Transfers

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.