The Places We Share : Migration, Subjectivity, and Global Mobility

By exploring the lives of people on the move, this book describes the relationship of mobility to subjectivity, identity to place. Drawing on research among nomads and serial migrants, it questions their own trajectories. It also comments on cosmopolitanism, ethnicity and religion which challenge conventional wisdom from concrete perspectives.

While some people study globalization, others live their lives as global experiments. This book brings together people who do both. The authors or subjects of these studies are of diverse national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. What they have in common is a connection to Morocco. It is from this shared space that they draw on personal stories, fieldwork, and literary and linguistic analysis to provide a critical, socially reflexive response to the conceptions of culture, identity, and mobility that animate debates on migration and cosmopolitanism. On the trail of the Bedouin or Europe''s new nomads and of Zaccarias Moussaoui Places We Share explores the relationship of mobility to subjectivity, and how physically moving can be a way of escaping the stigma of being an immigrant. Reading Rushdie, listening to Moroccan women converse in the UAE, or examining how the experience of serial migration can shape comparative ethnography we become more aware of how moving pushes us up against the limits of global experience. These limits must be recognized. They can be positively embraced to develop new ways of conceiving of ourselves, the world and our connections to others.