Transfers

The title of this journal, Transfers, merits explication, as it attempts to engage a multitude of scholarly fields, applications, practices and conceptual frameworks. For us, Transfers invokes the movement of people, things, and information through time and space, but it also applies to the transit of concepts between fields of scholarship. The practices of technology transfer are an example of the former, while the latter can be seen at work when the concept of mobility is used to refer to both social (or “vertical”) mobility and physical (or “horizontal”) mobility. Social mobility, for instance, comes into play when the possession of a car leads to higher status, or when the train compartment becomes a medium of social exchange or the display of social hierarchies rather than simply a vehicle of physical transport. Interdisciplinarity, the key scholarly mode of this journal, always involves the movement of ideas across disciplinary borders, unsettling them in (we think) productive ways. Transfers, in other words, connects adjacent fields of scholarship as much as it connects geographical areas between which technologies move. It is crucial to understand that during this process, people, technologies, concepts, and goods in movement are transformed and transform their environments in turn. This is not an automatic or passive process: as people move, people translate.

This essay examines the trajectories of skilled labor migrants within a global South-North migration matrix using an interdisciplinary framework. Focusing on Nigeria's huge brain drain phenomenon, the essay draws from the limited available data on the field, interpreting those data through theoretical perspectives from postcolonial studies, Marxism, cultural studies, and human geography. The study spotlights the example of the United States of America as a receptacle of skilled migrants and raises questions of social justice along the North-South divide. The research demonstrates that contrary to the dominant image promoted by some elements in the Western media of migrants as irritants or criminals who disturb well-cultivated, advanced World economies and social spaces, 1 those nations benefit highly from Africa's (and other migrant countries') labor diasporas, especially the highly skilled professionals.

Although shipbreaking—the taking apart of a ship—signals the end of the useful maritime life of a vessel, the process is also the beginning of the recycling and reuse of the ship's constituent parts and materials. The process, while economically and materially useful, is also fraught with hazard, to both the environment and the laborers who undertake the breaking down of the ship. This essay examines that process in Bangladesh, one of the most significant sites for global shipbreaking. Mobility is a central theme of this examination, as the concept connects numerous aspects of the study: the shipping industry, the impact of shipbreaking on the environment; international maritime policy; and local and international responses to the industry. The essay explores the interactions that arise out of the shipbreaking industry's mobility and material and the subsequent impact on the environment and people of southern Bangladesh.

Following Germany's resounding defeat in the First World War, the loss of its status as a colonial power, and the series of severe political and economic upheavals during the interwar years, travel abroad by motor vehicle was one way that Germans sought to renegotiate their place in the world. One important question critical studies of mobility should ask is if technologies of mobility contributed to the construction of cultural inequality, and if so in which ways? Although Germans were not alone in using technology to shore up notions of cultural superiority, the adventure narratives of interwar German motorists, both male and female, expressed aspirations for renewed German power on the global stage, based, in part, on the claimed superiority of German motor vehicle technology.

Following Germany's resounding defeat in the First World War, the loss of its status as a colonial power, and the series of severe political and economic upheavals during the interwar years, travel abroad by motor vehicle was one way that Germans sought to renegotiate their place in the world. One important question critical studies of mobility should ask is if technologies of mobility contributed to the construction of cultural inequality, and if so in which ways? Although Germans were not alone in using technology to shore up notions of cultural superiority, the adventure narratives of interwar German motorists, both male and female, expressed aspirations for renewed German power on the global stage, based, in part, on the claimed superiority of German motor vehicle technology.

Large-scale public bicycle rental programs represent the latest grand venture for outdoor advertising corporations. By supporting these programs, advertisers gain unfettered access to street furniture and municipal billboard space and thus acquire the power to transform the city dwellers' experience of the urban landscape both visually and kinetically. These public-private bike rental programs have mushroomed around the world due in part to the impact of Paris' Vélib, which is the world's largest. This paper discusses the role of outdoor advertising in this trend, and focuses on two existing and two projected public bicycle programs. The existing programs are Vélib and Montreal's Bixi; and the projected ones are slated for New York and San Juan, Puerto Rico.1

The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a Border Disturbance Art Performance that discusses the physical and virtual limits of the U.S.–Mexico frontier. It was developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) with the funding of the Arts and Humanities Grant 2007–2008 at the University of California in San Diego. The project uses an inexpensive GPS-enabled cell phone and a custom piece of software, the Virtual Hiker Algorithm, to guide border crossers in the desert. The crossing of the U.S.–Mexico border can be deadly due to the severe conditions of the environment; once in the Mexican desert, the software installed in the cell phone directs the immigrant toward the nearest aid site, be that water, first aid or law enforcement, along with other contextual navigational information. According to the EDT, the Transborder Immigrant Tool was created with the aim of reappropriating widely available technology to be used as a form of humanitarian aid, as well as offering a tactical intervention of distraction and disturbance in the order of transnational corridors. In addition to the navigational capabilities of the Tool, the performative effect is also provided through poetry made available on the screen of the cell phone. It is with this poetry that the artists attempt to rescue a sense of hospitality and to alleviate the difficulties of the journey.

God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands, albeit with only a limited role for the railway. Any railway museum in this country invented by and dependent on hydraulic engineering must creatively solve the problem of portraying a technology of mobility which was not central to the Waterstaat (hydro-engineering) identity and the nation’s sociotechnological construction, but one which initially was secondary and subsidiary and, above all, delayed. On the face of it, the story to be told here appears to be that of how, in a northwestern part of Europe where thorough industrialization was late to come, railway-based mobility established itself against the omnipresence of shipping and evolved from seaport-catering surface logistics into an integral element of everyday transportation in twentieth-century Netherlands. The Utrecht Spoorwegmuseum (railway museum) impressively shows that this is not even half the truth, behind which might be, at best, the grumbling resentment of an 1890 boatman.

The Bicycle Film Festival (BFF) has grown from a minor grassroots event to a global “Fest” staging urban cycling events in over two dozen cities worldwide. In its 11th year in New York City, the “BFF” New York (June 22–26, 2011) intends to provide its participants with a “weekend full of bike movies, music, art, street party and after parties,”1 before going on tour around the globe. Festival cities include Amsterdam, Athens, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Paris, Sao Paolo, Sydney, Taiwan, Tokyo, Vienna.

David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel, Food, Energy and Society, 3rd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), xix + 380 pp.

James E. McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We can Truly Eat Responsibly (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 258 pp., Pb US$14.99.

C. Claire Hinrichs and Thomas A. Lyson, eds., Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 384 pp., Hb US$45.00, Pb US$29.95.

David Burch and Geoffrey Lawrence, eds., Supermarkets and Agri-food Supply Chains (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007), xiv + 330 pp.

It is a remarkable development that mobility providers, the industry and planners are getting closer to each other in the field of mobility and transport. This is especially so in the transfer of knowledge from academia to the practical use of scientific expertise. Here I am not referring to consultancy—the broad market of selling knowledge and competence—but to debates about methodologies, approaches, access to knowledge and skills and so forth which get transferred from one field of research and practice to the other.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Speed Limits Charissa Terranova

Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-century America Cotten Seiler

Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces and Subjects Gopa Samanta

Aharon Kellerman, Personal Mobilities Marcel Endres

Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman, eds., The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble Dorit Müller

William D. Middleton and William D. Middleton III, Frank Julian Sprague: Electrical Inventor and Engineer and Frederick Dalzell, Engineering Invention: Frank J. Sprague and the U.S. Electrical Industry Bob Post

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us) Clay McShane

Lee Friedlander, America By Car Charissa Terranova

Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon, Two Billion Cars: Driving towards Sustainability Rudi Volti