This is a call for papers that seek to offer new perspectives on the complex history of trans-cultural movements and social mobility within, and between, the (Ottoman) Arab Mediterranean and Europe in the pre-modern, modern and contemporary periods.

Taking as its starting point the view that movements across the Mediterranean were multi-directional, be they official, clandestine or unseen, this special issue seeks to make a contribution to innovative research, empirical/archival and/or conceptual, and thus to enhance present debates about the Mediterranean as a sea that unites rather than divides. A multilayered picture and understanding of processes of exchange may challenge paradigms of historical explanation that are still premised on deterministic frameworks of colonialism, post-coloniality, and westernization, and hence to maintain unilateral and univocal modes of analysis.

In particular, we invite papers, based on new historical research, that would offer critical insights into the contemporary fetishes of culture and mobility, or that give due weight to non-political agency in comparative or croise histories. We would especially welcome contributions that focus on institutions, various forms of agency, translations (in the widest possible sense), life experiences, re-conceptualizations and recastings of centre and periphery relations, or symbolic geographies of the Levant and the Arab world in their Ottoman and Mediterranean contexts.

Papers should be submitted by 15 September 2011 to ijems@emuni.si.
For further information please see the instructions for authors.