Edward Said’s summation that “we live in a period of migration, of forced travel and forced residence, that has literally engulfed the globe” is an apt description of the riveting and pervasive nature of (im)mobility in contemporary times. Wars, climate change, economic recessions, and social and cultural inequalities all contribute to coercing both individuals and communities into forced movement or imposed immobility. This volume investigates the injustices related to free circulation as represented in various literary texts.

Edward Saidâ (TM)s summation that â oewe live in a period of migration, of forced travel and forced residence, that has literally engulfed the globeâ is an apt description of the riveting and pervasive nature of (im)mobility in contemporary times. Wars, climate change, economic recessions, and social and cultural inequalities all contribute to coercing both individuals and communities into forced movement or imposed immobility. This volume investigates the injustices related to free circulation as represented in various literary texts.

Despite the amount of storytelling in social movements, little attention has been paid to narrative as a form of movement discourse or as a mode of social interaction. Stories of Change is a systematic study of narrative as well as a demonstration of the power of narrative analysis to illuminate many features of contemporary social movements. Davis includes a wide array of stories of change—stories of having been harmed or wronged, stories of conflict with unjust authorities, stories of liberation and empowerment, and stories of strategic success and failure. By showing how these stories are a powerful vehicle for producing, regulating, and diffusing shared meaning, the contributors explore movement stories, their functions, and the conditions under which they are created and performed. They show how narrative study can illuminate social movement emergence, recruitment, internal dynamics, and identity building.

Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations? Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.

How do ordinary people navigate the intense uncertainty of the onset of war? Different individuals mobilize in different ways—some flee, some pick up arms, and some support armed actors as civil war begins. Drawing on nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with participants and nonparticipants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992–1993, Anastasia Shesterinina explores Abkhaz mobilization decisions during that conflict. Her fresh approach underscores the uncertain nature of the first days of the war when Georgian forces had a preponderance of manpower and arms. Mobilizing in Uncertainty demonstrates, in contrast to explanations that assume individuals know the risk involved in mobilization and make decisions based on that knowledge, that the Abkhaz anticipated risk in ways that were affected by their earlier experiences and by social networks at the time of mobilization. What Shesterinina uncovers is that to make sense of the violence, Abkhaz leaders, local authority figures, and others relied on shared understandings of the conflict and their roles in it—collective conflict identities—that they had developed before the war. As appeals traveled across society, people consolidated mobilization decisions within small groups of family and friends and based their actions on whom they understood to be threatened. Their decisions shaped how the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict unfolded and how people continued to mobilize during and after the war. Through this detailed analysis of Abkhaz mobilization from prewar to postwar, Mobilizing in Uncertainty sheds light on broader processes of violence, which have lasting effects on societies marked by intergroup conflict.

Which get-out-the-vote efforts actually succeed in ethnoracial communities—and why? Analyzing the results from hundreds of original experiments, the authors of this book offer a persuasive new theory to explain why some methods work while others don’t. Exploring and comparing a wide variety of efforts targeting ethnoracial voters, Lisa García Bedolla and Melissa R. Michelson present a new theoretical frame—the Social Cognition Model of voting, based on an individual’s sense of civic identity—for understanding get-out-the-vote effectiveness. Their book will serve as a useful guide for political practitioners, for it offers concrete strategies to employ in developing future mobilization efforts.

The Roma issue is generally treated as a European matter. Indeed, the Roma are the largest European minority—their presence outside of Europe is a result of various waves of migration over the past four hundred years. Likewise, the stereotypes associated with the Roma—the problematized, stigmatized status of a “Gypsy” as well as the historical and contemporary manifestations of antigypsyism—are also of European origin. This book claims, however, that the perception of Roma being strictly a European issue is flawed, and that re-connecting the Roma issue globally represents an important learning experience and an added value. The book offers a critical exploration of Romani political activism in Colombia and Argentina, and compares it to that in Spain, narrated from the intimate perspective of Romani actors themselves. By outlining parallel lineages of Romani activism in three countries and on two continents, the author arrives at broad conclusions regarding the nature of ethnic mobilization. Mirga-Kruszelnicka proposes a new synergetic conceptualization of this multidirectional concept as an interplay between political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and frames of identity. Contributing to the vivid debate about the relationship between the researcher and the researched, the book also includes an original discussion of the positionality of scholars of Romani background.