Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Gender and Mobility: A Critical Introduction

Our world is characterized by mobility. The number of refugees on the global scale has increased considerably. Meanwhile border control measures and legal avenues for mobility have been severely curbed, and the political climate has become all the more violent against racialized and gendered "Others". Business elites traverse the fast-track lines to financial hubs and tourists discover new destinations. Ageing societies need people from abroad to perform care work. Domestic workers carve out nearer and further paths to reach employment, often leaving their family members behind in need of care. This book examines global mobilities from gendered perspectives, asking how gender together with race/ethnicity, social class, nationality and sexuality shape globally mobile lives. By developing analysis that cuts through economic structures, policies and individuals enacting agency, the book demonstrates how intersectional feminist analysis helps to comprehend uneven mobilities. Through multidisciplinary angle the book draws examples from different parts of the world and refuses to provide easy answers. Calling for students, scholars and general readers alike, the book invites the reader to imagine and relate to the world in manifold ways. Review Penttinen and Kynsilehto take us on a scholarly feminist journey that maps gender and mobility in deeply empathetic, challenging and unsettling ways. Gender and migration scholars will read this book but its significance is greater for those in mainstream IR who continue to believe that we can theorise without considering the lived realities of people moving across space and time. That myth has been powerfully busted in this book.--Swati Parashar, Associate Professor in Peace and Development Research, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Gender and Mobility brings a critical approach to the study of gender and migration, using feminist theories to understand how gender shapes global mobilities, and how local, national and international policy frameworks impact on these. I would highly recommend this book to all those interested in migration, mobility and gender relations.--Jane Freedman, Professor, Université Paris 8 About the Author Docent Elina Penttinen is a University Lecturer in Gender Studies, University of Helsinki. She has published widely on globalization and sex-trafficking, new security agency in the context of civilian crisis management, gendered experience of war and compassion-based methodology. She leads a multidisciplinary research project on experience of violence and develops feminist analysis on healing trauma. She is the author of Joy and International Relations: a new methodology (2013) Routledge, Globalization, Prostitution and Sex-Trafficking: corporeal politics (2008) Routledge. She teaches courses on feminist methodology, scientific writing and gender studies and supervises doctoral thesis projects in Gender, Culture and Society doctoral programme. Her areas of expertise are feminist methodology, creative analytic writing, contemplative pedagogy and research on violence. Dr. Anitta Kynsilehto works at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere, Finland. Kynsilehto's research focuses on human mobility, intersectionality, borders, and solidarity activism, with an ongoing project studying corporeal forms of resistance and relational knowledge formation between undocumented migrants and solidarity activists in North Africa, Middle East and Europe. Her work has been published, for example, in Environment and Planning A, Body & Society, International Studies Perspectives, and European Journal of Cultural Studies. Alongside her academic interests, she takes part in civil society networks that deal with above topics, for example by serving in the executive committee of the EuroMed Rights as the political referent on migration and asylum.