Cities play a major role in designing future mobility plans. Our question is how to contribute to sustainable mobility design while effectively accounting for social equity, health, and wellbeing considerations. After defining a list of mobility-related social issues, two stakeholder-based workshops with mobility users from two major cities, namely Paris and Cairo, were conducted. Participants explored mobility problems through eighteen purposive persona models in total. In Cairo, participants mainly reported safety and security issues while in Paris, mobility stress was dominant.

Digital platforms for food and mobility offer sustainability and convenience, but their global adoption is context-dependent. This paper analyzes eight platforms in Turkey, contributing to the discourse on sustainable consumption. The analysis reveals diverse platform configurations and identifies key consumer barriers to widespread adoption, including trust issues, platform misuse, power imbalances, and limited service. The paper concludes with recommendations for motivating Turkish users, managing stakeholder trust dynamics, and leveraging existing consumption habits in new platform design.

Though mortuary practices seem largely archaeologically invisible in Iron Age Britain, the visible dead were subject to diverse treatment. Here, the authors report the results of a multi-strand analysis of two Iron Age skeletons buried in a stone cairn at Loch Borralie, north-west Scotland. Manipulation of one skeleton, including the possible removal of the brain, fashioning of long bones into ‘tools’ and reassembly for burial, suggests complex mortuary processing, while the east-coast origin of both individuals and their biological ties to Orkney reveal long-distance connections, expanding our understanding of funerary practice, mobility and connectivity in Iron Age Britain.

This article explores (a) how conceptualisations of movement embed sedentism within the security–migration nexus and its protection logics and (b) which conceptualisation of movement can analytically challenge that embedding. The overall aim is to problematise the opposition between sedentism and movement. I address these questions by analysing mapping and countermapping practices and considering what insights can be gained by conceptualising life as fundamentally in motion. The maps reveal four concepts of movement: border crossing, routes, journeys, and threads. Each operates within the security–migration nexus. The article then extends the notion of threads into a conceptualisation of life (and matter) as inherently in motion, or life-in-motion. Allowing life to emerge from and through the coexistence of movements offers an analytical framework that creates cracks in sedentism inscriptions within the security–migration nexus while avoiding the reduction of movement to nomadism – the ‘other’ of sedentism.

Mobility has become a central focus of research into material culture. We chart the life-cycle of one mobile object: a painting commissioned in 1790s Peru by an indigenous man, painted by an indigenous artist, and intended for the king of Spain. Its history demonstrates the importance of exploring not simply the fact that objects moved around, but the particular reasons why they were in motion, and the particular ways in which they circulated. In the case of this painting, its creation, trajectory, disappearance, and afterlife were determined by two forms of damage characteristic of the eighteenth century: colonial violence and imperial warfare. These forces set objects in motion, and they conditioned the ways in which this painting was repeatedly reinterpreted and physically rearranged. Its history exemplifies the interconnections between imperial and colonial conflict, and the mobility and reception of artworks in this globalising era. Warfare and violence, we show, were powerful, and overlooked, factors that shaped the meanings and changing materiality of objects as they circulated.

The Imjin War resulted in numerous Koreans being captured and transported to Japan as captives. This study examines the experiences of these captives, including scholars, potters, farmers and artisans, focusing on their transition from ordinary to war captives, and their subsequent lives in Japan, mainly in Kyushu and western Japan. Drawing on diverse sources such as Korean envoys’ diaries, captives’ memoirs and local Japanese records, this research investigates the allocation processes and living conditions of captives in Japan. The study identifies three primary transportation routes significantly influencing captives’ fates: sale to Japanese slave merchants, selective transfers by samurai and daimyo, and large-scale wartime relocations. Furthermore, it reveals that wartime mobilisation in Japan led to a shortage of administrative personnel, unexpectedly affording some captives relative freedom of movement. This freedom enabled them to establish social networks and integrate more effectively into Japanese society, offering new insights into captives’ adaptation to alien environments.

This research article examines the role of immigrant labour and micro-innovations in transferring glass-making knowledge in early modern Britain. It argues that immigrants played a crucial role in adapting European products to local conditions by providing new recipes and access to trade routes. Furthermore, it emphasises the significance of mobility and secrecy in knowledge transfer. Immigrants created innovations through mobility by tailoring their roles to encourage movement and maintaining the confidentiality of their skills. The article also examines the demands of local settings and conditions for integrating new technology.

Our Forum envisions East Asia as part of Islamic Asia, treating it as a space where Muslim communities have forged cross-border networks across time, episodically, and where discourses about Islam have circulated and been appropriated in interconnection with Muslim-majority regions of the continent (that is, ‘Islamic’ Asia). We hold that Islam, as a constellation of religious, political, cultural, and social formations, questions the spatial and conceptual boundaries of East Asia, while East Asia expands the known geographies of Islamic Asia. The articles in this Forum show that Islam was a shared paradigm of meaning-making across inter-Asian geographies, and offered alternative modes and axes of spatial production and political idioms that both Muslims and non-Muslims latched onto across Asia, including its easternmost reaches.

This article examines the surge of Iranian migration to Japan in the early 1990s. After Iran and Japan established a mutual visa waiver agreement in 1974, many overstayed, with migration increased notably from 1989. However, stricter rules and the suspension of visa exemptions in 1992 sharply reduced the number of Iranians in Japan by the mid-1990s. The influx represented a unique chapter in the history of the Iranian diaspora—rapid migration, informal social networks, and public gatherings characterized this period. While Japan’s strict immigration policies quickly ended the “coming-to-Japan” boom, Iranian migrants developed a sense of equality and mutual support during their time in Japan.

The history of the KwaZulu-Natal region in the period under study has mostly been written round the evolution of a series of polities seen as more or less firmly bounded territorial “states.” This approach goes hand in hand with readings of recorded oral source materials as “oral traditions.” In this article, we reread the materials not simply as relayed historical accounts but as evidence of past discursive practices geared towards the navigation of change. This allows us to argue that a fundamental feature of the political order at this time was a degree of mobility and political flexibility that earlier studies hardly engage with.

Despite the expansion of research on South Asian courtesans, there has been no attempt at a critical historiography on courtesans alone. Within this larger gap, the specific connections between travel, mobility, and female performers in South Asia have not been adequately theorised. By making a critical intervention into the historiography of courtesans, we hope to aid in the establishment of what could be termed ‘South Asian courtesan studies’ as a recognised field of scholarship. Foregrounding the historical method for research into courtesans, the articles here show that beyond conventional ethnographic sources, there is a rich textual, visual, and material archive, largely unexplored until recently. They reveal both the transnational and local, and the spectacular and quotidian circuits of female performers’ travels. These include religious sites and participation in rites of passage like weddings but also extend beyond South Asia into the theatre spectacles and exhibitions of Europe. In the context of empire, this volume maps how female performers travelled in local, regional, and transnational contexts, and whether they were able to transcend the hypersexualised colonial trope of the ‘nautch girl’. This special issue offers a sample of the new developments in this growing field to catalyse its further expansion.