Images have become an integral part of the political regulation of migration: they help produce categories of legality versus illegality, foster stereotypes, and mobilize political convictions. Yet how are we to understand the relationship between these images and the political in the discourse surrounding migration? How can we, as anthropologists, migration scholars, or documentary filmmakers visually represent people who are excluded from political representation? And how can such visual representations gain political momentum? This volume not only considers the images that circulate with reference to migrants or draw attention to those that accompany, show, or conceal them. The book explores the phenomena of migration with the help of images. It offers an in-depth analysis of the documentary approaches of Ursula Biemann, Renzo Martens, Bouchra Khalili, Silvain George, Raphael Cuomo and Maria Iorio, Alex Rivera, and Rania Stepha, which evoke the particularities of migrant lifeworlds and examine urgent questions regarding the interrelations between politics and poetics, mobility and mediation, and the ethics of probability and possibility. The author also discusses his own cinematic practice in the making of Tell Me When (2011), A Tale of Two Islands (2012), and Intimate Distance (2015), a trilogy of films that explore the potential to communicate the bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the experience of migration.

Media practices and the everyday cultures of transnational migrants are deeply interconnected. Mediating Migration narrates aspects of the migrant experience as shaped by the technologies of communication and the social, political and cultural configurations of neoliberal globalization. The book examines the mediated reinventions of transnational diasporic cultures, the emergence of new publics, and the manner in which nations and migrants connect. By placing migration and media practices in the same frame, the book offers a wide-ranging discussion of the contested politics of mobility and transnational cultures of diasporic communities as they are imagined, connected, and reproduced by various groups, individuals, and institutions. Drawing on current events, activism, cultural practices, and crises concerning immigration, this book is organized around themes – legitimacy, recognition, publics, domesticity, authenticity – that speak to the entangled interconnections between media and migration. Mediating Migration will be of interest to students in media, communication, and cultural studies. The book raises questions that cut across disciplines about cutting-edge issues of our times – migration, mobility, citizenship, and mediated environments.

Media practices and the everyday cultures of transnational migrants are deeply interconnected. Mediating Migration narrates aspects of the migrant experience as shaped by the technologies of communication and the social, political and cultural configurations of neoliberal globalization. The book examines the mediated reinventions of transnational diasporic cultures, the emergence of new publics, and the manner in which nations and migrants connect. By placing migration and media practices in the same frame, the book offers a wide-ranging discussion of the contested politics of mobility and transnational cultures of diasporic communities as they are imagined, connected, and reproduced by various groups, individuals, and institutions. Drawing on current events, activism, cultural practices, and crises concerning immigration, this book is organized around themes legitimacy, recognition, publics, domesticity, authenticity that speak to the entangled interconnections between media and migration. Mediating Migration will be of interest to students in media, communication, and cultural studies. The book raises questions that cut across disciplines about cutting-edge issues of our times migration, mobility, citizenship, and mediated environments.

Transnational business people, international aid workers, and diplomats are all actors on the international stage working for organizations and groups often scrutinized by the public eye. But the very lives of these global middlemen and women are relatively unstudied. Mediating the Global takes up the challenge, uncovering the day-to-day experiences of elite foreign workers and their families living in Nepal, and the policies and practices that determine their daily lives. In this book, Heather Hindman calls for a consideration of the complex role that global middlemen and women play, not merely in implementing policies, but as objects of policy. Examining the lives of expatriate professionals working in Kathmandu, Nepal and the families that accompany them, Hindman unveils intimate stories of the everyday life of global mediators. Mediating the Global focuses on expatriate employees and families who are affiliated with international development bodies, multinational corporations, and the foreign service of various countries. The author investigates the life of expatriates while they visit recreational clubs and international schools and also examines how the practices of international human resources management, cross-cultural communication, and promotion of flexible careers are transforming the world of elite overseas workers.

As everything from immigration, airport security and road tolling become headline news, the need to understand mobility has never been more pertinent. Yet ‘mobility’ remains remarkably elusive in summary and definition. This introductory text makes ‘mobility’ tangible by explaining the key theories and writings that surround it. This book traces out the concept of mobility as a key idea within the discipline of geography as well as subject areas from the wider arts and social sciences. The text takes an interdisciplinary approach to draw upon key writers and thinkers that have contributed to the topic. In analyzing these, it develops an understanding of mobility as a relationship through which the world is lived and understood. Mobility is organized around themed chapters discussing – 'Meanings', 'Politics', 'Practices' and 'Mediations', and the book identifies the evolution of mobility and its implications for theoretical debate. These include the way we think about travel and embodiment, to regarding issues such as power, feminism and post-colonialism. Important contemporary case-studies are showcased in boxes. Examples range from the mobility politics evident in the evacuation of the flooding of New Orleans, xenophobia in Southern Africa, motoring in India, to the new social relationships emerging from the mobile phone. The methodological quandaries mobility demands are addressed through highlighted boxes discussing both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Arguing for a more relational notion of the term, the book understands mobility as a keystone to the examination of issues from migration, war and transportation; from communications and politics to disability rights and security. Key concept and case-study boxes, further readings, and central issue discussions allow students to grasp the central importance of ‘mobility’ to social, cultural, political, economic and everyday terrains. The text also assists scholars of Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Planning, and Political Science to understand and engage with this evasive concept.

Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media—including print, film, theater, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric—that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images. The contributors to this collection are (Native) American and European scholars whose initial findings were presented or performed in a four-panel format at the 2012 MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) conference in Barcelona. The selection of the term Indianness is deliberate. It points to the intricate construction of ethnicity as filtered through media, despite frequent assertions of “authenticity.” From William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging “true-to-life” scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMC’s announcement that his songs tell his people’s “own history” and draw on their “true” culture, media of all types has served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy. This volume does not shy away from the issue of evaluation and how it is only tangential to medial artificiality. As evidenced in this collection, “the vibrant, ever-transforming future of Native peoples is located within a complex intersection of cultural influences,” said Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness.

Throughout the twentieth century in the lands of Yugoslavia, socialists embarked on multiple projects of supranational unification. Sensitive to the vulnerability of small nations in a world of great powers, they pursued political sovereignty, economic development, and cultural modernization at a scale between the national and the global – from regional strategies of Balkan federalism to continental visions of European integration to the internationalist ambitions of the Non-Aligned Movement. In Mediating Spaces James Robertson offers an intellectual history of the diverse supranational politics of Yugoslav socialism, beginning with its birth in the 1870s and concluding with its violent collapse in the 1990s. Showcasing the ways in which socialists in Southeast Europe confronted the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization, the book frames the evolution of supranational politics as a response to the shifting dynamics of global economic and geopolitical competition. Arguing that literature was a crucial vehicle for imagining new communities beyond the nation, Robertson analyzes the manuscripts, journals, and personal correspondence of the literary left to excavate the cultural geographies that animated Yugoslav socialism and its supranational horizons. The book ultimately illuminates the innovative strategies of cultural development used by socialist writers to challenge global asymmetries of power and prestige. Mediating Spaces reveals the full significance of supranationalism in the history of socialist thought, recovering a key concern for an era of renewed geopolitical contestation in Eastern Europe.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this collection of essays examines the ways in which popular media re-construct ideas and ideals of femininity in the post-socialist cultural space. The authors explore a comprehensive range of questions including: How have post-socialist women engaged with media as media producers and consumers, as well as objects of media representation? What are the consequences of the commodification of femininity in the post-socialist context? How does the female body serve as a battleground for the enactment and renegotiation of gendered identities and ideologies? How can we understand and theorize post-socialist women’s activist movements? In seeking answers to such questions, this volume highlights the need to reconsider feminism as a political and theoretical project with many faces. It bridges research on the mediation of post-socialist femininities with broader concerns about the transnational trajectories of feminism today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Mediating Cultural Memory is the first book to analyze the relationship between cultural memory, national identity and the changing media ecology in early eighteenth-century Britain. Leith Davis focuses on five pivotal episodes in the histories of England, Scotland and Ireland: the 1688 'Glorious' Revolution; the War of the Two Kings in Ireland (1688-91); the Scottish colonial enterprise in Darien (1695-1700); the 1715 Jacobite Rising; and the 1745 Jacobite Rising. She explores the initial inscription of these episodes in forms such as ballads, official documents, manuscript newsletters, correspondence, newspapers and popular histories, and examines how counter-memories of these events continued to circulate in later mediations. Bringing together Memory Studies, Book History and British Studies, Mediating Cultural Memory offers a new interpretation of the early eighteenth century as a crucial stage in the development of cultural memory and illuminates the processes of remembrance and forgetting that have shaped the nation of Britain.

The external border of the EU remains under permanent construction. Sabrina Ellebrecht engages with two of its primary building sites - the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) and the Refugee Boat. She analyzes how the function and quality of the EU's current political border is crafted, shaped, produced and eventually stabilized through these two mediators. Eurosur and the Refugee Boat mediate a level of Europeanization which has hitherto - and would otherwise have - been impossible. While Eurosur mobilizes the limits of border policing in various ways, the Refugee Boat functions as the vacillating European Other to legitimize both control and humanitarian interventions. The study shows the specific, if not constitutive, ambivalences of EU border policies, and explores the emergence of viapolitics.