances a particular vision of transport and development, while obscuring other perspectives on the importance of jeepneys for the everyday mobilities of marginalized groups.

In this article we argue for attention to the everyday ethics of mobilities transitions, demonstrated through the example of possible everyday futures in a site of South–North encounter. Dominant transition narratives seek to leverage changes in mobility systems within calculated timescales by orchestrating diverse actors through technologically solutionist automated and electric mobility interventions. We reframe mobilities transitions through futures anthropology, to investigate how people, other species, environment, and tech- nologies configure in continually emergent, indeterminate, and unquantifiable or unmeasurable futures. We draw on design ethnography research undertaken in a multicultural and multispecies university precinct in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, to demonstrate how everyday ethics participate in, complicate, and offer new insight for possible future mobilities transitions.

This article examines how young Muslim soccer players in South Delhi navigate spatial segregation and infrastructural exclusion through everyday sporting practices. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how soccer becomes a site for negotiating moral legitimacy and limited urban mobility in neighborhoods like Meerabh Bagh. Drawing on theories of neoliberal governance, political society, and edge politics, the article argues that soccer fields function as “zones of transition” where marginality is both reproduced and contested. NGOs enable movement but also reinforce symbolic boundaries. In this context, sport is not merely recreational, it is political. Soccer becomes a method through which marginalized youth assert visibility, claim space, and reimagine their relationship to the city.

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

The association of morality with mobility transitions is a little investigated phenomenon, but it offers a particularly timely direction for scholarship located in Southern urban contexts. In this brief introduction, I begin by emphasizing the particular import of the terms of urban, transition, and morality guiding this special issue by decentering their implicit Eurocentrism. Building upon this base, I draw upon critical mobility theory (and the diverse interpretations of the field that contributors to this special issue have elaborated on) to examine what moralities and normativities accompany transitional urges in Southern urban contexts. I do so by employing three axes: spatio-temporal embeddedness that decenters Eurocentrism, questions of power and inequality, and shifts in valuations arising through the reimagining of mobilities rooted in lived experiences.

Various regions in the Global South have embraced the call to transition to low carbon mobilities, often accompanied by promises of sociotechnical solutions that aim to better existing mobility conditions. Building upon the work on decolonizing transitions research, this article takes the case of the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program in the Philippines—which aims to phase out old paratransit vehicles called jeepneys—to understand the implicit embedding of moral values based on Western narratives that drive such programs. Based on fieldwork with jeepney users in Metro Manila, the article argues that the casting of the program as “better” and “modern” advances a particular vision of transport and development, while obscuring other perspectives on the importance of jeepneys for the everyday mobilities of marginalized groups.

In this article we argue for attention to the everyday ethics of mobilities transitions, demonstrated through the example of possible everyday futures in a site of South–North encounter. Dominant transition narratives seek to leverage changes in mobility systems within calculated timescales by orchestrating diverse actors through technologically solutionist automated and electric mobility interventions. We reframe mobilities transitions through futures anthropology, to investigate how people, other species, environment, and tech- nologies configure in continually emergent, indeterminate, and unquantifiable or unmeasurable futures. We draw on design ethnography research undertaken in a multicultural and multispecies university precinct in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, to demonstrate how everyday ethics participate in, complicate, and offer new insight for possible future mobilities transitions.

This article examines how young Muslim soccer players in South Delhi navigate spatial segregation and infrastructural exclusion through everyday sporting practices. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how soccer becomes a site for negotiating moral legitimacy and limited urban mobility in neighborhoods like Meerabh Bagh. Drawing on theories of neoliberal governance, political society, and edge politics, the article argues that soccer fields function as “zones of transition” where marginality is both reproduced and contested. NGOs enable movement but also reinforce symbolic boundaries. In this context, sport is not merely recreational, it is political. Soccer becomes a method through which marginalized youth assert visibility, claim space, and reimagine their relationship to the city.

Bengaluru, a metropolitan city in India, struggles with high levels of traffic congestion caused by enormous increase in personal automobiles. To tackle congestion, Bengaluru has designed streets restricting automotive usage and with dedicated spaces for walking and cycling to facilitate sustainable transition. These design efforts are heralded as transformative initiatives to solve congestion. However, through a longue durée analysis, this article reveals that congestion has been consistently mobilized to intervene in the streets of Bengaluru. We argue that historically, in Bengaluru, congestion was the rationale for reimagining streets and has been the leitmotif in transitional impulses and the ongoing colonization of Indian streets. We conclude by considering what it takes to decolonize and make sovereign the transition in streets in Bengaluru and in India.

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

The association of morality with mobility transitions is a little investigated phenomenon, but it offers a particularly timely direction for scholarship located in Southern urban contexts. In this brief introduction, I begin by emphasizing the particular import of the terms of urban, transition, and morality guiding this special issue by decentering their implicit Eurocentrism. Building upon this base, I draw upon critical mobility theory (and the diverse interpretations of the field that contributors to this special issue have elaborated on) to examine what moralities and normativities accompany transitional urges in Southern urban contexts. I do so by employing three axes: spatio-temporal embeddedness that decenters Eurocentrism, questions of power and inequality, and shifts in valuations arising through the reimagining of mobilities rooted in lived experiences.

Various regions in the Global South have embraced the call to transition to low carbon mobilities, often accompanied by promises of sociotechnical solutions that aim to better existing mobility conditions. Building upon the work on decolonizing transitions research, this article takes the case of the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program in the Philippines—which aims to phase out old paratransit vehicles called jeepneys—to understand the implicit embedding of moral values based on Western narratives that drive such programs. Based on fieldwork with jeepney users in Metro Manila, the article argues that the casting of the program as “better” and “modern” advances a particular vision of transport and development, while obscuring other perspectives on the importance of jeepneys for the everyday mobilities of marginalized groups.

In this article we argue for attention to the everyday ethics of mobilities transitions, demonstrated through the example of possible everyday futures in a site of South–North encounter. Dominant transition narratives seek to leverage changes in mobility systems within calculated timescales by orchestrating diverse actors through technologically solutionist automated and electric mobility interventions. We reframe mobilities transitions through futures anthropology, to investigate how people, other species, environment, and tech- nologies configure in continually emergent, indeterminate, and unquantifiable or unmeasurable futures. We draw on design ethnography research undertaken in a multicultural and multispecies university precinct in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, to demonstrate how everyday ethics participate in, complicate, and offer new insight for possible future mobilities transitions.

This article examines how young Muslim soccer players in South Delhi navigate spatial segregation and infrastructural exclusion through everyday sporting practices. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how soccer becomes a site for negotiating moral legitimacy and limited urban mobility in neighborhoods like Meerabh Bagh. Drawing on theories of neoliberal governance, political society, and edge politics, the article argues that soccer fields function as “zones of transition” where marginality is both reproduced and contested. NGOs enable movement but also reinforce symbolic boundaries. In this context, sport is not merely recreational, it is political. Soccer becomes a method through which marginalized youth assert visibility, claim space, and reimagine their relationship to the city.

Bengaluru, a metropolitan city in India, struggles with high levels of traffic congestion caused by enormous increase in personal automobiles. To tackle congestion, Bengaluru has designed streets restricting automotive usage and with dedicated spaces for walking and cycling to facilitate sustainable transition. These design efforts are heralded as transformative initiatives to solve congestion. However, through a longue durée analysis, this article reveals that congestion has been consistently mobilized to intervene in the streets of Bengaluru. We argue that historically, in Bengaluru, congestion was the rationale for reimagining streets and has been the leitmotif in transitional impulses and the ongoing colonization of Indian streets. We conclude by considering what it takes to decolonize and make sovereign the transition in streets in Bengaluru and in India.

Tiitu Takalo and Tiina Männistö-Funk, Polkimilla: Nyt, ennen ja tulevaisuudessa (Tampere: Suuri Kurpitsa, 2023), 168 pp., €28 (paperback).

Safdar Ahmed, Still Alive: Graphic Reportage from Australia's Immigration Detention System (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books Inc., 2022), 222 pp., $30.00 (hardback).

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.

Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.

Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.

The multi-fold developments in science and technology have led to enhanced mobility among people in the present times. The desire to have a better life impels migration to far off lands even when it involves facing alien, different cultures, and unknown people. The struggle to adjust and adapt to the new surroundings takes them along various paths filled with numerous challenges. This leads to the creation of a space for them that is transcultural, imbibing the characteristics of more than one culture and often perceived as embodying the promise of an escape from the existing complexities, constraints, and norms governing national and communal identities. However, cross-cultural conflicts as well as those due to the implications of gender have to be negotiated before one can hope to achieve a coveted kind of existence. Additionally, the caste factor is a major construct in the formation of identity particularly in the Indian cultural context where it is deeply embedded in the social set-up and determines the social norms. Its implications are vast and it continues to impact identity even as people migrate to the new land. Sunjeev Sahota in The Year of the Runaways (2015) provides a realistic peep into the struggles identity undergoes on venturing into the transcultural spaces. The article explores Sahota's portrayal of issues such as factors impacting migration, negotiations of identity, caste, and gender conflicts in the transcultural space even as one strives to make a home of the outside world.

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.

Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.

The multi-fold developments in science and technology have led to enhanced mobility among people in the present times. The desire to have a better life impels migration to far off lands even when it involves facing alien, different cultures, and unknown people. The struggle to adjust and adapt to the new surroundings takes them along various paths filled with numerous challenges. This leads to the creation of a space for them that is transcultural, imbibing the characteristics of more than one culture and often perceived as embodying the promise of an escape from the existing complexities, constraints, and norms governing national and communal identities. However, cross-cultural conflicts as well as those due to the implications of gender have to be negotiated before one can hope to achieve a coveted kind of existence. Additionally, the caste factor is a major construct in the formation of identity particularly in the Indian cultural context where it is deeply embedded in the social set-up and determines the social norms. Its implications are vast and it continues to impact identity even as people migrate to the new land. Sunjeev Sahota in The Year of the Runaways (2015) provides a realistic peep into the struggles identity undergoes on venturing into the transcultural spaces. The article explores Sahota's portrayal of issues such as factors impacting migration, negotiations of identity, caste, and gender conflicts in the transcultural space even as one strives to make a home of the outside world.

In recent debates around the concept of technocracy, the issues of “technology” and “skill” (tekhne) and “power” (kratos) have been absent, even though the combination of these words defines the term. To address the issue of tekhne, I draw on Thorsten Veblen's theoretical justification of the epistemic differences between engineers and financiers. For kratos, I invoke the anarchist critique of authority. The theoretical argument presented in this article claims that epistemic superiority lies in the procedures of knowledge production. Epistemological issues taken as algorithms in the nexus with bureaucratic mechanisms of execution demand a specific type of knowledge. Empirical observations from the reopening of a trolleybus system in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, show that local engineers have formulated this agenda and that the Czech tradition of electrical engineering in the transport sector plays a crucial role. In turn, the existing procedures for the execution of transportation-related agendas allow engineers to realize their vision for decarbonizing a diesel bus fleet.

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.

Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.

The multi-fold developments in science and technology have led to enhanced mobility among people in the present times. The desire to have a better life impels migration to far off lands even when it involves facing alien, different cultures, and unknown people. The struggle to adjust and adapt to the new surroundings takes them along various paths filled with numerous challenges. This leads to the creation of a space for them that is transcultural, imbibing the characteristics of more than one culture and often perceived as embodying the promise of an escape from the existing complexities, constraints, and norms governing national and communal identities. However, cross-cultural conflicts as well as those due to the implications of gender have to be negotiated before one can hope to achieve a coveted kind of existence. Additionally, the caste factor is a major construct in the formation of identity particularly in the Indian cultural context where it is deeply embedded in the social set-up and determines the social norms. Its implications are vast and it continues to impact identity even as people migrate to the new land. Sunjeev Sahota in The Year of the Runaways (2015) provides a realistic peep into the struggles identity undergoes on venturing into the transcultural spaces. The article explores Sahota's portrayal of issues such as factors impacting migration, negotiations of identity, caste, and gender conflicts in the transcultural space even as one strives to make a home of the outside world.

In recent debates around the concept of technocracy, the issues of “technology” and “skill” (tekhne) and “power” (kratos) have been absent, even though the combination of these words defines the term. To address the issue of tekhne, I draw on Thorsten Veblen's theoretical justification of the epistemic differences between engineers and financiers. For kratos, I invoke the anarchist critique of authority. The theoretical argument presented in this article claims that epistemic superiority lies in the procedures of knowledge production. Epistemological issues taken as algorithms in the nexus with bureaucratic mechanisms of execution demand a specific type of knowledge. Empirical observations from the reopening of a trolleybus system in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, show that local engineers have formulated this agenda and that the Czech tradition of electrical engineering in the transport sector plays a crucial role. In turn, the existing procedures for the execution of transportation-related agendas allow engineers to realize their vision for decarbonizing a diesel bus fleet.

Diao, Ying. Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland: Media, Mobility, and Christianity at the Margins. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2023.

Kielman, Adam. Sonic Mobilities: Producing Worlds in Southern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.

Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.

The multi-fold developments in science and technology have led to enhanced mobility among people in the present times. The desire to have a better life impels migration to far off lands even when it involves facing alien, different cultures, and unknown people. The struggle to adjust and adapt to the new surroundings takes them along various paths filled with numerous challenges. This leads to the creation of a space for them that is transcultural, imbibing the characteristics of more than one culture and often perceived as embodying the promise of an escape from the existing complexities, constraints, and norms governing national and communal identities. However, cross-cultural conflicts as well as those due to the implications of gender have to be negotiated before one can hope to achieve a coveted kind of existence. Additionally, the caste factor is a major construct in the formation of identity particularly in the Indian cultural context where it is deeply embedded in the social set-up and determines the social norms. Its implications are vast and it continues to impact identity even as people migrate to the new land. Sunjeev Sahota in The Year of the Runaways (2015) provides a realistic peep into the struggles identity undergoes on venturing into the transcultural spaces. The article explores Sahota's portrayal of issues such as factors impacting migration, negotiations of identity, caste, and gender conflicts in the transcultural space even as one strives to make a home of the outside world.

In recent debates around the concept of technocracy, the issues of “technology” and “skill” (tekhne) and “power” (kratos) have been absent, even though the combination of these words defines the term. To address the issue of tekhne, I draw on Thorsten Veblen's theoretical justification of the epistemic differences between engineers and financiers. For kratos, I invoke the anarchist critique of authority. The theoretical argument presented in this article claims that epistemic superiority lies in the procedures of knowledge production. Epistemological issues taken as algorithms in the nexus with bureaucratic mechanisms of execution demand a specific type of knowledge. Empirical observations from the reopening of a trolleybus system in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, show that local engineers have formulated this agenda and that the Czech tradition of electrical engineering in the transport sector plays a crucial role. In turn, the existing procedures for the execution of transportation-related agendas allow engineers to realize their vision for decarbonizing a diesel bus fleet.

Diao, Ying. Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland: Media, Mobility, and Christianity at the Margins. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2023.

Kielman, Adam. Sonic Mobilities: Producing Worlds in Southern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking (London: Windmill Books, 2017), 308 pp., €13 (paperback).

Chris Abani, GraceLand (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 321 pp., $18.08 (hardcover).

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.

Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.

The multi-fold developments in science and technology have led to enhanced mobility among people in the present times. The desire to have a better life impels migration to far off lands even when it involves facing alien, different cultures, and unknown people. The struggle to adjust and adapt to the new surroundings takes them along various paths filled with numerous challenges. This leads to the creation of a space for them that is transcultural, imbibing the characteristics of more than one culture and often perceived as embodying the promise of an escape from the existing complexities, constraints, and norms governing national and communal identities. However, cross-cultural conflicts as well as those due to the implications of gender have to be negotiated before one can hope to achieve a coveted kind of existence. Additionally, the caste factor is a major construct in the formation of identity particularly in the Indian cultural context where it is deeply embedded in the social set-up and determines the social norms. Its implications are vast and it continues to impact identity even as people migrate to the new land. Sunjeev Sahota in The Year of the Runaways (2015) provides a realistic peep into the struggles identity undergoes on venturing into the transcultural spaces. The article explores Sahota's portrayal of issues such as factors impacting migration, negotiations of identity, caste, and gender conflicts in the transcultural space even as one strives to make a home of the outside world.

In recent debates around the concept of technocracy, the issues of “technology” and “skill” (tekhne) and “power” (kratos) have been absent, even though the combination of these words defines the term. To address the issue of tekhne, I draw on Thorsten Veblen's theoretical justification of the epistemic differences between engineers and financiers. For kratos, I invoke the anarchist critique of authority. The theoretical argument presented in this article claims that epistemic superiority lies in the procedures of knowledge production. Epistemological issues taken as algorithms in the nexus with bureaucratic mechanisms of execution demand a specific type of knowledge. Empirical observations from the reopening of a trolleybus system in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, show that local engineers have formulated this agenda and that the Czech tradition of electrical engineering in the transport sector plays a crucial role. In turn, the existing procedures for the execution of transportation-related agendas allow engineers to realize their vision for decarbonizing a diesel bus fleet.

Diao, Ying. Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland: Media, Mobility, and Christianity at the Margins. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2023.

Kielman, Adam. Sonic Mobilities: Producing Worlds in Southern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking (London: Windmill Books, 2017), 308 pp., €13 (paperback).

Chris Abani, GraceLand (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 321 pp., $18.08 (hardcover).

Civility and etiquette underpin how we are expected to move, where the mobile subject—particularly in transit mobilities—is conditioned and expected to perform in certain manners. In this article, I consider civility and etiquette as more than fixed codes of conduct but a contested and situated process that is both infrastructurally mediated and affectively charged. In the context of transit mobilities, etiquette is closely entangled with not only the ways mobile subject interacts with the infrastructures of mobilities but also the bodily and affective experiences of mobilities. Drawing on the intersecting conceptual lenses of affect and infrastructure, I seek to rethink civility and etiquette in relation to the politics of the body, investigating how socio-cultural norms of mobility are materialized or transgressed at the level of the body. Moreover, I argue that attention to transgression is crucial to uncovering the power dynamics that underlie and construct the norms of civility in transit, revealing an uneven geography of bodily comportment as well as a politics of mobility across intersecting social differences.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

A body in motion, said Isaac Newton, will stay in motion; and so, too, will a body at rest stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by some external force. A human body is such an object, or rather, a system of articulated tissues that are set in motion and stilled by various internal (electrical signals from the brain, chemical reactions in the muscles) and external (gravity, heat, wind, pies thrown in one's face, etc.) forces.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

A body in motion, said Isaac Newton, will stay in motion; and so, too, will a body at rest stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by some external force. A human body is such an object, or rather, a system of articulated tissues that are set in motion and stilled by various internal (electrical signals from the brain, chemical reactions in the muscles) and external (gravity, heat, wind, pies thrown in one's face, etc.) forces.

This article offers an ethnographic account of Bengaluru, a city in southern India, marked for its crippling urban infrastructures, frequent traffic jams, and burgeoning IT economy. The article asks if there's a relationship between how one labors inside glass enclaves and the congestion experienced outside on the road. In trying to answer this question, it interweaves three situations of “rooming,” “switching,” and “ordering” traversed by IT workers on a daily basis. These situations foreground how the everyday dispositions of bodies are consistently negotiating with im/mobilities in how one passes through life and labor, which, in turn, assembles the city, or makes it happen—as an event—in a particular way.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

A body in motion, said Isaac Newton, will stay in motion; and so, too, will a body at rest stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by some external force. A human body is such an object, or rather, a system of articulated tissues that are set in motion and stilled by various internal (electrical signals from the brain, chemical reactions in the muscles) and external (gravity, heat, wind, pies thrown in one's face, etc.) forces.

This article offers an ethnographic account of Bengaluru, a city in southern India, marked for its crippling urban infrastructures, frequent traffic jams, and burgeoning IT economy. The article asks if there's a relationship between how one labors inside glass enclaves and the congestion experienced outside on the road. In trying to answer this question, it interweaves three situations of “rooming,” “switching,” and “ordering” traversed by IT workers on a daily basis. These situations foreground how the everyday dispositions of bodies are consistently negotiating with im/mobilities in how one passes through life and labor, which, in turn, assembles the city, or makes it happen—as an event—in a particular way.

In this article, a single road, the Roper Highway, in the Northern Territory of Australia becomes a focus for the exploration of colonization, mobilities, separation, and continuing inequalities for Indigenous people in the region. We argue that the needs of the people situated at the end of the road are usually secondary to those of strategy and big business. We bring together perspectives from participant observation, traveling the road, historical accounts and contemporary experience, to describe the Roper Highway as a meshwork of intersecting biographies, histories, interests, and experiences and explore why, despite our extensive experience as anthropologists driving this road, our knowledge of the road from the perspective of the people we worked with remained elusive and incomplete.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

A body in motion, said Isaac Newton, will stay in motion; and so, too, will a body at rest stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by some external force. A human body is such an object, or rather, a system of articulated tissues that are set in motion and stilled by various internal (electrical signals from the brain, chemical reactions in the muscles) and external (gravity, heat, wind, pies thrown in one's face, etc.) forces.

This article offers an ethnographic account of Bengaluru, a city in southern India, marked for its crippling urban infrastructures, frequent traffic jams, and burgeoning IT economy. The article asks if there's a relationship between how one labors inside glass enclaves and the congestion experienced outside on the road. In trying to answer this question, it interweaves three situations of “rooming,” “switching,” and “ordering” traversed by IT workers on a daily basis. These situations foreground how the everyday dispositions of bodies are consistently negotiating with im/mobilities in how one passes through life and labor, which, in turn, assembles the city, or makes it happen—as an event—in a particular way.

In this article, a single road, the Roper Highway, in the Northern Territory of Australia becomes a focus for the exploration of colonization, mobilities, separation, and continuing inequalities for Indigenous people in the region. We argue that the needs of the people situated at the end of the road are usually secondary to those of strategy and big business. We bring together perspectives from participant observation, traveling the road, historical accounts and contemporary experience, to describe the Roper Highway as a meshwork of intersecting biographies, histories, interests, and experiences and explore why, despite our extensive experience as anthropologists driving this road, our knowledge of the road from the perspective of the people we worked with remained elusive and incomplete.

Coastal urban edges, defined by significant spaces of mobilities, create tensions in the oppositions of flows of the practices of vision and action. Photography captures moments and tells fragments of stories. A closer, longer look of photographic images allows for otherwise un-noticed details. We notice the gendered automobilities at play in the coastal roadways and street spaces of Brighton, UK and Havana, Cuba, both renowned for their celebration of speed from car racing and testing. This article analyses selected photographic images from two archives situated in Brighton and Havana. We consider the impact of pre-determined and applied axes and planes of the spaces, considering the intentions before, and the imaginary afterlife of the images. Our analysis adds to an understanding of speed and injustice at the coastal urban edge.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

A body in motion, said Isaac Newton, will stay in motion; and so, too, will a body at rest stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by some external force. A human body is such an object, or rather, a system of articulated tissues that are set in motion and stilled by various internal (electrical signals from the brain, chemical reactions in the muscles) and external (gravity, heat, wind, pies thrown in one's face, etc.) forces.

This article offers an ethnographic account of Bengaluru, a city in southern India, marked for its crippling urban infrastructures, frequent traffic jams, and burgeoning IT economy. The article asks if there's a relationship between how one labors inside glass enclaves and the congestion experienced outside on the road. In trying to answer this question, it interweaves three situations of “rooming,” “switching,” and “ordering” traversed by IT workers on a daily basis. These situations foreground how the everyday dispositions of bodies are consistently negotiating with im/mobilities in how one passes through life and labor, which, in turn, assembles the city, or makes it happen—as an event—in a particular way.

In this article, a single road, the Roper Highway, in the Northern Territory of Australia becomes a focus for the exploration of colonization, mobilities, separation, and continuing inequalities for Indigenous people in the region. We argue that the needs of the people situated at the end of the road are usually secondary to those of strategy and big business. We bring together perspectives from participant observation, traveling the road, historical accounts and contemporary experience, to describe the Roper Highway as a meshwork of intersecting biographies, histories, interests, and experiences and explore why, despite our extensive experience as anthropologists driving this road, our knowledge of the road from the perspective of the people we worked with remained elusive and incomplete.

Coastal urban edges, defined by significant spaces of mobilities, create tensions in the oppositions of flows of the practices of vision and action. Photography captures moments and tells fragments of stories. A closer, longer look of photographic images allows for otherwise un-noticed details. We notice the gendered automobilities at play in the coastal roadways and street spaces of Brighton, UK and Havana, Cuba, both renowned for their celebration of speed from car racing and testing. This article analyses selected photographic images from two archives situated in Brighton and Havana. We consider the impact of pre-determined and applied axes and planes of the spaces, considering the intentions before, and the imaginary afterlife of the images. Our analysis adds to an understanding of speed and injustice at the coastal urban edge.

Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómads reflects on how Indigenous and Latinx artists employ creative social interactions and installations to address issues of mobility, space, power, agency, affect, place, capitalism, and subjectivity. Transfers readers will become acquainted with a dynamic space marking a complex power structure that interweaves the mass media effects upon the migrant subjectivity, the nation-state policing mobility, the illicit enrichment of the Coyote mafia, and irregular population movements traveling up north from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central America. The project mainly focuses on experiencing subjectivity as an affected pedagogical tool to—in some cases, heal the consequences of irregular mobility—understand, discuss, and recognize how Indigenous and Latinx migrants are constantly reshaping mobility, sociocultural production, and the variability of transnational landscapes.

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

A body in motion, said Isaac Newton, will stay in motion; and so, too, will a body at rest stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by some external force. A human body is such an object, or rather, a system of articulated tissues that are set in motion and stilled by various internal (electrical signals from the brain, chemical reactions in the muscles) and external (gravity, heat, wind, pies thrown in one's face, etc.) forces.

This article offers an ethnographic account of Bengaluru, a city in southern India, marked for its crippling urban infrastructures, frequent traffic jams, and burgeoning IT economy. The article asks if there's a relationship between how one labors inside glass enclaves and the congestion experienced outside on the road. In trying to answer this question, it interweaves three situations of “rooming,” “switching,” and “ordering” traversed by IT workers on a daily basis. These situations foreground how the everyday dispositions of bodies are consistently negotiating with im/mobilities in how one passes through life and labor, which, in turn, assembles the city, or makes it happen—as an event—in a particular way.

In this article, a single road, the Roper Highway, in the Northern Territory of Australia becomes a focus for the exploration of colonization, mobilities, separation, and continuing inequalities for Indigenous people in the region. We argue that the needs of the people situated at the end of the road are usually secondary to those of strategy and big business. We bring together perspectives from participant observation, traveling the road, historical accounts and contemporary experience, to describe the Roper Highway as a meshwork of intersecting biographies, histories, interests, and experiences and explore why, despite our extensive experience as anthropologists driving this road, our knowledge of the road from the perspective of the people we worked with remained elusive and incomplete.

Coastal urban edges, defined by significant spaces of mobilities, create tensions in the oppositions of flows of the practices of vision and action. Photography captures moments and tells fragments of stories. A closer, longer look of photographic images allows for otherwise un-noticed details. We notice the gendered automobilities at play in the coastal roadways and street spaces of Brighton, UK and Havana, Cuba, both renowned for their celebration of speed from car racing and testing. This article analyses selected photographic images from two archives situated in Brighton and Havana. We consider the impact of pre-determined and applied axes and planes of the spaces, considering the intentions before, and the imaginary afterlife of the images. Our analysis adds to an understanding of speed and injustice at the coastal urban edge.

Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómads reflects on how Indigenous and Latinx artists employ creative social interactions and installations to address issues of mobility, space, power, agency, affect, place, capitalism, and subjectivity. Transfers readers will become acquainted with a dynamic space marking a complex power structure that interweaves the mass media effects upon the migrant subjectivity, the nation-state policing mobility, the illicit enrichment of the Coyote mafia, and irregular population movements traveling up north from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central America. The project mainly focuses on experiencing subjectivity as an affected pedagogical tool to—in some cases, heal the consequences of irregular mobility—understand, discuss, and recognize how Indigenous and Latinx migrants are constantly reshaping mobility, sociocultural production, and the variability of transnational landscapes.

David Machado, The Shelf Life of Happiness, trans. Hillary Locke (Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2016), 236 pp., $14.95 (paperback).

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (New York: Doubleday, 2021), 336 pp., $18.00 (paperback).

In fall 2022, more than forty current and former students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends of Herrick Chapman gathered at New York University's Institute of French Studies to honor and reflect on his nearly thirty-year career at NYU as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. Long delayed due to Covid, the symposium—“France in the Twentieth Century: Mobilizing People, Power, and Ideas”—brought together the multiple cohorts Herrick has trained, on and off the tenure track, working within and beyond the university. An abiding sense of gratitude permeated the event: everyone wanted a chance to say what Herrick had done for them and meant to them. The roundtables accordingly combined the academic and the personal, as former students considered their own trajectories in light of Herrick's work on such themes as social movements and politics, the state and expertise, and empire and difference. If presenters’ career paths and intellectual preoccupations diverged widely, spanning France and the francophone world and grounded in social, cultural, and political approaches, a number of common threads emerged: the depth and rigor of Herrick's critique combined with the lightness of his touch; his remarkable ability to identify and articulate the stakes of a project or argument, no matter how far from his own wheelhouse; and the critical respect and consideration he paid to everyone, from nervous first-year doctoral students to late-stage dissertators as well as peers. We had all learned to trust our instincts as scholars and writers precisely because Herrick had.

When I nominated Herrick Chapman for the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, a recognition conferred by the American Historical Association upon an exemplary graduate mentor triennially, I collected some twenty letters from former students and colleagues. By the nature of the exercise, each letter was deeply personal. Students recounted the extra mile they felt Herrick had gone to personally help them navigate graduate student life and later the working world, whether in academia or beyond. Rereading these letters, one possible image that could emerge is of selfless generosity—after all, one student recalled how Herrick answered her panicked email on his own daughter's wedding day. I in turn recounted how he helped me pick up the pieces after the death of a parent. Other personal stories of this kind abound. He always was so attentive to his students as individuals.

The articles in this special issue honoring Herrick Chapman convey the many ways that he is a role model as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The ability to excel in all these areas is exceedingly rare. As John Henry Newman observed: “To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.” In addition to a career with a significant scholarly impact, Herrick's exceptional compassion and dedication to students at New York University earned him the American Historical Association's prestigious Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award in 2021. His fine example shows us the ripple effect or rayonnement of effective mentoring, beyond academe and one's own students, serving a broader public good.

Mentorship is one of the most rewarding but least rewarded aspects of the professoriate. There are countless undergraduate teaching awards at most institutions of higher learning, and the three North American learned societies in French history grant a number of book and article awards; in addition, the Western Society for French Historical Studies has recently introduced its Tyler Stovall Mission Prize for demonstrated commitment to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the Francophone world. But the flagship association for US historians, the American Historical Association, has exactly one award for mentoring: the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award, established in 1992. It is, moreover, given on an alternating cycle to graduate mentors, secondary school teachers, and undergraduate mentors (at both two- and four-year colleges), meaning that superb graduate mentors are recognized only every third year. Herrick Chapman was so recognized in 2021, which came as no surprise to those who know him.

Inside the academy and out, there is much talk of the importance of mentoring, of why younger students, faculty, and employees need it, of the potential benefits that will accrue to them from it, and of the rarity of dedicated and effective mentors. In the academy, mentorship takes two forms. One involves senior faculty helping junior colleagues learn the quirks of their department and institution and the often-opaque requirements for achieving tenure. It is a time-limited relationship of near equals that focuses on how to help junior colleagues work successfully within the given system. The other involves faculty and graduate students. If done well, such mentoring is a project extending not only over the years when a student is taking courses and writing a dissertation but well beyond them to a time when they are working and publishing. A good mentor imparts their own knowledge and skills, helps young scholars find their own interests and voice, and aids them in navigating the ever-more precarious job market and work–life balance. A good mentor needs to both acknowledge the enormous power differentials between faculty and graduate students and treat the latter as equal adults. A good mentor both helps a mentee understand the system as it exists and offers alternative values and visions of how the academy can be a more humane and just environment. Finally, a good mentor should expect no monetary rewards or recognition from colleagues for the time and intellectual and emotional energy put into mentoring. The ever-more corporate university pays only lip service to mentoring and teaching.

At New York University, where he spent most of his career between 1992 and 2019, and in the small world of French Studies, Herrick Chapman is known for being a remarkably generous, attentive, and productive advisor of graduate students. This reputation found institutional recognition with the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association in 2021.

Since the 1980s, Herrick Chapman has played a pivotal role as scholar, editor, and mentor in shaping the practice of French history. His books and articles are crucial for understanding France's trajectory from the 1930s to the present; his twenty-year-long stint as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society turned the journal into a major force in French Studies; and his mentorship of more than two dozen doctoral students has helped set the agenda for at least two generations of French historians.

I arrived at New York University's Washington Mews, home of the Institute of French Studies (IFS), in the fall of 1996 with a master's in French language and literature. At the time, I had been trained to analyze objects of study (primarily texts and discourses) using the tools of close reading and critical theory, and I came to the IFS looking to shift my focus and practice to cultural history. I intended to examine how cultural products contributed to shifts in mentalities and to shaping social imaginaries. Relatedly, I wanted to investigate how everyday people produced and consumed culture, especially as this pertained to women's quotidian experiences in the postwar period. I was keen to assert the agency of the powerless, but through my graduate education I came to learn how to more carefully delineate the contours of that agency. Where I had once exclusively studied revolutionary discourses, such as those trumpeted in the 1970s feminist newsletter Le Torchon Brûle, under the intellectual tutelage of Herrick Chapman, I came to appreciate the need to ground my studies in empirical events, asking both the journalist's questions—who, what, when, where, and how?—along with that of the historian: do we see change or continuity over time? To my naïve surprise, my interests in women's history, everyday life, and the histoire des mentalités led me down the path of engagement with the French state, with the figure of the expert, and with, gasp, policy history. Did the Institute of French Studies turn me into a wonk?!

Herrick Chapman supervised my doctoral dissertation, which explored the performance of politics on French radio from the early 1930s through the early 1950s. Herrick encouraged the crucial first step of this project: a focus on broadcast content rather than on French radio's institutional history. This direction combined my background in music, my interest in high politics, and the emerging resources of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the 1990s, archivists began digitizing and making available formerly fragile recordings of early broadcast radio, which created an opportunity to address historical questions through a longue durée study of the French airwaves.

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic, was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.

Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995)

Herrick Chapman, France's Long Reconstruction. In Search of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Even facing intense attacks, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic hold real public power. The power of scholars emerges in our final dossier in honor of Herrick Chapman, perhaps most explicitly in its final essay by sociologist Éric Fassin. Fassin argues that the recent surge of politicized attacks on the academy, an onslaught felt in both France and the United States, is, ironically, a good sign. So, too, he reasons, is the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism. “What these campaigns reveal,” Fassin writes, “is that intellectual work is not to be dismissed; it is dangerous. It turns out it is important. Otherwise, why should it be demonized thus?” Fassin arrives at the conclusion through personal experience. As he recounts, he captured the attention of former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who launched his far-right campaign in 2021 with a video telling viewers (“chers compatriots”) that they were “despised” by academics, Fassin included.

One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.

What is the audience for French Studies in the Anglophone world? Who is interested in reading about France, and what kinds of books, essays, and articles arouse their curiosity?

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel, a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel—but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.

A profound sentiment of satisfaction might settle upon Herrick Chapman after he reads the articles in this special issue. For having touched so many lives, for having excelled in the intellectual endeavors he set out to explore, and for having made an impact on the field of French Studies itself, any soul would be rightly moved to a sense of completion and contentedness that accompanies such lifetime achievement. Teaching, research, and service are the core responsibilities of all tenure-stream academics, but Chapman has fulfilled these missions to an extraordinary degree to which few can aspire. In addition to this triple crown, his career is matched by a life well lived, one in which family, friendship, joy, and love are so abundant that they infuse his professionalism.

A body in motion, said Isaac Newton, will stay in motion; and so, too, will a body at rest stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by some external force. A human body is such an object, or rather, a system of articulated tissues that are set in motion and stilled by various internal (electrical signals from the brain, chemical reactions in the muscles) and external (gravity, heat, wind, pies thrown in one's face, etc.) forces.

This article offers an ethnographic account of Bengaluru, a city in southern India, marked for its crippling urban infrastructures, frequent traffic jams, and burgeoning IT economy. The article asks if there's a relationship between how one labors inside glass enclaves and the congestion experienced outside on the road. In trying to answer this question, it interweaves three situations of “rooming,” “switching,” and “ordering” traversed by IT workers on a daily basis. These situations foreground how the everyday dispositions of bodies are consistently negotiating with im/mobilities in how one passes through life and labor, which, in turn, assembles the city, or makes it happen—as an event—in a particular way.

In this article, a single road, the Roper Highway, in the Northern Territory of Australia becomes a focus for the exploration of colonization, mobilities, separation, and continuing inequalities for Indigenous people in the region. We argue that the needs of the people situated at the end of the road are usually secondary to those of strategy and big business. We bring together perspectives from participant observation, traveling the road, historical accounts and contemporary experience, to describe the Roper Highway as a meshwork of intersecting biographies, histories, interests, and experiences and explore why, despite our extensive experience as anthropologists driving this road, our knowledge of the road from the perspective of the people we worked with remained elusive and incomplete.

Coastal urban edges, defined by significant spaces of mobilities, create tensions in the oppositions of flows of the practices of vision and action. Photography captures moments and tells fragments of stories. A closer, longer look of photographic images allows for otherwise un-noticed details. We notice the gendered automobilities at play in the coastal roadways and street spaces of Brighton, UK and Havana, Cuba, both renowned for their celebration of speed from car racing and testing. This article analyses selected photographic images from two archives situated in Brighton and Havana. We consider the impact of pre-determined and applied axes and planes of the spaces, considering the intentions before, and the imaginary afterlife of the images. Our analysis adds to an understanding of speed and injustice at the coastal urban edge.

Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómads reflects on how Indigenous and Latinx artists employ creative social interactions and installations to address issues of mobility, space, power, agency, affect, place, capitalism, and subjectivity. Transfers readers will become acquainted with a dynamic space marking a complex power structure that interweaves the mass media effects upon the migrant subjectivity, the nation-state policing mobility, the illicit enrichment of the Coyote mafia, and irregular population movements traveling up north from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central America. The project mainly focuses on experiencing subjectivity as an affected pedagogical tool to—in some cases, heal the consequences of irregular mobility—understand, discuss, and recognize how Indigenous and Latinx migrants are constantly reshaping mobility, sociocultural production, and the variability of transnational landscapes.

David Machado, The Shelf Life of Happiness, trans. Hillary Locke (Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2016), 236 pp., $14.95 (paperback).

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (New York: Doubleday, 2021), 336 pp., $18.00 (paperback).

Mobility platforms have been transforming cities for fifteen years now. Research on these platforms is in robust shape, but there are emerging tensions surrounding how we frame and research platforms’ effects. Increasingly, two opposing views are coalescing. On the one hand, platforms are seen through a Marxist lens as part of an urban spatial fix. On the other hand, research grounded in Feminist geographies, Black, and Queer studies, sees a spatial fix approach as a totalizing one that denies the complexity and political possibility of platforms. We argue that these approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Paying attention to the relationship between mobility and fixity can help scholars remain attentive to mobility platforms’ political and economic heft, while mitigating a tendency to frame platforms as purely symptomatic of an all-encompassing neoliberalism. We illustrate our arguments by thinking through the relationship between fixity and mobility with respect to capital, labor, and ideas.

Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.

Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.

The traditional, largely economic explanations of migration through “push-and-pull” factors have been widely criticized for being deterministic and generalized, and for failing to account for the personal aspirations of migrants. Alternatively, some authors regard personal aspirations as a lens through which to understand the interaction between structure and agency, and between mutually interconnected structural factors. Emphasizing the individual (as opposed to collective) desire for attaining a more or less specific goal (e.g. social upward mobility, or a “better life” in a more general sense), the notion of aspiration can serve as an analytical tool to understand the ways in which individuals make sense of migration. Aspiring to how life could be is intrinsically connected with mobility, because it relates to the complexities of being mobile in different ways. What is at stake here, in particular, is a better understanding of the spatial and the social dimensions of being or wanting to be mobile—a phenomenon that has been called “motility”—and the knowledge and skills that are actually required to become mobile. Aspiration thus relates to the ability to imagine, a decisive feature that Arjun Appadurai has called “capacity.”

Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.

The traditional, largely economic explanations of migration through “push-and-pull” factors have been widely criticized for being deterministic and generalized, and for failing to account for the personal aspirations of migrants. Alternatively, some authors regard personal aspirations as a lens through which to understand the interaction between structure and agency, and between mutually interconnected structural factors. Emphasizing the individual (as opposed to collective) desire for attaining a more or less specific goal (e.g. social upward mobility, or a “better life” in a more general sense), the notion of aspiration can serve as an analytical tool to understand the ways in which individuals make sense of migration. Aspiring to how life could be is intrinsically connected with mobility, because it relates to the complexities of being mobile in different ways. What is at stake here, in particular, is a better understanding of the spatial and the social dimensions of being or wanting to be mobile—a phenomenon that has been called “motility”—and the knowledge and skills that are actually required to become mobile. Aspiration thus relates to the ability to imagine, a decisive feature that Arjun Appadurai has called “capacity.”

This article is situated within the ongoing debate about how spatial belonging is reconfigured under conditions of flexible capitalism and mobility. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores localities as imagined places and analyzes attachments and spatial aspirations of mobile managerial elites toward the places of their assignment as powerful imaginative geographies. It shows that managerial spatial imaginations oscillate between longing for belonging and the attempt to control and enclose belonging to places: on the one hand, belonging has to be constantly resisted and monitored, in order to make it compatible with the demands of flexibility and self-optimization; on the other hand, belonging to a career place has to be created biographically as a career asset. This, however, creates paradoxical attachments that have to be negotiated on an everyday basis.

Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.

The traditional, largely economic explanations of migration through “push-and-pull” factors have been widely criticized for being deterministic and generalized, and for failing to account for the personal aspirations of migrants. Alternatively, some authors regard personal aspirations as a lens through which to understand the interaction between structure and agency, and between mutually interconnected structural factors. Emphasizing the individual (as opposed to collective) desire for attaining a more or less specific goal (e.g. social upward mobility, or a “better life” in a more general sense), the notion of aspiration can serve as an analytical tool to understand the ways in which individuals make sense of migration. Aspiring to how life could be is intrinsically connected with mobility, because it relates to the complexities of being mobile in different ways. What is at stake here, in particular, is a better understanding of the spatial and the social dimensions of being or wanting to be mobile—a phenomenon that has been called “motility”—and the knowledge and skills that are actually required to become mobile. Aspiration thus relates to the ability to imagine, a decisive feature that Arjun Appadurai has called “capacity.”

This article is situated within the ongoing debate about how spatial belonging is reconfigured under conditions of flexible capitalism and mobility. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores localities as imagined places and analyzes attachments and spatial aspirations of mobile managerial elites toward the places of their assignment as powerful imaginative geographies. It shows that managerial spatial imaginations oscillate between longing for belonging and the attempt to control and enclose belonging to places: on the one hand, belonging has to be constantly resisted and monitored, in order to make it compatible with the demands of flexibility and self-optimization; on the other hand, belonging to a career place has to be created biographically as a career asset. This, however, creates paradoxical attachments that have to be negotiated on an everyday basis.

This article discusses the educational aspirations of students of “migrant background” at a German university. It focuses its attention on the nexus of mobility and in/equality in the realm of higher education while especially addressing the affective tensions and related processes of contested belonging that students experience during their educational course. Understanding family constellations as “regimes of belonging,” the contribution analyzes how relations experienced by students in their familial settings—often entailing intergenerational dramas—bear on the study course and on the personal constellations within the university settings. Following students’ trajectories, who move to the universities in order to perform specific educational desires that are more or less guided by their parents’ visions, it is shown that universities may become protected realms of relatedness in which the students experience new forms of personal freedom and belonging—apart from, but often in continuity with, the rules of commonality and reciprocity as experienced within their families back home.

Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.

The traditional, largely economic explanations of migration through “push-and-pull” factors have been widely criticized for being deterministic and generalized, and for failing to account for the personal aspirations of migrants. Alternatively, some authors regard personal aspirations as a lens through which to understand the interaction between structure and agency, and between mutually interconnected structural factors. Emphasizing the individual (as opposed to collective) desire for attaining a more or less specific goal (e.g. social upward mobility, or a “better life” in a more general sense), the notion of aspiration can serve as an analytical tool to understand the ways in which individuals make sense of migration. Aspiring to how life could be is intrinsically connected with mobility, because it relates to the complexities of being mobile in different ways. What is at stake here, in particular, is a better understanding of the spatial and the social dimensions of being or wanting to be mobile—a phenomenon that has been called “motility”—and the knowledge and skills that are actually required to become mobile. Aspiration thus relates to the ability to imagine, a decisive feature that Arjun Appadurai has called “capacity.”

This article is situated within the ongoing debate about how spatial belonging is reconfigured under conditions of flexible capitalism and mobility. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores localities as imagined places and analyzes attachments and spatial aspirations of mobile managerial elites toward the places of their assignment as powerful imaginative geographies. It shows that managerial spatial imaginations oscillate between longing for belonging and the attempt to control and enclose belonging to places: on the one hand, belonging has to be constantly resisted and monitored, in order to make it compatible with the demands of flexibility and self-optimization; on the other hand, belonging to a career place has to be created biographically as a career asset. This, however, creates paradoxical attachments that have to be negotiated on an everyday basis.

This article discusses the educational aspirations of students of “migrant background” at a German university. It focuses its attention on the nexus of mobility and in/equality in the realm of higher education while especially addressing the affective tensions and related processes of contested belonging that students experience during their educational course. Understanding family constellations as “regimes of belonging,” the contribution analyzes how relations experienced by students in their familial settings—often entailing intergenerational dramas—bear on the study course and on the personal constellations within the university settings. Following students’ trajectories, who move to the universities in order to perform specific educational desires that are more or less guided by their parents’ visions, it is shown that universities may become protected realms of relatedness in which the students experience new forms of personal freedom and belonging—apart from, but often in continuity with, the rules of commonality and reciprocity as experienced within their families back home.

In this article, I deal with young people with Bangladeshi origins who want to remain in Rome in spite of a massive onward migration toward the United Kingdom that involved most of their friends. Based on ethnographic interviews, I show how the same aspirations of social mobility that their parents and many of their peers fulfilled thanks to spatial mobility are now being pursued by these youth through sedentarization processes. Their counternarratives of mobility debunk a dreamlike imaginary of faraway places, shedding light on the role played by structures of opportunities and social positionalities in interconnecting spatial and social (im)mobility, and in creating alternative aspirational geographies, that is, spatial imaginaries that incorporate the opportunities and the desires that people associate with different places.

Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.

The traditional, largely economic explanations of migration through “push-and-pull” factors have been widely criticized for being deterministic and generalized, and for failing to account for the personal aspirations of migrants. Alternatively, some authors regard personal aspirations as a lens through which to understand the interaction between structure and agency, and between mutually interconnected structural factors. Emphasizing the individual (as opposed to collective) desire for attaining a more or less specific goal (e.g. social upward mobility, or a “better life” in a more general sense), the notion of aspiration can serve as an analytical tool to understand the ways in which individuals make sense of migration. Aspiring to how life could be is intrinsically connected with mobility, because it relates to the complexities of being mobile in different ways. What is at stake here, in particular, is a better understanding of the spatial and the social dimensions of being or wanting to be mobile—a phenomenon that has been called “motility”—and the knowledge and skills that are actually required to become mobile. Aspiration thus relates to the ability to imagine, a decisive feature that Arjun Appadurai has called “capacity.”

This article is situated within the ongoing debate about how spatial belonging is reconfigured under conditions of flexible capitalism and mobility. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores localities as imagined places and analyzes attachments and spatial aspirations of mobile managerial elites toward the places of their assignment as powerful imaginative geographies. It shows that managerial spatial imaginations oscillate between longing for belonging and the attempt to control and enclose belonging to places: on the one hand, belonging has to be constantly resisted and monitored, in order to make it compatible with the demands of flexibility and self-optimization; on the other hand, belonging to a career place has to be created biographically as a career asset. This, however, creates paradoxical attachments that have to be negotiated on an everyday basis.

This article discusses the educational aspirations of students of “migrant background” at a German university. It focuses its attention on the nexus of mobility and in/equality in the realm of higher education while especially addressing the affective tensions and related processes of contested belonging that students experience during their educational course. Understanding family constellations as “regimes of belonging,” the contribution analyzes how relations experienced by students in their familial settings—often entailing intergenerational dramas—bear on the study course and on the personal constellations within the university settings. Following students’ trajectories, who move to the universities in order to perform specific educational desires that are more or less guided by their parents’ visions, it is shown that universities may become protected realms of relatedness in which the students experience new forms of personal freedom and belonging—apart from, but often in continuity with, the rules of commonality and reciprocity as experienced within their families back home.

In this article, I deal with young people with Bangladeshi origins who want to remain in Rome in spite of a massive onward migration toward the United Kingdom that involved most of their friends. Based on ethnographic interviews, I show how the same aspirations of social mobility that their parents and many of their peers fulfilled thanks to spatial mobility are now being pursued by these youth through sedentarization processes. Their counternarratives of mobility debunk a dreamlike imaginary of faraway places, shedding light on the role played by structures of opportunities and social positionalities in interconnecting spatial and social (im)mobility, and in creating alternative aspirational geographies, that is, spatial imaginaries that incorporate the opportunities and the desires that people associate with different places.

Sudan since its independence in 1956 and South Sudan since its secession from Sudan in 2011 have been exposed to political and economic crises, civil wars, and local and regional outbreaks of violence that have forced people to leave their homes and move on to more secure places. Reflecting on the lives of two women, I scrutinize how people try to live normal lives despite the chronicity of crisis and a high degree of (forced) mobility. For them, mobility is an essential part of their livelihood and helps to create lives that are “meaningful, reasonable, and normal.” Furthermore, I reflect on the aspiration/ability model and ask how the wish to live normal lives leads to migration on the one side and forced (im)mobility on the other.

Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.

The traditional, largely economic explanations of migration through “push-and-pull” factors have been widely criticized for being deterministic and generalized, and for failing to account for the personal aspirations of migrants. Alternatively, some authors regard personal aspirations as a lens through which to understand the interaction between structure and agency, and between mutually interconnected structural factors. Emphasizing the individual (as opposed to collective) desire for attaining a more or less specific goal (e.g. social upward mobility, or a “better life” in a more general sense), the notion of aspiration can serve as an analytical tool to understand the ways in which individuals make sense of migration. Aspiring to how life could be is intrinsically connected with mobility, because it relates to the complexities of being mobile in different ways. What is at stake here, in particular, is a better understanding of the spatial and the social dimensions of being or wanting to be mobile—a phenomenon that has been called “motility”—and the knowledge and skills that are actually required to become mobile. Aspiration thus relates to the ability to imagine, a decisive feature that Arjun Appadurai has called “capacity.”

This article is situated within the ongoing debate about how spatial belonging is reconfigured under conditions of flexible capitalism and mobility. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores localities as imagined places and analyzes attachments and spatial aspirations of mobile managerial elites toward the places of their assignment as powerful imaginative geographies. It shows that managerial spatial imaginations oscillate between longing for belonging and the attempt to control and enclose belonging to places: on the one hand, belonging has to be constantly resisted and monitored, in order to make it compatible with the demands of flexibility and self-optimization; on the other hand, belonging to a career place has to be created biographically as a career asset. This, however, creates paradoxical attachments that have to be negotiated on an everyday basis.

This article discusses the educational aspirations of students of “migrant background” at a German university. It focuses its attention on the nexus of mobility and in/equality in the realm of higher education while especially addressing the affective tensions and related processes of contested belonging that students experience during their educational course. Understanding family constellations as “regimes of belonging,” the contribution analyzes how relations experienced by students in their familial settings—often entailing intergenerational dramas—bear on the study course and on the personal constellations within the university settings. Following students’ trajectories, who move to the universities in order to perform specific educational desires that are more or less guided by their parents’ visions, it is shown that universities may become protected realms of relatedness in which the students experience new forms of personal freedom and belonging—apart from, but often in continuity with, the rules of commonality and reciprocity as experienced within their families back home.

In this article, I deal with young people with Bangladeshi origins who want to remain in Rome in spite of a massive onward migration toward the United Kingdom that involved most of their friends. Based on ethnographic interviews, I show how the same aspirations of social mobility that their parents and many of their peers fulfilled thanks to spatial mobility are now being pursued by these youth through sedentarization processes. Their counternarratives of mobility debunk a dreamlike imaginary of faraway places, shedding light on the role played by structures of opportunities and social positionalities in interconnecting spatial and social (im)mobility, and in creating alternative aspirational geographies, that is, spatial imaginaries that incorporate the opportunities and the desires that people associate with different places.

Sudan since its independence in 1956 and South Sudan since its secession from Sudan in 2011 have been exposed to political and economic crises, civil wars, and local and regional outbreaks of violence that have forced people to leave their homes and move on to more secure places. Reflecting on the lives of two women, I scrutinize how people try to live normal lives despite the chronicity of crisis and a high degree of (forced) mobility. For them, mobility is an essential part of their livelihood and helps to create lives that are “meaningful, reasonable, and normal.” Furthermore, I reflect on the aspiration/ability model and ask how the wish to live normal lives leads to migration on the one side and forced (im)mobility on the other.

Past accidents with the Boeing 737 MAX have brought to light the dynamics behind the development of aviation technology and how these impact different stakeholders in the aviation industry, which is known for its siloing practices. Using the investigation of the tragic accident of Lion Air 610 as an exploratory case, we reveal how different forces in the aerospace industry are shaping the ongoing narrative of the Boeing 737 MAX. One way of examining this narrative is through the perspective of distributed situation awareness (DSA). We then argue that focusing on ethnographic storytelling to investigate DSA can highlight compatibility between different groups in aviation. We seek to cultivate more curiosity across seemingly incompatible fields in mobility: for social scientists to explore the world of air transport standards and safety, and for aviation professionals to recognize the value of ethnographic approaches in such studies.

Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.

The traditional, largely economic explanations of migration through “push-and-pull” factors have been widely criticized for being deterministic and generalized, and for failing to account for the personal aspirations of migrants. Alternatively, some authors regard personal aspirations as a lens through which to understand the interaction between structure and agency, and between mutually interconnected structural factors. Emphasizing the individual (as opposed to collective) desire for attaining a more or less specific goal (e.g. social upward mobility, or a “better life” in a more general sense), the notion of aspiration can serve as an analytical tool to understand the ways in which individuals make sense of migration. Aspiring to how life could be is intrinsically connected with mobility, because it relates to the complexities of being mobile in different ways. What is at stake here, in particular, is a better understanding of the spatial and the social dimensions of being or wanting to be mobile—a phenomenon that has been called “motility”—and the knowledge and skills that are actually required to become mobile. Aspiration thus relates to the ability to imagine, a decisive feature that Arjun Appadurai has called “capacity.”

This article is situated within the ongoing debate about how spatial belonging is reconfigured under conditions of flexible capitalism and mobility. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores localities as imagined places and analyzes attachments and spatial aspirations of mobile managerial elites toward the places of their assignment as powerful imaginative geographies. It shows that managerial spatial imaginations oscillate between longing for belonging and the attempt to control and enclose belonging to places: on the one hand, belonging has to be constantly resisted and monitored, in order to make it compatible with the demands of flexibility and self-optimization; on the other hand, belonging to a career place has to be created biographically as a career asset. This, however, creates paradoxical attachments that have to be negotiated on an everyday basis.

This article discusses the educational aspirations of students of “migrant background” at a German university. It focuses its attention on the nexus of mobility and in/equality in the realm of higher education while especially addressing the affective tensions and related processes of contested belonging that students experience during their educational course. Understanding family constellations as “regimes of belonging,” the contribution analyzes how relations experienced by students in their familial settings—often entailing intergenerational dramas—bear on the study course and on the personal constellations within the university settings. Following students’ trajectories, who move to the universities in order to perform specific educational desires that are more or less guided by their parents’ visions, it is shown that universities may become protected realms of relatedness in which the students experience new forms of personal freedom and belonging—apart from, but often in continuity with, the rules of commonality and reciprocity as experienced within their families back home.

In this article, I deal with young people with Bangladeshi origins who want to remain in Rome in spite of a massive onward migration toward the United Kingdom that involved most of their friends. Based on ethnographic interviews, I show how the same aspirations of social mobility that their parents and many of their peers fulfilled thanks to spatial mobility are now being pursued by these youth through sedentarization processes. Their counternarratives of mobility debunk a dreamlike imaginary of faraway places, shedding light on the role played by structures of opportunities and social positionalities in interconnecting spatial and social (im)mobility, and in creating alternative aspirational geographies, that is, spatial imaginaries that incorporate the opportunities and the desires that people associate with different places.

Sudan since its independence in 1956 and South Sudan since its secession from Sudan in 2011 have been exposed to political and economic crises, civil wars, and local and regional outbreaks of violence that have forced people to leave their homes and move on to more secure places. Reflecting on the lives of two women, I scrutinize how people try to live normal lives despite the chronicity of crisis and a high degree of (forced) mobility. For them, mobility is an essential part of their livelihood and helps to create lives that are “meaningful, reasonable, and normal.” Furthermore, I reflect on the aspiration/ability model and ask how the wish to live normal lives leads to migration on the one side and forced (im)mobility on the other.

Past accidents with the Boeing 737 MAX have brought to light the dynamics behind the development of aviation technology and how these impact different stakeholders in the aviation industry, which is known for its siloing practices. Using the investigation of the tragic accident of Lion Air 610 as an exploratory case, we reveal how different forces in the aerospace industry are shaping the ongoing narrative of the Boeing 737 MAX. One way of examining this narrative is through the perspective of distributed situation awareness (DSA). We then argue that focusing on ethnographic storytelling to investigate DSA can highlight compatibility between different groups in aviation. We seek to cultivate more curiosity across seemingly incompatible fields in mobility: for social scientists to explore the world of air transport standards and safety, and for aviation professionals to recognize the value of ethnographic approaches in such studies.

Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen, Disrupting DC: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), 224 pp. $27.95.

Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation (London: Verso, 2022), 272 pp. $26.95.

This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.

This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.

The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.

This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.

The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.

The Solomon's Temple in São Paulo goes beyond a house of worship. On its grounds, visitors can explore the Biblical Garden, a themed space for an immersive experience into performed biblical narratives centered around the Exodus of the Hebrews, which relies on the visual repertoire present in successful biblical telenovelas produced by RecordTV, a major TV channel owned by a neo-Pentecostal Christian denomination. In dialogue with the mobilities turn in the social sciences and the materialist turn in communication studies, this article proposes an ethnographical account of the Biblical Garden tour. Crossed by globalized flows of images and people, objects, and narratives, the tour puts together several representation technologies to offer “a piece of the Holy Land in Brazil.” By combining religious cosmologies, tourism practices, and entertainment marketing tactics, the Biblical Garden became strategic in strengthening UCKG's leading role in what ultraconservative sectors name a cultural war.

This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.

The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.

The Solomon's Temple in São Paulo goes beyond a house of worship. On its grounds, visitors can explore the Biblical Garden, a themed space for an immersive experience into performed biblical narratives centered around the Exodus of the Hebrews, which relies on the visual repertoire present in successful biblical telenovelas produced by RecordTV, a major TV channel owned by a neo-Pentecostal Christian denomination. In dialogue with the mobilities turn in the social sciences and the materialist turn in communication studies, this article proposes an ethnographical account of the Biblical Garden tour. Crossed by globalized flows of images and people, objects, and narratives, the tour puts together several representation technologies to offer “a piece of the Holy Land in Brazil.” By combining religious cosmologies, tourism practices, and entertainment marketing tactics, the Biblical Garden became strategic in strengthening UCKG's leading role in what ultraconservative sectors name a cultural war.

This article explores some eschatological facets of vehicle/road ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a disappearing form of travel in the twenty-first century (at least in the Western world), serves as a memento mori metaphor for our post-COVID era. There are plenty of death-memory features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns, and the search to escape social constraint through adventure, memento mori lurks/lingers near spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. As an art-historical and theological notion, it is inherently material and incorporates both eschatology and remembering. As a pragmatic act of embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialized as an endangered transgression and dying-out form of displacement. Hitchhiking is thus a socio-spatial memento mori for an epoch during which it is increasingly presented “virtually” in re-representational forms. I therefore propose that this phenomenon is a simulacrum, offering topical allegorical tristesse lessons for considering global annihilation.

This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.

The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.

The Solomon's Temple in São Paulo goes beyond a house of worship. On its grounds, visitors can explore the Biblical Garden, a themed space for an immersive experience into performed biblical narratives centered around the Exodus of the Hebrews, which relies on the visual repertoire present in successful biblical telenovelas produced by RecordTV, a major TV channel owned by a neo-Pentecostal Christian denomination. In dialogue with the mobilities turn in the social sciences and the materialist turn in communication studies, this article proposes an ethnographical account of the Biblical Garden tour. Crossed by globalized flows of images and people, objects, and narratives, the tour puts together several representation technologies to offer “a piece of the Holy Land in Brazil.” By combining religious cosmologies, tourism practices, and entertainment marketing tactics, the Biblical Garden became strategic in strengthening UCKG's leading role in what ultraconservative sectors name a cultural war.

This article explores some eschatological facets of vehicle/road ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a disappearing form of travel in the twenty-first century (at least in the Western world), serves as a memento mori metaphor for our post-COVID era. There are plenty of death-memory features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns, and the search to escape social constraint through adventure, memento mori lurks/lingers near spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. As an art-historical and theological notion, it is inherently material and incorporates both eschatology and remembering. As a pragmatic act of embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialized as an endangered transgression and dying-out form of displacement. Hitchhiking is thus a socio-spatial memento mori for an epoch during which it is increasingly presented “virtually” in re-representational forms. I therefore propose that this phenomenon is a simulacrum, offering topical allegorical tristesse lessons for considering global annihilation.

This text explores how the introduction of (semi)autonomous cars fundamentally transforms traffic accidents. Using examples of recent crashes, the article examines how edge cases, accidents, and machine learning are intertwined and produce “infrastructural violence.” Following the example of the suspension of Cruise in 2023, the text investigates edge cases, which may not coincide with actual collisions but necessarily raise their probability, because they enable constant optimization through machine learning. I argue that it is therefore necessary for mobility studies to go beyond existing frameworks in order to investigate the epistemology of accidents of self-driving cars and to scrutinize the transitions from human perception to big data, machine learning, and sensor-based world modeling.

This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.

The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.

The Solomon's Temple in São Paulo goes beyond a house of worship. On its grounds, visitors can explore the Biblical Garden, a themed space for an immersive experience into performed biblical narratives centered around the Exodus of the Hebrews, which relies on the visual repertoire present in successful biblical telenovelas produced by RecordTV, a major TV channel owned by a neo-Pentecostal Christian denomination. In dialogue with the mobilities turn in the social sciences and the materialist turn in communication studies, this article proposes an ethnographical account of the Biblical Garden tour. Crossed by globalized flows of images and people, objects, and narratives, the tour puts together several representation technologies to offer “a piece of the Holy Land in Brazil.” By combining religious cosmologies, tourism practices, and entertainment marketing tactics, the Biblical Garden became strategic in strengthening UCKG's leading role in what ultraconservative sectors name a cultural war.

This article explores some eschatological facets of vehicle/road ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a disappearing form of travel in the twenty-first century (at least in the Western world), serves as a memento mori metaphor for our post-COVID era. There are plenty of death-memory features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns, and the search to escape social constraint through adventure, memento mori lurks/lingers near spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. As an art-historical and theological notion, it is inherently material and incorporates both eschatology and remembering. As a pragmatic act of embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialized as an endangered transgression and dying-out form of displacement. Hitchhiking is thus a socio-spatial memento mori for an epoch during which it is increasingly presented “virtually” in re-representational forms. I therefore propose that this phenomenon is a simulacrum, offering topical allegorical tristesse lessons for considering global annihilation.

This text explores how the introduction of (semi)autonomous cars fundamentally transforms traffic accidents. Using examples of recent crashes, the article examines how edge cases, accidents, and machine learning are intertwined and produce “infrastructural violence.” Following the example of the suspension of Cruise in 2023, the text investigates edge cases, which may not coincide with actual collisions but necessarily raise their probability, because they enable constant optimization through machine learning. I argue that it is therefore necessary for mobility studies to go beyond existing frameworks in order to investigate the epistemology of accidents of self-driving cars and to scrutinize the transitions from human perception to big data, machine learning, and sensor-based world modeling.

This article discusses four recently published books¹ that join an expanding corpus foregrounding mobility as a key dynamic of life in a heating world. Taken together, these titles construct a more explicit, applied dialogue about the process of producing solutions and policies that combat rising global temperatures. I primarily employ Mimi Sheller's mobility justice framework to identify the intersections between movement, inequality, and environmental justice, and go on to explore what each author proposes in terms of measures going forward. A tension arises between clear-cut solutions that advocate specific mobility strategies, like mass migration, for climate adaptation, and holistic mobility approaches that consider the complex sociopolitical and environmental factors at play. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, I consider which elements of each approach are worth holding onto to continue to challenge static narratives of global climate resilience.

This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.

The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.

The Solomon's Temple in São Paulo goes beyond a house of worship. On its grounds, visitors can explore the Biblical Garden, a themed space for an immersive experience into performed biblical narratives centered around the Exodus of the Hebrews, which relies on the visual repertoire present in successful biblical telenovelas produced by RecordTV, a major TV channel owned by a neo-Pentecostal Christian denomination. In dialogue with the mobilities turn in the social sciences and the materialist turn in communication studies, this article proposes an ethnographical account of the Biblical Garden tour. Crossed by globalized flows of images and people, objects, and narratives, the tour puts together several representation technologies to offer “a piece of the Holy Land in Brazil.” By combining religious cosmologies, tourism practices, and entertainment marketing tactics, the Biblical Garden became strategic in strengthening UCKG's leading role in what ultraconservative sectors name a cultural war.

This article explores some eschatological facets of vehicle/road ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a disappearing form of travel in the twenty-first century (at least in the Western world), serves as a memento mori metaphor for our post-COVID era. There are plenty of death-memory features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns, and the search to escape social constraint through adventure, memento mori lurks/lingers near spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. As an art-historical and theological notion, it is inherently material and incorporates both eschatology and remembering. As a pragmatic act of embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialized as an endangered transgression and dying-out form of displacement. Hitchhiking is thus a socio-spatial memento mori for an epoch during which it is increasingly presented “virtually” in re-representational forms. I therefore propose that this phenomenon is a simulacrum, offering topical allegorical tristesse lessons for considering global annihilation.

This text explores how the introduction of (semi)autonomous cars fundamentally transforms traffic accidents. Using examples of recent crashes, the article examines how edge cases, accidents, and machine learning are intertwined and produce “infrastructural violence.” Following the example of the suspension of Cruise in 2023, the text investigates edge cases, which may not coincide with actual collisions but necessarily raise their probability, because they enable constant optimization through machine learning. I argue that it is therefore necessary for mobility studies to go beyond existing frameworks in order to investigate the epistemology of accidents of self-driving cars and to scrutinize the transitions from human perception to big data, machine learning, and sensor-based world modeling.

This article discusses four recently published books¹ that join an expanding corpus foregrounding mobility as a key dynamic of life in a heating world. Taken together, these titles construct a more explicit, applied dialogue about the process of producing solutions and policies that combat rising global temperatures. I primarily employ Mimi Sheller's mobility justice framework to identify the intersections between movement, inequality, and environmental justice, and go on to explore what each author proposes in terms of measures going forward. A tension arises between clear-cut solutions that advocate specific mobility strategies, like mass migration, for climate adaptation, and holistic mobility approaches that consider the complex sociopolitical and environmental factors at play. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, I consider which elements of each approach are worth holding onto to continue to challenge static narratives of global climate resilience.

China's all-in embrace of high-speed rail transportation has put trains back in the global discourse, reshaping international and national imaginaries. Incorporating the Chinese case can substantially reshape our understanding of rail mobility can be and ought to be. The nationwide transformations wrought by Chinese rail offer mobility studies an opportunity to reengage with how mobility shapes community at the national scale, and the central role of the state highlights the peculiar connection between rail imaginaries and an interventionist state—paralleling a striking renaissance of rail imaginaries in Europe and the United States. As the “China Model” circulates across the globe and Chinese rail technologies proliferate, Chinese rail mobility will remain both theoretically and empirically significant.

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This is the second instalment of a special section exploring the pedagogies—classroom and otherwise—associated with mobilities scholarship. As we discussed in the previous introduction (Transfers 13.1/2), the collocation of mobility and pedagogy is by no means a one-way street when it comes to innovation since, in several instances, novel theories and methodologies have emerged directly out of classroom teaching rather than the other way around.¹ This dynamic was apparent in the discussions that took place at the first-ever conference dedicated to mobility pedagogy, which took place at Waterloo University, Canada, in 2018 (see Nicholson, 13.1), and is evidenced here in several articles across the two issues.² As we discussed previously, the field's reputation for innovative methodologies is often the link between research and teaching, and the variety of applications continues to grow. In this special section introduction, we have therefore taken the opportunity to reflect upon some possible new directions for mobilities and pedagogy that take account of not only topical theoretical and political debates but also the pedagogic practices that may, themselves, inspire new research and “real-world” applications. In particular, we share some reflections on the way in which the concept of mobility justice, as first advanced by Mimi Sheller in 2018, lends a new dimension to mobility pedagogies and connects with research and teaching on social justice more broadly.³

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This is the second instalment of a special section exploring the pedagogies—classroom and otherwise—associated with mobilities scholarship. As we discussed in the previous introduction (Transfers 13.1/2), the collocation of mobility and pedagogy is by no means a one-way street when it comes to innovation since, in several instances, novel theories and methodologies have emerged directly out of classroom teaching rather than the other way around.¹ This dynamic was apparent in the discussions that took place at the first-ever conference dedicated to mobility pedagogy, which took place at Waterloo University, Canada, in 2018 (see Nicholson, 13.1), and is evidenced here in several articles across the two issues.² As we discussed previously, the field's reputation for innovative methodologies is often the link between research and teaching, and the variety of applications continues to grow. In this special section introduction, we have therefore taken the opportunity to reflect upon some possible new directions for mobilities and pedagogy that take account of not only topical theoretical and political debates but also the pedagogic practices that may, themselves, inspire new research and “real-world” applications. In particular, we share some reflections on the way in which the concept of mobility justice, as first advanced by Mimi Sheller in 2018, lends a new dimension to mobility pedagogies and connects with research and teaching on social justice more broadly.³

In this article, we take seriously where we teach mobilities from and why that matters. “Where from?” asks vital questions about how teaching and learning in mobilities are located in various traditions, spaces and bodies that shape knowledges co-produced in the classroom, application beyond it, and the future of the field more widely. Asking “where from?” helps identify how our mobilities pedagogies are situated and the perspectives they emphasize and those they overlook. In this article, we reflect on the creation and evolution of a mobilities course and confront its “where-ing” in four ways, exploring the disciplinary, institutional, positionality, and spatial influences on our pedagogies. We explore why these matter, strategies for negotiating them, and why asking “where from?” is key for anyone teaching mobilities.

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This is the second instalment of a special section exploring the pedagogies—classroom and otherwise—associated with mobilities scholarship. As we discussed in the previous introduction (Transfers 13.1/2), the collocation of mobility and pedagogy is by no means a one-way street when it comes to innovation since, in several instances, novel theories and methodologies have emerged directly out of classroom teaching rather than the other way around.¹ This dynamic was apparent in the discussions that took place at the first-ever conference dedicated to mobility pedagogy, which took place at Waterloo University, Canada, in 2018 (see Nicholson, 13.1), and is evidenced here in several articles across the two issues.² As we discussed previously, the field's reputation for innovative methodologies is often the link between research and teaching, and the variety of applications continues to grow. In this special section introduction, we have therefore taken the opportunity to reflect upon some possible new directions for mobilities and pedagogy that take account of not only topical theoretical and political debates but also the pedagogic practices that may, themselves, inspire new research and “real-world” applications. In particular, we share some reflections on the way in which the concept of mobility justice, as first advanced by Mimi Sheller in 2018, lends a new dimension to mobility pedagogies and connects with research and teaching on social justice more broadly.³

In this article, we take seriously where we teach mobilities from and why that matters. “Where from?” asks vital questions about how teaching and learning in mobilities are located in various traditions, spaces and bodies that shape knowledges co-produced in the classroom, application beyond it, and the future of the field more widely. Asking “where from?” helps identify how our mobilities pedagogies are situated and the perspectives they emphasize and those they overlook. In this article, we reflect on the creation and evolution of a mobilities course and confront its “where-ing” in four ways, exploring the disciplinary, institutional, positionality, and spatial influences on our pedagogies. We explore why these matter, strategies for negotiating them, and why asking “where from?” is key for anyone teaching mobilities.

As a pedagogical and ludic tool, the game Trayectopia¹ was designed to engage the complexities of everyday mobilities through storytelling. In this paper, we explain storytelling, games and ludic initiatives in urban planning processes, the conceptual basis for Trayectopia, and how to play the game. Trayectopia contributes to a more situated form of urban and design and planning by incorporating multiple knowledges—particularly those emerging from diverse mobility experiences—into the process. Including new stories is crucial to new forms of thinking to address complex and fast-changing urban planning challenges.Keywords

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This is the second instalment of a special section exploring the pedagogies—classroom and otherwise—associated with mobilities scholarship. As we discussed in the previous introduction (Transfers 13.1/2), the collocation of mobility and pedagogy is by no means a one-way street when it comes to innovation since, in several instances, novel theories and methodologies have emerged directly out of classroom teaching rather than the other way around.¹ This dynamic was apparent in the discussions that took place at the first-ever conference dedicated to mobility pedagogy, which took place at Waterloo University, Canada, in 2018 (see Nicholson, 13.1), and is evidenced here in several articles across the two issues.² As we discussed previously, the field's reputation for innovative methodologies is often the link between research and teaching, and the variety of applications continues to grow. In this special section introduction, we have therefore taken the opportunity to reflect upon some possible new directions for mobilities and pedagogy that take account of not only topical theoretical and political debates but also the pedagogic practices that may, themselves, inspire new research and “real-world” applications. In particular, we share some reflections on the way in which the concept of mobility justice, as first advanced by Mimi Sheller in 2018, lends a new dimension to mobility pedagogies and connects with research and teaching on social justice more broadly.³

In this article, we take seriously where we teach mobilities from and why that matters. “Where from?” asks vital questions about how teaching and learning in mobilities are located in various traditions, spaces and bodies that shape knowledges co-produced in the classroom, application beyond it, and the future of the field more widely. Asking “where from?” helps identify how our mobilities pedagogies are situated and the perspectives they emphasize and those they overlook. In this article, we reflect on the creation and evolution of a mobilities course and confront its “where-ing” in four ways, exploring the disciplinary, institutional, positionality, and spatial influences on our pedagogies. We explore why these matter, strategies for negotiating them, and why asking “where from?” is key for anyone teaching mobilities.

As a pedagogical and ludic tool, the game Trayectopia¹ was designed to engage the complexities of everyday mobilities through storytelling. In this paper, we explain storytelling, games and ludic initiatives in urban planning processes, the conceptual basis for Trayectopia, and how to play the game. Trayectopia contributes to a more situated form of urban and design and planning by incorporating multiple knowledges—particularly those emerging from diverse mobility experiences—into the process. Including new stories is crucial to new forms of thinking to address complex and fast-changing urban planning challenges.Keywords

If we understand texts both as “spatial events” that take place otherwise in different spatio-temporal contexts but also as “mobile events” that activate mobilities of different kinds, how does this approach influence our teaching of literary geographies? This paper is inspired by the idea that a mobile approach to literary geography may move our pedagogical practices, mobilising creatively our didactics and activating new experimental and performative ways for teaching (with) texts. The article begins by discussing the opportunities and issues related to the teaching of literary geographies through a mobility-centred approach, inspired by mobility studies and creative pedagogies in the geohumanities. Then it discusses empirical examples of teaching activities set in the Italian contexts and imagined for “moving (with) texts” in and outside the classroom.

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This is the second instalment of a special section exploring the pedagogies—classroom and otherwise—associated with mobilities scholarship. As we discussed in the previous introduction (Transfers 13.1/2), the collocation of mobility and pedagogy is by no means a one-way street when it comes to innovation since, in several instances, novel theories and methodologies have emerged directly out of classroom teaching rather than the other way around.¹ This dynamic was apparent in the discussions that took place at the first-ever conference dedicated to mobility pedagogy, which took place at Waterloo University, Canada, in 2018 (see Nicholson, 13.1), and is evidenced here in several articles across the two issues.² As we discussed previously, the field's reputation for innovative methodologies is often the link between research and teaching, and the variety of applications continues to grow. In this special section introduction, we have therefore taken the opportunity to reflect upon some possible new directions for mobilities and pedagogy that take account of not only topical theoretical and political debates but also the pedagogic practices that may, themselves, inspire new research and “real-world” applications. In particular, we share some reflections on the way in which the concept of mobility justice, as first advanced by Mimi Sheller in 2018, lends a new dimension to mobility pedagogies and connects with research and teaching on social justice more broadly.³

In this article, we take seriously where we teach mobilities from and why that matters. “Where from?” asks vital questions about how teaching and learning in mobilities are located in various traditions, spaces and bodies that shape knowledges co-produced in the classroom, application beyond it, and the future of the field more widely. Asking “where from?” helps identify how our mobilities pedagogies are situated and the perspectives they emphasize and those they overlook. In this article, we reflect on the creation and evolution of a mobilities course and confront its “where-ing” in four ways, exploring the disciplinary, institutional, positionality, and spatial influences on our pedagogies. We explore why these matter, strategies for negotiating them, and why asking “where from?” is key for anyone teaching mobilities.

As a pedagogical and ludic tool, the game Trayectopia¹ was designed to engage the complexities of everyday mobilities through storytelling. In this paper, we explain storytelling, games and ludic initiatives in urban planning processes, the conceptual basis for Trayectopia, and how to play the game. Trayectopia contributes to a more situated form of urban and design and planning by incorporating multiple knowledges—particularly those emerging from diverse mobility experiences—into the process. Including new stories is crucial to new forms of thinking to address complex and fast-changing urban planning challenges.Keywords

If we understand texts both as “spatial events” that take place otherwise in different spatio-temporal contexts but also as “mobile events” that activate mobilities of different kinds, how does this approach influence our teaching of literary geographies? This paper is inspired by the idea that a mobile approach to literary geography may move our pedagogical practices, mobilising creatively our didactics and activating new experimental and performative ways for teaching (with) texts. The article begins by discussing the opportunities and issues related to the teaching of literary geographies through a mobility-centred approach, inspired by mobility studies and creative pedagogies in the geohumanities. Then it discusses empirical examples of teaching activities set in the Italian contexts and imagined for “moving (with) texts” in and outside the classroom.

This article adopts an “engaged pedagogy” inspired by feminist thinking to revisit reflections concerning inquiries undertaken into mobilities that incorporate video-making. Moving from a human geographic perspective, the article focuses on several aspects developed in the course unit the author teaches on space, place, and mobility. In the proposed pedagogy, video-making allows learners to focus on mobilities as central to our understanding of contemporary social and spatial dynamics, as well as raising awareness of mobile spatial embodiments and their critical entanglement with ordinary encounters. Video-making engages students in deconstructing the inequalities that affect mobilities explicating issues of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. In addition, it allows learners to experiment with strategies and tools that support communication on the move, which are increasingly ordinary. In conclusion, the article suggests that if a mobilities scholarship were to embrace the “engaged” pedagogic potential of video-making, this should be understood as a constituent within the wider politics of mobilities.

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This is the second instalment of a special section exploring the pedagogies—classroom and otherwise—associated with mobilities scholarship. As we discussed in the previous introduction (Transfers 13.1/2), the collocation of mobility and pedagogy is by no means a one-way street when it comes to innovation since, in several instances, novel theories and methodologies have emerged directly out of classroom teaching rather than the other way around.¹ This dynamic was apparent in the discussions that took place at the first-ever conference dedicated to mobility pedagogy, which took place at Waterloo University, Canada, in 2018 (see Nicholson, 13.1), and is evidenced here in several articles across the two issues.² As we discussed previously, the field's reputation for innovative methodologies is often the link between research and teaching, and the variety of applications continues to grow. In this special section introduction, we have therefore taken the opportunity to reflect upon some possible new directions for mobilities and pedagogy that take account of not only topical theoretical and political debates but also the pedagogic practices that may, themselves, inspire new research and “real-world” applications. In particular, we share some reflections on the way in which the concept of mobility justice, as first advanced by Mimi Sheller in 2018, lends a new dimension to mobility pedagogies and connects with research and teaching on social justice more broadly.³

In this article, we take seriously where we teach mobilities from and why that matters. “Where from?” asks vital questions about how teaching and learning in mobilities are located in various traditions, spaces and bodies that shape knowledges co-produced in the classroom, application beyond it, and the future of the field more widely. Asking “where from?” helps identify how our mobilities pedagogies are situated and the perspectives they emphasize and those they overlook. In this article, we reflect on the creation and evolution of a mobilities course and confront its “where-ing” in four ways, exploring the disciplinary, institutional, positionality, and spatial influences on our pedagogies. We explore why these matter, strategies for negotiating them, and why asking “where from?” is key for anyone teaching mobilities.

As a pedagogical and ludic tool, the game Trayectopia¹ was designed to engage the complexities of everyday mobilities through storytelling. In this paper, we explain storytelling, games and ludic initiatives in urban planning processes, the conceptual basis for Trayectopia, and how to play the game. Trayectopia contributes to a more situated form of urban and design and planning by incorporating multiple knowledges—particularly those emerging from diverse mobility experiences—into the process. Including new stories is crucial to new forms of thinking to address complex and fast-changing urban planning challenges.Keywords

If we understand texts both as “spatial events” that take place otherwise in different spatio-temporal contexts but also as “mobile events” that activate mobilities of different kinds, how does this approach influence our teaching of literary geographies? This paper is inspired by the idea that a mobile approach to literary geography may move our pedagogical practices, mobilising creatively our didactics and activating new experimental and performative ways for teaching (with) texts. The article begins by discussing the opportunities and issues related to the teaching of literary geographies through a mobility-centred approach, inspired by mobility studies and creative pedagogies in the geohumanities. Then it discusses empirical examples of teaching activities set in the Italian contexts and imagined for “moving (with) texts” in and outside the classroom.

This article adopts an “engaged pedagogy” inspired by feminist thinking to revisit reflections concerning inquiries undertaken into mobilities that incorporate video-making. Moving from a human geographic perspective, the article focuses on several aspects developed in the course unit the author teaches on space, place, and mobility. In the proposed pedagogy, video-making allows learners to focus on mobilities as central to our understanding of contemporary social and spatial dynamics, as well as raising awareness of mobile spatial embodiments and their critical entanglement with ordinary encounters. Video-making engages students in deconstructing the inequalities that affect mobilities explicating issues of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. In addition, it allows learners to experiment with strategies and tools that support communication on the move, which are increasingly ordinary. In conclusion, the article suggests that if a mobilities scholarship were to embrace the “engaged” pedagogic potential of video-making, this should be understood as a constituent within the wider politics of mobilities.

Emily Ruete, E. J. van Donzel, An Arabian Princess between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs: Syrian Customs and Usages (Brill, 1992), 549 pages, (€296.00)

Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (Random House, 1995 [1959]), translated by Eileen Hall, p. 218, price $9.99)¹

Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002), 1–269, $21.95

Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (London: Penguin Random House, 2015), £10.00, 80pp.

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This is the second instalment of a special section exploring the pedagogies—classroom and otherwise—associated with mobilities scholarship. As we discussed in the previous introduction (Transfers 13.1/2), the collocation of mobility and pedagogy is by no means a one-way street when it comes to innovation since, in several instances, novel theories and methodologies have emerged directly out of classroom teaching rather than the other way around.¹ This dynamic was apparent in the discussions that took place at the first-ever conference dedicated to mobility pedagogy, which took place at Waterloo University, Canada, in 2018 (see Nicholson, 13.1), and is evidenced here in several articles across the two issues.² As we discussed previously, the field's reputation for innovative methodologies is often the link between research and teaching, and the variety of applications continues to grow. In this special section introduction, we have therefore taken the opportunity to reflect upon some possible new directions for mobilities and pedagogy that take account of not only topical theoretical and political debates but also the pedagogic practices that may, themselves, inspire new research and “real-world” applications. In particular, we share some reflections on the way in which the concept of mobility justice, as first advanced by Mimi Sheller in 2018, lends a new dimension to mobility pedagogies and connects with research and teaching on social justice more broadly.³

In this article, we take seriously where we teach mobilities from and why that matters. “Where from?” asks vital questions about how teaching and learning in mobilities are located in various traditions, spaces and bodies that shape knowledges co-produced in the classroom, application beyond it, and the future of the field more widely. Asking “where from?” helps identify how our mobilities pedagogies are situated and the perspectives they emphasize and those they overlook. In this article, we reflect on the creation and evolution of a mobilities course and confront its “where-ing” in four ways, exploring the disciplinary, institutional, positionality, and spatial influences on our pedagogies. We explore why these matter, strategies for negotiating them, and why asking “where from?” is key for anyone teaching mobilities.

As a pedagogical and ludic tool, the game Trayectopia¹ was designed to engage the complexities of everyday mobilities through storytelling. In this paper, we explain storytelling, games and ludic initiatives in urban planning processes, the conceptual basis for Trayectopia, and how to play the game. Trayectopia contributes to a more situated form of urban and design and planning by incorporating multiple knowledges—particularly those emerging from diverse mobility experiences—into the process. Including new stories is crucial to new forms of thinking to address complex and fast-changing urban planning challenges.Keywords

If we understand texts both as “spatial events” that take place otherwise in different spatio-temporal contexts but also as “mobile events” that activate mobilities of different kinds, how does this approach influence our teaching of literary geographies? This paper is inspired by the idea that a mobile approach to literary geography may move our pedagogical practices, mobilising creatively our didactics and activating new experimental and performative ways for teaching (with) texts. The article begins by discussing the opportunities and issues related to the teaching of literary geographies through a mobility-centred approach, inspired by mobility studies and creative pedagogies in the geohumanities. Then it discusses empirical examples of teaching activities set in the Italian contexts and imagined for “moving (with) texts” in and outside the classroom.

This article adopts an “engaged pedagogy” inspired by feminist thinking to revisit reflections concerning inquiries undertaken into mobilities that incorporate video-making. Moving from a human geographic perspective, the article focuses on several aspects developed in the course unit the author teaches on space, place, and mobility. In the proposed pedagogy, video-making allows learners to focus on mobilities as central to our understanding of contemporary social and spatial dynamics, as well as raising awareness of mobile spatial embodiments and their critical entanglement with ordinary encounters. Video-making engages students in deconstructing the inequalities that affect mobilities explicating issues of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. In addition, it allows learners to experiment with strategies and tools that support communication on the move, which are increasingly ordinary. In conclusion, the article suggests that if a mobilities scholarship were to embrace the “engaged” pedagogic potential of video-making, this should be understood as a constituent within the wider politics of mobilities.

Emily Ruete, E. J. van Donzel, An Arabian Princess between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs: Syrian Customs and Usages (Brill, 1992), 549 pages, (€296.00)

Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (Random House, 1995 [1959]), translated by Eileen Hall, p. 218, price $9.99)¹

Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002), 1–269, $21.95

Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (London: Penguin Random House, 2015), £10.00, 80pp.

Carlnita P. Greene (Ed.), Foodscapes: Food, Space, and Place in a Global Society (New York Peter Lang, 2019), 325 pages, £33.60 (paperback)

Suzanne Beech, The Geographies of International Student Mobility: Spaces Places and Decision-Making (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 271 pp., 5 b/w illustrations, €59,49 (paperback)

Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This is the second instalment of a special section exploring the pedagogies—classroom and otherwise—associated with mobilities scholarship. As we discussed in the previous introduction (Transfers 13.1/2), the collocation of mobility and pedagogy is by no means a one-way street when it comes to innovation since, in several instances, novel theories and methodologies have emerged directly out of classroom teaching rather than the other way around.¹ This dynamic was apparent in the discussions that took place at the first-ever conference dedicated to mobility pedagogy, which took place at Waterloo University, Canada, in 2018 (see Nicholson, 13.1), and is evidenced here in several articles across the two issues.² As we discussed previously, the field's reputation for innovative methodologies is often the link between research and teaching, and the variety of applications continues to grow. In this special section introduction, we have therefore taken the opportunity to reflect upon some possible new directions for mobilities and pedagogy that take account of not only topical theoretical and political debates but also the pedagogic practices that may, themselves, inspire new research and “real-world” applications. In particular, we share some reflections on the way in which the concept of mobility justice, as first advanced by Mimi Sheller in 2018, lends a new dimension to mobility pedagogies and connects with research and teaching on social justice more broadly.³

In this article, we take seriously where we teach mobilities from and why that matters. “Where from?” asks vital questions about how teaching and learning in mobilities are located in various traditions, spaces and bodies that shape knowledges co-produced in the classroom, application beyond it, and the future of the field more widely. Asking “where from?” helps identify how our mobilities pedagogies are situated and the perspectives they emphasize and those they overlook. In this article, we reflect on the creation and evolution of a mobilities course and confront its “where-ing” in four ways, exploring the disciplinary, institutional, positionality, and spatial influences on our pedagogies. We explore why these matter, strategies for negotiating them, and why asking “where from?” is key for anyone teaching mobilities.

As a pedagogical and ludic tool, the game Trayectopia¹ was designed to engage the complexities of everyday mobilities through storytelling. In this paper, we explain storytelling, games and ludic initiatives in urban planning processes, the conceptual basis for Trayectopia, and how to play the game. Trayectopia contributes to a more situated form of urban and design and planning by incorporating multiple knowledges—particularly those emerging from diverse mobility experiences—into the process. Including new stories is crucial to new forms of thinking to address complex and fast-changing urban planning challenges.Keywords

If we understand texts both as “spatial events” that take place otherwise in different spatio-temporal contexts but also as “mobile events” that activate mobilities of different kinds, how does this approach influence our teaching of literary geographies? This paper is inspired by the idea that a mobile approach to literary geography may move our pedagogical practices, mobilising creatively our didactics and activating new experimental and performative ways for teaching (with) texts. The article begins by discussing the opportunities and issues related to the teaching of literary geographies through a mobility-centred approach, inspired by mobility studies and creative pedagogies in the geohumanities. Then it discusses empirical examples of teaching activities set in the Italian contexts and imagined for “moving (with) texts” in and outside the classroom.

This article adopts an “engaged pedagogy” inspired by feminist thinking to revisit reflections concerning inquiries undertaken into mobilities that incorporate video-making. Moving from a human geographic perspective, the article focuses on several aspects developed in the course unit the author teaches on space, place, and mobility. In the proposed pedagogy, video-making allows learners to focus on mobilities as central to our understanding of contemporary social and spatial dynamics, as well as raising awareness of mobile spatial embodiments and their critical entanglement with ordinary encounters. Video-making engages students in deconstructing the inequalities that affect mobilities explicating issues of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. In addition, it allows learners to experiment with strategies and tools that support communication on the move, which are increasingly ordinary. In conclusion, the article suggests that if a mobilities scholarship were to embrace the “engaged” pedagogic potential of video-making, this should be understood as a constituent within the wider politics of mobilities.

Emily Ruete, E. J. van Donzel, An Arabian Princess between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs: Syrian Customs and Usages (Brill, 1992), 549 pages, (€296.00)

Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (Random House, 1995 [1959]), translated by Eileen Hall, p. 218, price $9.99)¹

Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002), 1–269, $21.95

Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (London: Penguin Random House, 2015), £10.00, 80pp.

Carlnita P. Greene (Ed.), Foodscapes: Food, Space, and Place in a Global Society (New York Peter Lang, 2019), 325 pages, £33.60 (paperback)

Suzanne Beech, The Geographies of International Student Mobility: Spaces Places and Decision-Making (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 271 pp., 5 b/w illustrations, €59,49 (paperback)

As the hype cycles surrounding autonomous vehicles (AVs) continue to oscillate, it appears that the mobilities they entail are set to become more than a fleeting feature of our socio-spatial landscapes. How to understand these emerging mobilities, the range of issues they generate, and the regulatory approaches they demand? This article centers on a single incident that took place on October 2, 2023, in San Francisco, where a Cruise vehicle pinned a woman and dragged her several feet after she had been struck by a human-driven car. Examining the key facts of the case and tracing its aftermath illustrates some of the principal challenges posed by AV mobilities as well as possibilities for regulating them. The text offers four interlinked analytics as future avenues of research and policymaking surrounding autonomous mobilities: (1) rhetorical trickery, (2) new kinds of mistakes, (3) informational asymmetries, and (4) regulatory ambiguities.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

This article offers a perspective on how mobilities and landscape intertwine outside the academic debate, in the context of learning practices concerned with landscape, sustainability, and citizenship education. The article is based on the analysis of two personal research-action experiences conducted in Italy from 2017 onward in two different contexts: school education and informal education. The first experience concerns a project on promoting sustainable mobility that involved secondary school students, while the second addresses the informal learning activities of urban walking groups. These different experiences are connected and analyzed by adopting the notions of enskillment and friction as interpretive tools to help trace some of the multiple and unpredictable ways in which movement interacts with landscape in pedagogical contexts.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

This article offers a perspective on how mobilities and landscape intertwine outside the academic debate, in the context of learning practices concerned with landscape, sustainability, and citizenship education. The article is based on the analysis of two personal research-action experiences conducted in Italy from 2017 onward in two different contexts: school education and informal education. The first experience concerns a project on promoting sustainable mobility that involved secondary school students, while the second addresses the informal learning activities of urban walking groups. These different experiences are connected and analyzed by adopting the notions of enskillment and friction as interpretive tools to help trace some of the multiple and unpredictable ways in which movement interacts with landscape in pedagogical contexts.

John Urry has been one of the prominent visionaries of futural social and material worlds as a nexus of mobilities in the social sciences and beyond. His work developed in spaces of collaboration and exchange with colleagues, among whom are the contributors to this special section. In this introductory article I provide a brief genealogy of the “new mobilities paradigm,” outlining its relationship to social ontologies of belonging that inform and are informed epistemologically by new spatial and temporal configurations of life. Its formation and development have always been a collaborative international venture of scholars, activists, and policymakers, wishing to map the ways cultures and societies race to the future. From these groups I introduce the section's contributors as prominent academic examples.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

This article offers a perspective on how mobilities and landscape intertwine outside the academic debate, in the context of learning practices concerned with landscape, sustainability, and citizenship education. The article is based on the analysis of two personal research-action experiences conducted in Italy from 2017 onward in two different contexts: school education and informal education. The first experience concerns a project on promoting sustainable mobility that involved secondary school students, while the second addresses the informal learning activities of urban walking groups. These different experiences are connected and analyzed by adopting the notions of enskillment and friction as interpretive tools to help trace some of the multiple and unpredictable ways in which movement interacts with landscape in pedagogical contexts.

John Urry has been one of the prominent visionaries of futural social and material worlds as a nexus of mobilities in the social sciences and beyond. His work developed in spaces of collaboration and exchange with colleagues, among whom are the contributors to this special section. In this introductory article I provide a brief genealogy of the “new mobilities paradigm,” outlining its relationship to social ontologies of belonging that inform and are informed epistemologically by new spatial and temporal configurations of life. Its formation and development have always been a collaborative international venture of scholars, activists, and policymakers, wishing to map the ways cultures and societies race to the future. From these groups I introduce the section's contributors as prominent academic examples.

This article traces the enduring legacy of metaphorical thinking in John Urry's work. It begins with a reflection on metaphorical thinking as a mobile epistemology and then details the impact of three key metaphors Urry proposed in his work: the tourist gaze, nomads, and dwelling-in-mobility. The article focuses on the way these metaphors have informed my own research on mobile lifestyles, but also discusses the broader impact of Urry's metaphorical thinking on the current and future field of mobilities studies.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

This article offers a perspective on how mobilities and landscape intertwine outside the academic debate, in the context of learning practices concerned with landscape, sustainability, and citizenship education. The article is based on the analysis of two personal research-action experiences conducted in Italy from 2017 onward in two different contexts: school education and informal education. The first experience concerns a project on promoting sustainable mobility that involved secondary school students, while the second addresses the informal learning activities of urban walking groups. These different experiences are connected and analyzed by adopting the notions of enskillment and friction as interpretive tools to help trace some of the multiple and unpredictable ways in which movement interacts with landscape in pedagogical contexts.

John Urry has been one of the prominent visionaries of futural social and material worlds as a nexus of mobilities in the social sciences and beyond. His work developed in spaces of collaboration and exchange with colleagues, among whom are the contributors to this special section. In this introductory article I provide a brief genealogy of the “new mobilities paradigm,” outlining its relationship to social ontologies of belonging that inform and are informed epistemologically by new spatial and temporal configurations of life. Its formation and development have always been a collaborative international venture of scholars, activists, and policymakers, wishing to map the ways cultures and societies race to the future. From these groups I introduce the section's contributors as prominent academic examples.

This article traces the enduring legacy of metaphorical thinking in John Urry's work. It begins with a reflection on metaphorical thinking as a mobile epistemology and then details the impact of three key metaphors Urry proposed in his work: the tourist gaze, nomads, and dwelling-in-mobility. The article focuses on the way these metaphors have informed my own research on mobile lifestyles, but also discusses the broader impact of Urry's metaphorical thinking on the current and future field of mobilities studies.

John Urry's legacy is rich and reaches beyond the sociology of mobility. This article follows up on Urry's interest in exploring possible mobile futures by connecting the field of mobilities research to design. “Mobilities design” has emerged as a subbranch of mobilities research during the last decade. By looking into the critical-creative ways in which designers explore potential futures, mobilities research may indeed learn fruitful lessons of future imagination. Specifically, the article illustrates how such “designerly ways of thinking” add new insight when exploring “what the future is,” which Urry set out to do as the last thing of his career.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

This article offers a perspective on how mobilities and landscape intertwine outside the academic debate, in the context of learning practices concerned with landscape, sustainability, and citizenship education. The article is based on the analysis of two personal research-action experiences conducted in Italy from 2017 onward in two different contexts: school education and informal education. The first experience concerns a project on promoting sustainable mobility that involved secondary school students, while the second addresses the informal learning activities of urban walking groups. These different experiences are connected and analyzed by adopting the notions of enskillment and friction as interpretive tools to help trace some of the multiple and unpredictable ways in which movement interacts with landscape in pedagogical contexts.

John Urry has been one of the prominent visionaries of futural social and material worlds as a nexus of mobilities in the social sciences and beyond. His work developed in spaces of collaboration and exchange with colleagues, among whom are the contributors to this special section. In this introductory article I provide a brief genealogy of the “new mobilities paradigm,” outlining its relationship to social ontologies of belonging that inform and are informed epistemologically by new spatial and temporal configurations of life. Its formation and development have always been a collaborative international venture of scholars, activists, and policymakers, wishing to map the ways cultures and societies race to the future. From these groups I introduce the section's contributors as prominent academic examples.

This article traces the enduring legacy of metaphorical thinking in John Urry's work. It begins with a reflection on metaphorical thinking as a mobile epistemology and then details the impact of three key metaphors Urry proposed in his work: the tourist gaze, nomads, and dwelling-in-mobility. The article focuses on the way these metaphors have informed my own research on mobile lifestyles, but also discusses the broader impact of Urry's metaphorical thinking on the current and future field of mobilities studies.

John Urry's legacy is rich and reaches beyond the sociology of mobility. This article follows up on Urry's interest in exploring possible mobile futures by connecting the field of mobilities research to design. “Mobilities design” has emerged as a subbranch of mobilities research during the last decade. By looking into the critical-creative ways in which designers explore potential futures, mobilities research may indeed learn fruitful lessons of future imagination. Specifically, the article illustrates how such “designerly ways of thinking” add new insight when exploring “what the future is,” which Urry set out to do as the last thing of his career.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, two interrelated themes emerged across art, activism, and academia related to the fate of humans on Earth. The first being the demise of “the future” and the prominence of dystopian scenarios for thinking of social futures. The other being the “emergence of the planet” in social science and the humanities. John Urry explored both themes, especially in his later work on the complex interrelationships of carbon-based mobility systems in the shadow of climate change and ecological disaster. In this article I will seek to trace these two themes out, exploring how that the planetary turn also resonates with changes in “the structures of feeling” and how this may invite for reimagining social futures from a more-than-human perspective.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

This article offers a perspective on how mobilities and landscape intertwine outside the academic debate, in the context of learning practices concerned with landscape, sustainability, and citizenship education. The article is based on the analysis of two personal research-action experiences conducted in Italy from 2017 onward in two different contexts: school education and informal education. The first experience concerns a project on promoting sustainable mobility that involved secondary school students, while the second addresses the informal learning activities of urban walking groups. These different experiences are connected and analyzed by adopting the notions of enskillment and friction as interpretive tools to help trace some of the multiple and unpredictable ways in which movement interacts with landscape in pedagogical contexts.

John Urry has been one of the prominent visionaries of futural social and material worlds as a nexus of mobilities in the social sciences and beyond. His work developed in spaces of collaboration and exchange with colleagues, among whom are the contributors to this special section. In this introductory article I provide a brief genealogy of the “new mobilities paradigm,” outlining its relationship to social ontologies of belonging that inform and are informed epistemologically by new spatial and temporal configurations of life. Its formation and development have always been a collaborative international venture of scholars, activists, and policymakers, wishing to map the ways cultures and societies race to the future. From these groups I introduce the section's contributors as prominent academic examples.

This article traces the enduring legacy of metaphorical thinking in John Urry's work. It begins with a reflection on metaphorical thinking as a mobile epistemology and then details the impact of three key metaphors Urry proposed in his work: the tourist gaze, nomads, and dwelling-in-mobility. The article focuses on the way these metaphors have informed my own research on mobile lifestyles, but also discusses the broader impact of Urry's metaphorical thinking on the current and future field of mobilities studies.

John Urry's legacy is rich and reaches beyond the sociology of mobility. This article follows up on Urry's interest in exploring possible mobile futures by connecting the field of mobilities research to design. “Mobilities design” has emerged as a subbranch of mobilities research during the last decade. By looking into the critical-creative ways in which designers explore potential futures, mobilities research may indeed learn fruitful lessons of future imagination. Specifically, the article illustrates how such “designerly ways of thinking” add new insight when exploring “what the future is,” which Urry set out to do as the last thing of his career.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, two interrelated themes emerged across art, activism, and academia related to the fate of humans on Earth. The first being the demise of “the future” and the prominence of dystopian scenarios for thinking of social futures. The other being the “emergence of the planet” in social science and the humanities. John Urry explored both themes, especially in his later work on the complex interrelationships of carbon-based mobility systems in the shadow of climate change and ecological disaster. In this article I will seek to trace these two themes out, exploring how that the planetary turn also resonates with changes in “the structures of feeling” and how this may invite for reimagining social futures from a more-than-human perspective.

This article puts John Urry's thought on the mobilities turn into conversation with Caribbean critical theory, which was in fact the starting point for my collaborations with Urry on the new mobilities paradigm twenty or more years ago. It describes the relation between my work on the Caribbean and the emergence of the new mobilities paradigm at Lancaster University between about 1999 and 2006. Then it considers the influence of Urry's work on thinking more widely about climate mobilities and carbon form. Finally, it seeks to “pluralize” mobilities research by showing how decolonial and indigenous critiques of the ongoing relations between mobility/immobility, energy production/consumption, and the “coloniality of climate” are necessary to dismantle the powerful racialized mobility regimes that work in the interest of kinetic elites.

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

This article offers a perspective on how mobilities and landscape intertwine outside the academic debate, in the context of learning practices concerned with landscape, sustainability, and citizenship education. The article is based on the analysis of two personal research-action experiences conducted in Italy from 2017 onward in two different contexts: school education and informal education. The first experience concerns a project on promoting sustainable mobility that involved secondary school students, while the second addresses the informal learning activities of urban walking groups. These different experiences are connected and analyzed by adopting the notions of enskillment and friction as interpretive tools to help trace some of the multiple and unpredictable ways in which movement interacts with landscape in pedagogical contexts.

John Urry has been one of the prominent visionaries of futural social and material worlds as a nexus of mobilities in the social sciences and beyond. His work developed in spaces of collaboration and exchange with colleagues, among whom are the contributors to this special section. In this introductory article I provide a brief genealogy of the “new mobilities paradigm,” outlining its relationship to social ontologies of belonging that inform and are informed epistemologically by new spatial and temporal configurations of life. Its formation and development have always been a collaborative international venture of scholars, activists, and policymakers, wishing to map the ways cultures and societies race to the future. From these groups I introduce the section's contributors as prominent academic examples.

This article traces the enduring legacy of metaphorical thinking in John Urry's work. It begins with a reflection on metaphorical thinking as a mobile epistemology and then details the impact of three key metaphors Urry proposed in his work: the tourist gaze, nomads, and dwelling-in-mobility. The article focuses on the way these metaphors have informed my own research on mobile lifestyles, but also discusses the broader impact of Urry's metaphorical thinking on the current and future field of mobilities studies.

John Urry's legacy is rich and reaches beyond the sociology of mobility. This article follows up on Urry's interest in exploring possible mobile futures by connecting the field of mobilities research to design. “Mobilities design” has emerged as a subbranch of mobilities research during the last decade. By looking into the critical-creative ways in which designers explore potential futures, mobilities research may indeed learn fruitful lessons of future imagination. Specifically, the article illustrates how such “designerly ways of thinking” add new insight when exploring “what the future is,” which Urry set out to do as the last thing of his career.