Transfers

This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.

The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.

The Solomon's Temple in São Paulo goes beyond a house of worship. On its grounds, visitors can explore the Biblical Garden, a themed space for an immersive experience into performed biblical narratives centered around the Exodus of the Hebrews, which relies on the visual repertoire present in successful biblical telenovelas produced by RecordTV, a major TV channel owned by a neo-Pentecostal Christian denomination. In dialogue with the mobilities turn in the social sciences and the materialist turn in communication studies, this article proposes an ethnographical account of the Biblical Garden tour. Crossed by globalized flows of images and people, objects, and narratives, the tour puts together several representation technologies to offer “a piece of the Holy Land in Brazil.” By combining religious cosmologies, tourism practices, and entertainment marketing tactics, the Biblical Garden became strategic in strengthening UCKG's leading role in what ultraconservative sectors name a cultural war.

This article explores some eschatological facets of vehicle/road ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a disappearing form of travel in the twenty-first century (at least in the Western world), serves as a memento mori metaphor for our post-COVID era. There are plenty of death-memory features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns, and the search to escape social constraint through adventure, memento mori lurks/lingers near spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. As an art-historical and theological notion, it is inherently material and incorporates both eschatology and remembering. As a pragmatic act of embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialized as an endangered transgression and dying-out form of displacement. Hitchhiking is thus a socio-spatial memento mori for an epoch during which it is increasingly presented “virtually” in re-representational forms. I therefore propose that this phenomenon is a simulacrum, offering topical allegorical tristesse lessons for considering global annihilation.

This text explores how the introduction of (semi)autonomous cars fundamentally transforms traffic accidents. Using examples of recent crashes, the article examines how edge cases, accidents, and machine learning are intertwined and produce “infrastructural violence.” Following the example of the suspension of Cruise in 2023, the text investigates edge cases, which may not coincide with actual collisions but necessarily raise their probability, because they enable constant optimization through machine learning. I argue that it is therefore necessary for mobility studies to go beyond existing frameworks in order to investigate the epistemology of accidents of self-driving cars and to scrutinize the transitions from human perception to big data, machine learning, and sensor-based world modeling.

This article discusses four recently published books¹ that join an expanding corpus foregrounding mobility as a key dynamic of life in a heating world. Taken together, these titles construct a more explicit, applied dialogue about the process of producing solutions and policies that combat rising global temperatures. I primarily employ Mimi Sheller's mobility justice framework to identify the intersections between movement, inequality, and environmental justice, and go on to explore what each author proposes in terms of measures going forward. A tension arises between clear-cut solutions that advocate specific mobility strategies, like mass migration, for climate adaptation, and holistic mobility approaches that consider the complex sociopolitical and environmental factors at play. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, I consider which elements of each approach are worth holding onto to continue to challenge static narratives of global climate resilience.

China's all-in embrace of high-speed rail transportation has put trains back in the global discourse, reshaping international and national imaginaries. Incorporating the Chinese case can substantially reshape our understanding of rail mobility can be and ought to be. The nationwide transformations wrought by Chinese rail offer mobility studies an opportunity to reengage with how mobility shapes community at the national scale, and the central role of the state highlights the peculiar connection between rail imaginaries and an interventionist state—paralleling a striking renaissance of rail imaginaries in Europe and the United States. As the “China Model” circulates across the globe and Chinese rail technologies proliferate, Chinese rail mobility will remain both theoretically and empirically significant.