Transfers

In Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels, the diminutive Lilliputians present to their emperor an inventory of what they find in the pockets of their prisoner, “the Great Man-Mountain” Gulliver. Prominent among the contents of those pockets is “a wonderful kind of engine” on a silver chain. The Lilliputians were baffled at it, conjecturing it is “the god that he worships . . . because he assures us . . . that he seldom did any thing without consulting it: he called it his oracle.”¹

The increasing symbiosis between contemporary mobility and global Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has been widely recognized in both migration and media studies.¹ Advanced media technology, including smartphones, facilitates information exchange and instantaneous communication.² The pervasive use of smartphones is an everyday reality for migrants, whose activities are increasingly taking place online and in real time.³ Smartphone use by migrants and their families illustrates the different scales of modern mobility within structural socioeconomic and political orders.⁴ Smartphones, and those applications downloaded to the device, enhance connectivity⁵ with regard to transactions, entertainment, socialization, networking, and activism. They help with community building and boost a sense of belonging among people who are connected via various applications.

Early migration scholarship on the transnational family has tended to portray stay-behind children as passive recipients of care and helpless victims of transnational migration. Despite the increasing sophistication of the literature highlighting children's active roles, empirical studies on transnational families focusing on understanding children's changing agency through time are still limited. We aim to fill this lacuna by offering a longitudinal perspective on children's changing agency in using communication technologies. Focusing on the “transition to adulthood” experiences of Filipino and Indonesian stay-behind children (from 9–11 years old to 17–19 years old), we examine how their agentic behavior and practices change in using information and communication technologies to negotiate power and autonomy within the transnational family. We show how the changes in the children's specific life course and the shifting digital divide that accompany these transitions shape the possibilities and limits to children's empowerment and agency in enacting family transnationally.

This article addresses the intersectionality of digital connectivity, international mobility, gender, and ethnicity among Chinese trans women in Japan. Drawing on interviews with seven interlocutors residing in five prefectures in Japan, it illustrates a rather complex picture regarding how gender identities are interpreted and performed in various ways. Specifically, this article argues that their gender identities reflect their individualistic quests for a sense of wholeness and ontological security when dealing with the tension and fusion between online and offline realities. In this way, their gender identities are spatially realized and ultimately linked with and shaped by the movement of the queer body across different online and offline locations.

This article focuses on the e-commerce of infant milk by Chinese migrant women in France, who became retail agents for their Chinese clients after the melamine infant formula scandal in China in 2008. The daigou-ers conceive of their WeChat business as an activity of solidarity, one that allows them to earn a living while helping Chinese parents get safe baby foods. My article proposes to conceptualize the daigou business of formula milk as a moral economy and analyze the ways in which online and offline realities merge and collide in the making of this moral economy. I argue that the moral economy of infant formulas is co-constructed by the virtual encounters between the seller and the buyer, the materiality and mobility of infant milk, the dynamics of the infrastructures of mobility, the offline hazards and challenges affecting the supply and transportation of the formula milk, and customers’ risk perception.

This article analyses Chinese women's e-entrepreneurship of trading nostalgic and/or contested goods in the disputed sovereign borders and virtual marketplace in the borderland between China and Taiwan. Using physical and digital ethnography, and drawing on the case study of the journey of chicken feet and other goods traded through WeChat by Chinese women in Taiwan, this article shows how the online and offline trails of these goods and the virtual marketplace generate new forms of transnationalism and connectedness between the two rivaling societies. Calling attention to Chinese women's emotions and nostalgia embedded in their e-entrepreneurship, their goods’ geographical movements, and their social networks, these findings enrich our understanding of transnational entrepreneurship as well as migrants’ agency-making and digital connectivity. However, highlighting how the worsening Taiwan-China relationship has diminished micro e-entrepreneurship, this article also reveals the vulnerability, instability, and uncertainty of the virtual marketplace, which is threatened by the politics of sovereignty contestation.

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 129 pp. £8.99.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 529 pp. £9.90.

Zahra Marwan, Where Butterflies Fill the Sky: A Story of Immigration, Family, and Finding Hope (New York: Bloomsbury Children's Books, 2022), 38 pp. $18.99.

Govind Gopakumar, Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020)

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Tarini Bedi, Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2022)

Rano Turaeva and Rustamjon Urinboyev (eds.), Labour, Mobility and Informal Practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe: Power, Institutions and Mobile Actors in Transnational Space (London: Routledge, 2021)

Róisín Healy (ed.), Mobility in the Russian, Central and East European Past (London: Routledge, 2019)

Luke Heslop and Galen Murton (eds.), Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021)

Joshua Grace, African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)

Jun Zhang, Driving toward Modernity: Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019)

Shawn William Miller, The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Yujie Zhu, Heritage Tourism: From Problems to Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 126 pp. £17.00.

John J. Bodinger de Uriarte and Michael A. Di Giovine, eds., Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), Xviii +364 pp. $125.00.

Maria Alice de Faria Nogueira and Camila Maria dos Santos Moraes, eds., Brazilian Mobilities (New York: Routledge, 2020), 204 pp., 26 illus. $128.00.

This paper instigates a discussion on the applicability of a mobility lens to digital nomadism. Digital nomadism defines the lifestyle of highly mobile professionals, known as digital nomads, who work while traveling on a (semi)- permanent basis. Digital nomads encompass the mobility changes that have taken place both at a personal and at a societal level and serve as an example of the mobility changes brought about by “the mobilities turn.” This article outlines how mobility and immobility are present in digital nomadism, and how mobility regimes shape the digital nomadic lifestyle. It further discusses digital nomadism in relation to work and travel to examine how this phenomenon challenges and broadens our understanding of and perspectives on mobilities.