Indebted Mobilities

An ethnographic rendering of overseas students' fraught encounters studying at an American public university. As states have reduced funding to public universities, many of those institutions have turned to overseas students as a vital, alternative source of revenue. Students from India have especially been seen as among the most desirable populations, as they’re typically fluent in English and overwhelmingly enroll in professional fields deemed critical to the knowledge economy. The large numbers of these youth migrating for their education tend to be viewed as a shining example of the value of the contemporary global university and how it enables ambitious people to secure opportunities not available to them in their home nation. However, a deeper examination of these young people’s encounters reveals a more complicated story than glossy brochures and paeans to American higher education would suggest. Indebted Mobilities draws on Susan Thomas’s close shadowing of a group of middle-class Indian migrant men who attended a public university in New York just as the institution sought to “internationalize” its campus in the wake of ongoing withdrawal of state funding. Thomas takes the reader along with the young men as they study, work, and socialize, pursuing the successful futures they believed to be promised when they migrated for an American education. All the while, they must face their marginalization as they become enmeshed in the fraught inclusion politics of contemporary university life in the United States. At the heart of these encounters is these students’ relationship to debt—not just material ones that include student loans, but moral and affective debts as well. This indebtedness, which keeps them tied to both India and the United States, is meaningful to how Indian middle-class men make sense of their experiences as student-migrants. These youth long to be modern “men of the world.” Yet Thomas illuminates how the complex realities that arise for them, informed by the logic of US exceptionalism, force a reckoning with their anxieties about successful masculinities and the precarity of being drawn into the global knowledge economy as indebted migrants.

"As state funding to public universities becomes increasingly scarce, many universities have turned to a new student population to draw in revenue: international students. Typically fluent in English, and overwhelmingly enrolled in high-skill professional fields, students from India have consistently served as one of the most valuable student-migrant populations, and the United States has been their most popular destination. Assumed to be rationally calculating, ambitious, and globally minded consumers of higher education, these migrant youth are depicted as success stories of the global neoliberalization of education. But not all are wealthy or savvy, nor do they necessarily end up in a program that will leave them better off. Sociologist Susan Thomas followed a group of Indian middle-class men studying at a public university in New York for 16 months as they attended classes, worked in under-paid or unpaid research jobs, and socialized with each other. Thomas's ethnographic research shows that these men see themselves as pursuing successful careers, paths that they uniquely deserve due to their work ethic and intelligence. At the same time, that pathway is entangled within webs of obligation tethered to the imagined future returns of an American education. For these students, such obligations translate into an experience of indebtedness-materially, affectively, and morally. The students consider themselves the beneficiaries of an American education, accruing considerable financial debt to pay tuition and perceived moral debt to their families for the opportunity to study in the US, at the same time that they are marginalized on campus and off. They thus develop a logic of owing and being owed as a way to reconcile the ambivalences they experience while located on an American campus where they must form racial and class sensibilities as South Asian student-migrants. As students approach graduation, however, they are forced to reconcile the debts they have accrued with an uncertain return. Their final days on campus forced a reckoning with their anxieties about successful masculinities, which manifested through competitive frictions with one another, the uncertainties of supporting existing or future households, and the precarity of being drawn into the global knowledge economy as indebted migrants. Thomas illuminates not only how students' movements across national borders are an invaluable part of the neoliberalization of education, but also how this system forms indebted subjectivities"--

In Spacing Debt Christopher Harker demonstrates that financial debt is as much a spatial phenomenon as it is a temporal and social one. Harker traces the emergence of debt in Ramallah after 2008 as part of the financialization of the Palestinian economy under Israeli settler colonialism. Debt contributes to processes through which Palestinians are kept economically unstable and subordinate. Harker draws extensively on residents' accounts of living with the explosion of personal debt to highlight the entanglement of consumer credit with other obligatory relations among family, friends, and institutions. He offers a new geographical theorization of debt, showing how debt affects urban space, including the movement of bodies through the city, localized economies, and the political violence associated with occupation. Bringing cultural and urban imaginaries into conversation with monetized debt, Harker shows how debt itself becomes a slow violence embedded into the everyday lives of citizens. However, debt is also a means through which Palestinians practice endurance, creatively adapting to life under occupation.

Central to the Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 is an invitation to take incompleteness seriously in how we imagine, relate to and seek to understand a world in perpetual motion. Despite our instinct for and obsession with completeness, we are constantly reminded that the sooner one recognises and provides for incompleteness and the conviviality it inspires as the normal way of being, the better we are for it. Fluidity, compositeness and the capacity to be present in multiple places and forms simultaneously in whole or in fragments are core characteristics of reality and ontology of incompleteness. How would we frame our curiosities and conversations about processes, relationships and phenomena with an understanding of the universality of incompleteness and mobility? West and Central Africa, for example, are regions where it is commonplace to embrace and celebrate incompleteness in nature, the suprasensory, human beings, human actions, human inventions and human achievements. The lectures indicate how we could draw inspiration in this regard to inform current clamours for decolonisation and the growing ambivalence about rapid advances in digital technologies (artificial intelligence (AI) in particular), as well as with twenty-first century concerns about migrants and strangers knocking at the doors of opportunities we feel more entitled to as bona fide citizens and insiders. The lectures draw on the writings of Amos Tutuola as well as from popular ideas of personhood and agency in Africa, to make a case for sidestepped and silenced traditions of knowledge. They highlight Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with the continent’s creativity and imagination. They speak to the nimble-footed flexible-minded frontier African at the crossroads and junctions of myriad encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary claims and articulation of identities and achievements. The traditions of knowledge discussed in these lectures do not only speak to Africans, but to the world, as the philosophies explored have universal application. “The crucial anthropological question of relationality and othering is at the heart of this original and enlightening book. Nyamnjoh cautions the missionaries of decoloniality against the risk of substituting one illusion of completeness with another. For him, incompleteness is the basis of any healthy exchange. He therefore recommends embracing the universality of incompleteness in motion and taking seriously an ancestral tradition of self-extension through creative imagination in this anxious age of artificial intelligence. Forcefully argued and abundantly substantiated – with finesse and laughter that run through it – this book will be a milestone by making us rediscover the demands and the magic of fieldwork.” Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main Frobenius-Institut, Frankfurt/Main Point Sud, Bamako, Mali

With a focus on nineteenth century Cuba, this volume examines understudied forms of mobility and networks that emerged during Second Slavery. After being forcibly taken across the Atlantic, enslaved Africans were moved within Cuba, and sometimes sold to owners in other Caribbean islands or the U.S. South. The chapters included in this book, written by historians and literary critics, pay special attention to debates between abolitionists and proslavery ideologues, the ways in which people and ideas moved from the countryside to the city, from one Caribbean Island to the next, and from the United States or the coasts of West Africa to the sugarcane fields. They examine how enslaved persons ran away or were captured and coerced to relocate; how they mobilized information and ideas to ameliorate their situation; and how they were used to advance other people’s interests. Movement, these chapters show, was regularly deployed to reinforce enslavement and the suppression of rights, while at times helping people in their struggle for freedom. This book will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Latin American Literature, Global Slavery and Postcolonial Studies. The chapters were originally published in the journal Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

An audacious epilogue arms humanists with the argument that, in order to save the planet from unsustainable growth, we need to read more novels.

One of the primary objectives of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), established in 2015, was to boost skilled labor mobility within the region. This insightful book takes stock of the existing trends and patterns of skilled labor migration in the ASEAN. It endeavors to identify the likely winners and losers from the free movement of natural persons within the region through counterfactual policy simulations. Finally, it discusses existing issues and obstacles through case studies, as well as other sectoral examples.

Comprising seven edited pieces of detailed empirical work drawn from recent research, this title reveals the dynamics behind the movements of poor people in South and South East Asia and Africa.

The development of transportation policy in Los Angeles is a history of extremes: in the 1920s, the city had the largest regional rail network in the world, which was completely abolished 40 years later. In its place, a vast network of freeways was built in the metropolis with a car-focused mobility pattern. Los Angeles became a symbol of car-oriented mobility with all the negative ecological and social side effects. Since the 1990s, Los Angeles has been rebuilding its public rail transport — with little success so far.This book examines the history of Los Angeles' development and identifies the key drivers that have shaped the metropolis' extreme transport policies. With other cities facing similar — albeit less extreme — transportation issues, they can learn from how Los Angeles had responded and continues to adapt to its considerable transport policy problems, especially in order to avoid the mobility experiences faced by the American city.But, to do so, it is necessary to abandon the prevailing perspective, which is largely limited to evaluating transport modes ('road versus rail'). A sustainable solution to the problems of metropolitan areas will only be possible if the origins of transport with their spatial, social and economic interdependencies are understood and integrated into transport policy action.