Migration studies

Using both photographs and written narratives, The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine provides a depiction of the lives and struggles faced by Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank, in particular the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley. It sheds light on issues including house demolitions, conflicts between Palestinian shepherds or farmers and Israeli settlers, soldiers, and police, the daily struggles brought about by the occupation's efforts to displace Palestinians from their land, and the resilience and bravery required to endure these conditions. This moving book conveys the beauty of the landscape, the essence of the language, the value of friendships, and the richness of a threatened way of life.

Voices of activists, both Palestinian and Jewish, are brought into focus. The historical context that generated present realities in Palestine is outlined briefly, as well as the history of the authors’ partnership.  Their perspective mirrors extensive years of involvement in peace and human rights activism in Palestine. It also captures the ongoing dialogue between the two authors, who have experienced together the continually renewed astonishment that comes with such experiences and encounters.

Sonic Signatures is an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars and music-makers who come together to explore how music makes cities. More specifically, they argue that the musical encounter, composed of an array of production and consumption practices, takes on particular and essential meaning at night. Thinking about music as an encounter allows one to appreciate the value and power of migration within the act of music-making.

The majority of voices amplified in the book come from so-called “migrants,” understood as someone who was born in one country and currently lives and works in another. Yet, these words, migration, migrant and migrancy, are more expansive than that as they indicate a range of movement, politics and place-making.

Contributions from Emilie Amrein, André de Quadros, Nick Dunn, Pol Esteve, Jillian Fulton-Melanson, Jacqueline Georgis, Masimba Hwati, Ailbhe Kenny, Seger Kersbergen, Brendan Kibbee, Áine Mangaoang, Derek Pardue, Nick Prior, Austin T. Richie, Willians Santos, Sipho Sithole, Gibran Teixeira Braga, Katie Young.

A great, engaging transdisciplinary contribution to nightlife studies, music and the city.

While Eastern European migration is predominantly seen as one-way, permanent, for economic reasons and as going bilaterally from East to West Europe, this book investigates alternative patterns of migration and mobility across Europe.

This original new book explores how visual artists take part in regular cross-border mobilities, onward migrations and transnational communications across Europe for work and the effects of this on their feelings of home and belonging. It assesses how far there is a culture of mobility amongst visual artists from the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, for whom a combination of onward migration and regular cross-border mobilities is a necessity for career progression. This is due to the ‘glass ceiling’ in the Baltic States with regard to a lack of local art markets, few dealers buying art and governments not providing enough funding.

How then do artists from the Baltic States get onto the global art market in the face of such barriers? This is a particularly important question, as these artists come from a region where migration, mobilities and cross-cultural exchanges were not freely available during the Soviet Union. This transdisciplinary investigation into visual artists’ working practices, ways of moving and placing dwellings addresses this issue.

Mobile working practices have an impact on artists’ feelings of home and belonging, which can be seen in their artworks that compare different cultures. This is a result of their particular combination of onward migration and regular mobilities, the multiple flows in and out of the home cities and the workings of the global art market within which these artists are operating. Nevertheless, these movements are determined by the forces of the global art world, whereby a particular politics of migration and mobility is experienced by artists from the Baltic States wanting to ‘make it’ in the global art world.

With its focus on Baltic artists and their mobilities, the scope and space explored is the whole of Europe and the mobilities explored in this text are crucially enabled by the freedom of movement in the European Union. 

The book is multidisciplinary and at the intersection of art, geographic mobility and creative practice. It combines visual cultures and social sciences in order to answer questions more thoroughly as well as to contextualise an analysis of artworks in a conversation with the artists themselves.

This topic is current, with the situation of the ‘refugee crisis’ and Brexit that has created a culture of anti-immigration and resurgence in anti-Eastern European sentiment in government, mainstream media and society.

The book discusses the implications of these complex itineraries on the conventional sociological notions of home, mobility and diaspora. The author argues that artists form a ‘diaspora of practice’ rather than of ethnicity, their homes are multiple as are the directions of their settlement.

Primary appeal will be to artists and art professionals; scholars working and researching on mobilities and migration issues; those working on the concepts of belonging and home; sociologists; anthropologists; those in the fields of cultural studies and European Union studies.

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe examines a variety of films from the early 1990s that depict and address the lives and identities of both first generation immigrants and children of the diaspora in Europe. Whether they are authored by immigrants themselves or by white Europeans who use the resources and means of production of dominant cinema to politically engage with the immigrants’ predicaments, these films, Isolina Ballesteros shows, are unmappable – a condition resulting from immigration cinema’s re-combination and deliberate blurring of filmic conventions pertaining to two or more genres. In an age of globalization and increased migration, this book theorizes immigration cinema in relation to notions such as gender, hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, transnationalism and translation.

This volume is the first to focus exclusively on diasporic filmmaking and the rich cultural diversity within Australian cinema, and it contains previously unpublished articles by some of the foremost experts on Australian cinema in the world. Contributors to Diasporas of Australian Cinema discuss a variety of contemporary and historical filmmaking, encompassing documentaries, features and short films. A number of key feature films are discussed including Forty Thousand Horsemen, Silver City, Wog Boy, Head On, Russian Doll, Japanese Story, and Lucky Miles.  Opening with a comprehensive chapter that introduces the organizing concept of this volume, diasporic hybridity, the essays go on to explore migration, Asian-Australian subjectivity, cross-cultural romance, Islamic-Australian identity and “wogsploitation” comedy. A useful reference source for scholars of film, migration, cultural, and Australian studies, Diasporas of Australian Cinema also features a comprehensive filmography listing Australian features, documentaries and shorts with significant diasporic content.