Page - 23 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 1 2015, 23-26 Open Access: content is licensed under cc BY 3.0 The sea voyage as a transitory experience in migration processes Extended Abstract Joachim Schlör Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal enters the ocean of online publication with this special issue on sea voyages in the context of migration experiences. The project Mobile Culture Stu- dies was born in 2006 in Basel, created by Johanna Rolshoven and Justin Winkler, as “a non profit association [...] aimed to collect, discuss and redistribute inspiring mobility themes in an interdisciplinary context. Its members departed from cultural analysis, offering competence in both qualitative and quantitative research, covering all fields that exhibit mobility phenomena, in practise as well as in academia.“ 1 The main topics of research and debate should be the following: • mobilities of people, things, ideas, information and finances • cultural and social phenomena of mobilities and their counterparts • historical evidence of people’s mobile practices and changing concepts of mobility • representations of mobility in oral and visual culture The focus here is “not primarily [...] the comparative study of cultures of mobility, but culture as an inherent movement [...], mobile culture, culture as a dynamic principle, as generator of spatial and mental movement.“ 2 Materialities and mentalities connected to mobility form the main interest – and when the project founders invited me to edit the first volume of this journal, I thought that ships, and sea voyages, and the role they both played in processes of migration, could form an interesting example. In my research on German-Jewish emigrants and their ‚pas- sage‘ from Trieste to Jaffa or haifa between 1933 and 1941 I have come across a good number of sources, in letters, diaries, and photo albums, that describe and illustrate the sea voyage as an elementary part of the migratory experience. 1 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal <http://unipub.uni-graz.at/mcsj/wiki/about> [accessed 30.05.2015] 2 Ibid.