'Good fences make good neighbours, but what about bad ones?' The Israeli separation barrier is probably the most iconic divider of land since the Berlin Wall. It has been declared illegal under international law and its impact on life in the West Bank has been enormous. Mark Thomas - as only he could - decided the only way to really get to grips with this huge divide was to use the barrier as a route map, to 'walk the wall', covering the entire distance with little more in his armoury than Kendal Mint Cake and a box of blister plasters. In the course of his ramble he was tear-gassed, stoned, sunburned, rained on and hailed on and even lost the wall a couple of times. But thankfully he was also welcomed and looked after by Israelis and Palestinians - from farmers and soldiers to smugglers and zookeepers - and finally earned a unique insight of the real Middle East in all its entrenched and yet life-affirming glory. And all without hardly ever getting arrested!

Walking surveys the proliferation of pedestrian practices across contemporary art, taking an avowedly political stance on where and how the three practices of art, walking, and writing intersect. Across the world, walking is a vital way to assert one’s presence in public space and discourse. Walking maps the terrain of contemporary walking practices, foregrounding work by Black artists, Indigenous artists and artists of colour, working-class artists, LGBTQI+ artists, disabled artists and neurodiverse artists, as well as many more who are frequently denied the right to take their places in public space, not only in the street or the countryside, but also in art discourse. This anthology contends that, as a relational practice, walking inevitably touches upon questions of access, public space, land ownership, and use. Walking is, therefore, always a political act. Artists surveyed include Stanley Brouwn, Laura Grace Ford, Regina Jose Galindo, Emily Hesse, Tehching Hsieh, Kongo Astronauts, Myriam Lefkowitz, Sharon Kivland, Andre Komatsu, Steve McQueen, Jade Montserrat, Sara Morawetz, Paulo Nazareth, Carmen Papalia, Ingrid Pollard, Issa Samb, Sop, Iman Tajik, Tentative Collective, Anna Zvyagintseva. Writers include Jason Allen-Paisant, Tanya Barson, André Brasil, Amanda Cachia, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Annie Dillard, Jacques Derrida, Dwayne Donald, Darby English, Édouard Glissant, Steve Graby, Antje von Graevenitz, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Kathleen Jamie, Carl Lavery, JeeYeun Lee, Michael Marder, Gabriella Nugent, Isobel Parker Philip, Rebecca Solnit.

On the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which was also the fiftieth anniversary of the since the Six-day War and the tenth anniversary of the Blockade of Gaza, Justin Butcher—along with ten other companions (and another hundred joining him at points along the way)—walked from London to Jerusalem as an act of solidarity, penance, and hope. Weaving in history of the Holy Land as he moves across Europe, from Balfour and Christian Zionism, to colonialism and Jerusalem Syndrome, from desert spirituality to the lives of his fellow travelers, Walking to Jerusalem is a chronicle of serendipity, the hilarious, the infuriating, and, occasionally, an encounter with the Divine.

The Israeli security wall is going to be some 700 miles long when completed and will surround most of the West Bank. Seen by some as a cynical land grab and others as an apartheid barrier, opinions on it are hugely divided. But who are the people who live in the shadow of this wall and how does it affect their lives? Mark Thomas decides to combine his two great loves, walking and talking, and travel the length of the wall in an attempt to understand a bit more about the conflict and its effect on everyday people.

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies draws on the notion of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form. Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, the style more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors reflecting on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions ensures that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the selected words are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.

Broadly this book is about the Arabian desert as the locus of exploration by a long tradition of British travellers that includes T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger; more specifically, it is about those who, since 1950, have followed in their literary footsteps. In analysing modern works covering a land greater than the sum of its geographical parts, the discussion identifies outmoded tropes that continue to impinge upon the perception of the Middle East today while recognising that the laboured binaries of “East and West”, “desert and sown”, “noble and savage” have outrun their course. Where, however, only a barren legacy of latent Orientalism may have been expected, the author finds instead a rich seam of writing that exhibits diversity of purpose and insight contributing to contemporary discussions on travel and tourism, intercultural representation, and environmental awareness. By addressing a lack of scholarly attention towards recent additions to the genre, this study illustrates for the benefit of students of travel literature, or indeed anyone interested in “Arabia”, how desert writing, under the emerging configurations of globalisation, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism, acts as a microcosm of the kinds of ethical and emotional dilemmas confronting today’s travel writers in the world’s most extreme regions.

More than sixty years since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights first enshrined the right to freedom of movement in an international charter of human rights, the issue of mobility and the right to tourism itself have become increasingly significant areas of scholarly interest and political debate. However, despite the fact that cross-border travel implies certain citizenship rights as well as the material capacity to travel, the manifold intersections between tourism and citizenship have not received the attention they deserve in the literature. This book endeavours to fill this gap by being the first to fully examine the role of tourism in wider society through a critically-informed sociological reflection on the unfolding relationships between international tourism and distinct renderings of citizenship, with particular emphasis on the ideological and political alignments between the freedom of movement and the right to travel. The text weaves its analysis of citizenship and travel in the context of addressing large-scale societal transformations engendered by globalization, neoliberalism and the geopolitical realignments between states, as well as comprehending the internal reconfiguring of the relationship between citizens and states themselves. By doing so, it focuses on key themes including: tourism and social citizenship rights; race, culture and minority rights; states, markets and the freedom of movement; tourism, peace and geo-politics; consumerism and class; and, ethical tourism, global citizenship and cosmopolitanism. The book concludes that the advancement of genuinely democratic and just forms of tourism must be commensurate with demands for distributive justice and a democratic politics of mobility encompassing all of humanity. This timely and significant contribution to the sociology and politics of international tourism through the lens of citizenship is a must read for students and scholars in both in the fields of tourism and social science. The royalties received from this book will be donated to the International Porter Protection Group.