Transfers

The Mary Ann Morris Animal Society (M.A.M.A.S.) is a canine adoption operation that originated with a group of animal lovers in sparsely populated Bamberg County, South Carolina, which, for reasons I will go into below, has found itself perennially awash in stray dogs. Around 2000, the members of this group partnered with the county government to build a permanent animal shelter and develop an adoption pipeline to the populous Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the United States. The transport wing of the organization, M.A.M.A.S. On The Move, ferries dogs up the Interstate Highway 95 corridor, which begins in Miami, Florida, and runs all the way to Maine's border with Canada. Through adoption websites and the conscientious work of a phalanx of volunteers fanned out over the Eastern Seaboard, these northering rescue dogs find their “forever homes” in and around metropolises such as Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. My wife and I, who live in Baltimore, owe to the coordinated efforts of M.A.M.A.S. rescuers and transporters our dogs Cecil and Cassius, who, although they came from different litters and were adopted a year apart, were each found abandoned along Bamberg County's rural roads.

Temporariness, precariousness, and uncertainty feature prominently in late capitalism, manifesting in temporary labor mobility from low-income to high-income countries and heavily burdening the lower migration strata. However, precariousness affects mobile workers unevenly. I advance the concept of a transnationally mobile labor aristocracy to capture the situation of skilled mobile Polish tradesmen who, due to their European nationality and the employability of their skills, gain high motility capital with which to navigate the uncertainty of temporary labor mobility and achieve socioeconomic advancement. Drawing on a 2007–2019 multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Nordic countries, Belgium, and Poland, the article applies an anthropological lens to labor mobility to show how the politically underpinned intersection between what people do and how they move produces stratified mobilities and contributes to the transnational remaking of class.

This article explores dogs’ mobilities in the context of canine adoption and rescue. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of adopting a Romanian dog and on my involvement in dog rescue in Switzerland, it examines how canine adoption is not a linear or purely logistical process but a form of interspecies im/mobility governed by intersecting regimes of mobility and categorization. The article highlights the complex nature of animal rescue routes and the embodied, emotional, and everyday negotiations they entail in the adoption process. It contributes to the growing field of mobility studies by positioning dogs’ im/mobilities as a compelling and emerging area of inquiry.

Research indicates that an increasing number of Vietnamese international students return to Vietnam after graduation, yet migrants’ return decision-making remains understudied. This article draws on eighty-six ethnographic interviews with highly skilled migrants in Vancouver and Paris who have considered or decided against returning to Vietnam, as well as with those who have already returned. Centering on migrants’ aspirations for the “good life” in Vietnam, the study takes a mobility studies approach, moving beyond traditional push–pull migration frameworks to offer a nuanced understanding of return decision-making. It considers not only economic motivations but also social and lifestyle factors, as well as agency and subjectivity shaped by intersecting personal circumstances and social markers such as class and gender.

This article repositions digital nomads not as stateless figures of freedom but as central actors in evolving regimes of mobility governance. Moving beyond the lifestyle framing, we propose two lines of inquiry. First, we examine how race, class, and passport privilege shape differentiated access to mobility infrastructures co-produced by states and platforms. Second, we examine how nomads navigate and produce networked digital enclaves and cloud states—topological formations where territory is reconstituted through platforms, co-living hubs, and e-residency regimes. The article calls for scholarship that treats nomads not as exceptions to state power but as actors in its reconfiguration, where motion itself becomes a site of governance. By bridging political geography, mobility studies, and critical migration scholarship, this agenda seeks to theorize sovereignty beyond fixed borders and nomadism beyond neoliberal individualism.

Shortly after the American Civil War (1861–1865), a train snaked through the rolling mountains of Tennessee. As the locomotive thundered across the hills and valleys, a young girl sat alone in the finest car on the train. She was polite and impeccably dressed, but that did not stop a passenger from demanding that she be removed to the smoking car—a filthy cabin dominated by men of all sorts. She may have had a first-class ticket; however, her Black skin nearly relegated her to a second-class ride. The girl's predicament was resolved only after her hot-tempered father returned and threatened to shoot the conductor if they attempted to move his daughter to the smoking car. That little girl was Mary “Mollie” Church, later known as Mary Church Terrell, one of the future leaders of the NAACP. Her father was the influential Robert Church, perhaps the first African American millionaire from the South.