About this Research Topic

Background

Mobility is a site of power and stratification. Mobility shapes life chances across and within societies in ways that sociologists are just beginning to identify and explain, particularly as they intersect with class, gender, race, sexuality, and age. Access to mobility through borders, citizenship and nationality rather than receding during globalization has become even more important. What once seemed possible—the rise of a borderless world and the broad recognition of rights-- have now regressed under the bitter realities of turbo-nationalism, populism and violent forms of re-bordering. This historical backlash requires new and creative responses to mobility inequalities and injustices. At the same time – and the focus of this special issue– it is human mobility across national borders which challenges and unsettles the taken-for-granted patterns of belonging manifest as rights, citizenship, territories, justice, and foundational ideas about who and what constitutes a society. Mobility and migration across national borders include very different categories, from labour migration and refugees to elite forms of human mobility. Hence, questions such as what categories of mobile people we are talking about, or as Avtar Brah puts it, who is migrating, why, from where, and under what circumstances, are of crucial importance.

We invite new thinking on a range of questions, new and old, and on realizing various forms of justice. The aim of this Research Topic is to bring together a dynamic set of original articles that problematize various kinds of mobilities across national borders, show how it is a site of power and privilege, and detail the ways that mobility produces and reproduces various forms of injustice, local, social and global.

The Research Topic aims to bring up some of the transnational mobility patterns since the turn of the century by discussing the questions such as:
- What are the characteristics of transnational mobility in the 21 century?
- What do they mean for the maintenance of inequalities and for the reproduction of new forms of injustices global, national and local?
- What theoretical and methodological challenges do they imply?
- How does transnational mobility as a site of power and stratifications articulates with and intersect class, gender, race/ethnicity, nationality and citizenship?

We welcome submissions that critically discuss different aspects of mobility, geographically, spatially, digitally and socially, as well as intersectional approaches to mobility where many different sites of injustices and/or many different forms of mobility intersect and coincide. Papers may draw on original empirical data, or be primarily theoretical in focus.

Keywords: Nationalism, Borders, Migration, Power, Intersectionality

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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