Page - 11 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

People that are fleeing use maps and, if they are too poor to plan their trip themselves, they rely on directions from traffickers. They look for routes to take them out of the violence or misery in their home countries, they apply for visas and invitations in potential host countries, they activate their system of friends or build new networks, and they study or imagine the ways of life and job opportunities in the countries where they hope to eventually arrive. Mutatis mutan- dis, accounts by Jewish refugees in the 1930s sound completely similar to the situation of people from the Global South forced into mobility. What are we witnessing right now? The events of 2015 that shook people in the Middle East and Africa significantly affected Europe. They provoked political debate, and they are challen- ging western societies and the cultural and social sciences. The second issue of Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal (›mcsj›) addresses forced mobilities and new moorings as seen in current ethnographic studies. We investigate what these unsettling and enriching mobilities—from large-scale to individual movements—entail for a culture beyond national boundaries, and for actors, lifeworlds, institutions, structures, ideologies, and worldviews. Our still young journal continues to encourage multilingual and international contribu- tions. Different regions offer insights into different kinds of mobilities in different historical times. However, they share the passion of connecting the diverse perspectives of mobile actors and the multiplicity of structural frameworks: to consider events, actions, and emotions along with discourses, and to correlate political structures with historical attitudes and concepts. Apart from conventional texts, this issue also includes sound and video items that transcend the voicelessness seen in many unlikely and illegitimate migratory incidents. Fortunately, communication is about to emerge within the various thematic fields and methodological approaches, a dialogue between the so-far separate fields of conventional exile studies, migration studies of all shades, diaspora studies, urban studies, and tourism studies. It challenges categories of mobility practices that are taken for granted and delimited areas of work, and it opens up an exchange regarding sources, methods, theories, and representations. This is the context of Tony Kushner’s (University of Southampton) study of the “hot spot”: the redeeming shore but also nightmare for many migrants to the Mediterranean island of Lampe- dusa. He studies how the cultural memory of the current migratory process is lived and discus- ses how the term “illegal migration” as coined during the British Mandate in 1948 is overlaid on what is happening now. This leads to the denial of even forced landing, and the twentieth- century drama of the SS Exodus is the rejection of boat refugees in the twenty-first century. Forced mobilities, new moorings Editorial Extended Abstract Johanna Rolshoven and Joachim Schlör Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 2 2016, 11-13 Editorial Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0