An illustrated travelogue that brilliantly captures artist and illustrator Emma Fick’s epic train journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway—from Beijing through Mongolia to Moscow—including more than 200 watercolor illustrations and handwritten text that includes cultural and historical information as well as invaluable travel tips. In May 2015, on a trip through the Baltics and Scandinavia, artist and illustrator Emma Fick and her boyfriend (now husband) Helvio discovered a worn copy of the Trans-Siberian Handbook at a secondhand shop in Helsinki. Many travelers from around the globe had used the guide to journey on the longest train ride in the world. Emma and Helvio took their find as a sign to embark on their own adventure on the legendary railway that has captured the imaginations and curiosities of many travelers and explorers since its construction a century ago. A year and a half later, with Trans-Siberian Handbook in hand, they boarded the train in Beijing. Their odyssey was just beginning. Border Crossings is the chronicle of their unforgettable 26-day, 8-city journey across Asia to Moscow. Emma offers a concise history of the railway and in vivid, visual language, takes you across a vast landscape of rural villages and bustling urban centers, through open food markets brimming with delicacies and a snowy mountain wilderness dotted with clusters of gers—nomadic homes. Emma’s detailed observations and lush descriptions, accompanied by detailed colorful illustrations, bring this remarkable journey of discovery and adventure—the landscapes, food, people and cultures—to life. Experience drinking salty milk tea, eating shoe sole cake (fried cakes shaped like shoe soles piled high and topped with milk curds and hard candies), and riding camels in Mongolia. In Russia, wander through a snow-draped countryside filled with stands of birch trees, explore the wonders of freshwater Lake Baikal—the source of omul, a ubiquitous and beloved fish delicacy—go ice fishing, and take a self-guided tour of Moscow. With its hand-drawn maps, its wealth of illustrations of every aspect of the experience—from sleeping quarters on a train to the highlights of a monastery or the details of a memorable meal, Border Crossings is an invitation to experience new destinations and cultures first-hand—to travel the Trans-Siberian Railway as never before, whether you’re a nomad looking for a new vacation destination, an armchair traveler, or just culturally curious.

Graphic narratives of tragedies involving the journeys of irregular migrants trying to reach destinations in the global north are common in the media and are blamed almost invariably on human smuggling facilitators, described as rapacious members of highly structured underground transnational criminal organizations, who take advantage of migrants and prey upon their vulnerability. This book contributes to the current scholarship on migration by providing a window into the lives and experiences of those behind the facilitation of irregular border crossing journeys. Based on fieldwork conducted among coyotes in Arizona - the main point of entry for irregular migrants in the United States by the turn of the 21st Century - this project goes beyond traditional narratives of victimization and financial exploitation and asks: who are the men and women behind the journeys of irregular migrants worldwide? How and why do they enter the human smuggling market? How are they organized? How do they understand their roles in transnational migration? How do they explain the violence and victimization so many migrants face while in transit? This book is suitable for students and academics involved in the study of migration, border enforcement and migrant and refugee criminalization.

Shows how Christians can inhabit the whole world--public and private, body and soul--by engaging popular culture, political concerns, and cultural issues.

Set in the north of England, Barker's new novel portrays a child psychiatrist who rescues a man from drowning one day while walking on a beach in Northumberland. Uncannily, he recognizes the man: it's Danny Miller, a child murderer at whose trial he once gave evidence. Since the trial, he has reconsidered that evidence and found it lacking. Now he confronts the man whose altered fate may be his responsibility.

For anthropologists and social scientists working in North and South America, the past few decades have brought considerable change as issues such as repatriation, cultural jurisdiction, and revitalization movements have swept across the hemisphere. Today scholars are rethinking both how and why they study culture as they gain a new appreciation for the impact they have on the people they study. Key to this reassessment of the social sciences is a rethinking of the concept of borders: not only between cultures and nations but between disciplines such as archaeology and cultural anthropology, between past and present, and between anthropologists and indigenous peoples. "Border Crossings" is a collection of fourteen essays about the evolving focus and perspective of anthropologists and the anthropology of North and South America over the past two decades. For a growing number of researchers, the realities of working in the Americas have changed the distinctions between being a "Latin," "North," or "Native" Americanist as these researchers turn their interests and expertise simultaneously homeward and out across the globe.

Delving into questions like, What are borders? and Who are border crossers?, Border Crossings breaks down the complex issue through an extensive variety of readings and activities to really get you thinking and evaluating this theme.

The concept of border and border crossing has important implications for how we theorize cultural politics, power, ideology, pedagogy and critical intellectual work. This completely revised and updated edition takes these areas and draws new connections between postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Highly relevant to the times which we currently live, Giroux reflects on the limits and possibilities of border crossings in the twenty-first century and argues that in the post-9/11 world, borders have not been collapsing but vigorously rebuilt. The author identifies the most pressing issues facing critical educators at the turn of the century and discusses topics such as the struggle over the academic canon; the role of popular culture in the curriculum; and the cultural war the New Right has waged on schools. New sections deal with militarization in public spaces, empire building, and the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Those interested in cultural studies, critical race theory, education, sociology and speech communication will find this a valuable source of information.

Clandestine Crossings delivers an in-depth description and analysis of the experiences of working-class Mexican migrants at the beginning of the twenty-first century as they enter the United States surreptitiously with the help of paid guides known as coyotes. Drawing on ethnographic observations of crossing conditions in the borderlands of South Texas, as well as interviews with migrants, coyotes, and border officials, Spener details how migrants and coyotes work together to evade apprehension by U.S. law enforcement authorities as they cross the border. In so doing, he seeks to dispel many of the myths that misinform public debate about undocumented immigration to the United States. The hiring of a coyote, Spener argues, is one of the principal strategies that Mexican migrants have developed in response to intensified U.S. border enforcement. Although this strategy is typically portrayed in the press as a sinister organized-crime phenomenon, Spener argues that it is better understood as the resistance of working-class Mexicans to an economic model and set of immigration policies in North America that increasingly resemble an apartheid system. In the absence of adequate employment opportunities in Mexico and legal mechanisms for them to work in the United States, migrants and coyotes draw on their social connections and cultural knowledge to stage successful border crossings in spite of the ever greater dangers placed in their path by government authorities.

This is a compelling and revealing look at the history of the U.S.-Mexico border as a place, a symbol of cross-cultural melding, and a source of growing anxiety over immigration and national security. The U.S.-Mexico border is far more than a line that separates two countries. A winding path of nearly 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, it is history, commerce, and culture. In recent years, however, attitudes about border crossings and border issues have hardened as has immigration policy. A source of growing anxiety over illegal immigration, national security, and safety, the border has become a symbol of political cataclysm over immigration law and enforcement, the future of DACA, the increasingly harsh treatment of refugees and others who attempt to cross without authorization, and the future of U.S. policy. This book traces the history of the border and its people, from the creation of the border line to explosive issues surrounding immigration and the future of the United States as a nation of diverse cultures and races.

Mexico and the United States exist in a symbiotic relationship: Mexico frequently provides the United States with cheap labor, illegal goods, and, for criminal offenders, a refuge from the law. In turn, the U.S. offers Mexican laborers the American dream: the possibility of a better livelihood through hard work. To supply each other’s demands, Americans and Mexicans have to cross their shared border from both sides. Despite this relationship, U.S. immigration reform debates tend to be security-focused and center on the idea of menacing Mexicans heading north to steal abundant American resources. Further, Congress tends to approach reform unilaterally, without engaging with Mexico or other feeder countries, and, disturbingly, without acknowledging problematic southern crossings that Americans routinely make into Mexico. In Run for the Border, Steven W. Bender offers a framework for a more comprehensive border policy through a historical analysis of border crossings, both Mexico to U.S. and U.S. to Mexico. In contrast to recent reform proposals, this book urges reform as the product of negotiation and implementation by cross-border accord; reform that honors the shared economic and cultural legacy of the U.S. and Mexico. Covering everything from the history of Anglo crossings into Mexico to escape law authorities, to vice tourism and retirement in Mexico, to today’s focus on Mexican border-crossing immigrants and drug traffickers, Bender takes lessons from the past 150 years to argue for more explicit and compassionate cross-border cooperation. Steeped in several disciplines, Run for the Border is a blend of historical, cultural, and legal perspectives, as well as those from literature and cinema, that reflect Bender’s cultural background and legal expertise.