MoHu Projects

This joint research project, conducted by the University of Padua (DiSSGEA) and the University of South Africa’s Department of Geography (Pretoria), centers on the pivotal Battle of Isandlwana (1879). The primary scientific goal is to understand and quantify the influence of the geomorphological context on military mobilities, the spatial dynamics and ultimate outcome of the battle, integrating historical analysis with advanced geospatial data.

The program employs a multidisciplinary methodology that combines historical-archival research, on-site geomorphological surveys, high-resolution data acquisition via drones (orthophotos, DTM), and geomagnetic investigations to identify subsurface anomalies. All collected data will be processed and integrated within a GIS environment. Beyond its scientific aims, this project holds significant strategic importance, presenting a concrete opportunity to establish a lasting and fruitful relationship between the University of Padua and the University of South Africa, laying the groundwork for future academic agreements.

Key scientific objectives

The project aims to achieve the following primary scientific objectives:

• to analyze and quantify how the specific geomorphological features of the Isandlwana site (slopes, landforms, hydrography, surface lithology) conditioned the tactical choices, troop movements, lines of sight, and the final result of the battle.
• to integrate historical sources with high-resolution geospatial data to produce a more accurate, georeferenced reconstruction of the phases, deployments, and key events of the battle within its physical context.
• to use non-invasive geophysical methods (magnetometry) to locate and characterize anomalies indicative of archaeological remains related to the battle (metal artifacts, possible structures, burial areas) and to interpret this evidence within its historical and environmental framework.
• to test and refine a multidisciplinary methodological approach that effectively combines historical analysis, geomorphology, remote sensing, and geophysics for the complex study of battlefield landscapes.
• to provide a more holistic understanding of the battle by fully embedding it in its physical and environmental context, assessing the interactions between military events and landscape features.

Expected outcomes & verifiable deliverables

The project is set to produce a range of concrete deliverables:

• detailed geomorphological cartography of the Isandlwana site.
• georeferenced historical-military cartography illustrating the battle’s progression within the terrain’s context.
• high-resolution 3D terrain models and orthomosaics derived from drone surveys.
• maps of geomagnetic anomalies that potentially indicate archaeological remains.
• an integrated geospatial database (GIS).
• scientific publications in international journals and presentations at academic conferences.

Connections. Arts and Humanities for Just Mobility Futures is an open-access publication in three languages (English, Italian, and Korean) authored by Peter Adey, Jinhyoung Lee, Peter Merriman, Lynne Pearce, Veronica della Dora, Sasha Engelmann, Simone Gigliotti, Harriet Hawkins, Jooyoung Kim, Taehee Kim, Giada Peterle and Tania Rossetto. The book emerged as a joint reflection based on years of networking activities carried out among various partners in the UK (Lancaster University Centre for Mobilities Research, Royal Holloway University of London Centre for the GeoHumanities, Aberystwyth University Centre for Transport and Mobility) and South Korea (Konkuk University Academy of Mobility Humanities).

The book is a product of both UK and South Korean research grants. The UK grant was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through a UKRI UK-South Korea Social Science and Humanities Connections Grant, part of UKRI’s Fund for International Cooperation (FIC). This project was titled “Connecting Mobilities Research between the UK and South Korea: narrating, mobilising, experimenting and engaging mobilities for just futures” (reference: ES/W010895/1), and involved investigators based in the Royal Holloway University of London and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Aberystwyth University, Lancaster University, and Konkuk University. The team also received funding from KNRF’s Humanities Korea + (HK+) programme (reference: NRF-2018S1A6A3A03043497), in conjunction with a Korean research grant “Mobility Humanities based on the Coevolution of Human being and Technologies”. The Italian translation was funded by the UK grant and carried out by Giuseppe Tomasella for the MoHu Centre.

The Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities (MoHu) has emerged as a travel companion on this journey, creating further connections and triangulations that have enriched and added nuances to the mobility and humanities binomial. Director Tania Rossetto particularly wishes to thank all her colleagues at the Centre, as well as the past director, Andrea Caracausi, for their collegial work in organising and animating events, conferences, seminars, publications, and meetings with colleagues from Royal Holloway, Aberystwyth, Lancaster, and Konkuk. In particular, thanks to the MoHu’s support, it was possible for the Paduan delegation – including Giada Peterle, Margherita Cisani, Laura Lo Presti, Chiara Rabbiosi, Paola Molino, Marco Bertilorenzi, Lucio Biasiori and Federico Mazzini – to meet colleagues at several venues in Italy, the UK and Seoul.

From the Introduction:

“This book is interested in connection and connecting our  approaches and ideas of mobility. It is interested in these issues, however, in quite a specific way. On one hand, it seeks to make sense of connections between old and emerging concepts and approaches towards mobility that are more sensitive and open to the ethos, methods and practices of research from the arts and humanities. […] On the other hand, the book acknowledges the imperative to direct these new and emerging encounters and connections between mobilities and the arts and humanities towards more equitable, just and sustainable mobility futures, even as it pushes against the constraints and challenges of a neoliberal academy. For mobility arts and humanities cannot operate in a vacuum but simultaneously realises the constitutive role of mobility in the pressing social, political, economic and environment crises of our time, now, and in the future, and what has come before”

Know more

Overview                                                                                                                                     

“Research on the Move. A Bi-lateral Workshop between Padua and Florence” is a project based on a series of seminars to be held at the European University Institute (EUI) – Department of History and Civilisation (HEC) on 30 April 2025 and in Padua at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Humanities (MoHu) on 12 June 2025, organised by the Migration and Mobility Working Group of the European University Institute and the MA Programme in Mobility Studies of the University of Padova.

The event invites PhD students from the HEC department at the EUI, as well as advanced Masters students and PhD students from the MA Mobility Studies and PhD programme in Historical, Geographical and Anthropological Studies at the Universities of Padua and Venice Ca’ Foscari, to present and discuss their ongoing projects on various aspects of the history of mobility and migration. The workshop will provide advanced Masters students and PhD students with a forum for academic discussion and additional external feedback on their work. It will also provide an opportunity for networking between two leading research centres in the field of the history of mobility and for promoting the PhD programmes, in particular to Master’s students.

The project series

The project includes a series of events organised by the Migration and Mobility Working Group of the HEC Department and the MoHu in the first half of 2025:

(1) A lecture on 30 January 2025 by Paola Molino, Professor of Early Modern History and Coordinator of the MA in Mobility Studies.

(2) The official participation of two members of the working group in the Mobility Fest, where they presented the working group and promoted the EUI PhD programme (21 February 2025).

(3) Two workshops (30 April and 12 June 2025): During the workshops, panels are moderated by members of the working groups from the two institutions. Commentators provide feedback to stimulate discussion and intellectual exchange between participants.

Organisers

Anna Breidenbach (2nd Year)

Niklas Platzer (2nd Year)

Supported by Benno Gammerl, Paola Molino, Carlotta Sorba

Participants to the first workshop in Florence:

Anna Breidenbach (EUI), Daniele Cal (EUI), Emma dal Mas (EUI), Thays De Souza Ellero (Mobility Studies), Lydia Hendriksma (EUI), Aleksandr Lemeshinski (EUI), Alena Lesniak (Mobility Studies),  Chukwudi Matthew Anuforo (Mobility Studies), Midya Navidi  (Mobility Studies), Maria Pantazi (EUI), Niklas Platzer (EUI), Fabian Riesinger (EUI), Hasan Sezer (Mobility Studies), Ginevra Villani (PhD Padua-Venice), Mikhail Vsemirnov (PhD Padua-Venice).

SAIL analyses early migration from Sicily to Louisiana between 1865 and 1901. It sheds light on agents of migration who enrolled peasants in Sicily and on their transnational connections with labour recruiters based in Louisiana, who were looking for a labour force after the abolition of slavery at the end of the US Civil War in 1865. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Italian government considered emigration as an issue to be managed or opposed: the 1901 law restricted the activity of agents of migration, who were regarded as people smugglers and used as a scapegoat to justify migration, rather than being studied as one of the interrelated factors triggering it. This simplistic view permeated the public debate in Italy, has not been challenged by scholarship on Sicilian migration, and resonates with current populist and xenophobic narratives.

SAIL offers the first comprehensive study of early Sicilian migration to Louisiana by adopting an interdisciplinary approach combining social, economic, and cultural history with literature. Thanks to a thorough investigation and cross-referencing of untapped Italian and US archival sources and literary works, SAIL maps the presence of agents of migration in Sicily, analysing their identity, background, methods, organisation, and the transnational connections with labour recruiters in Louisiana, gauging their effectiveness in disseminating a dreaming image of the USA among Sicilian peasants and examining the extent to which their activity impacted the migration flow alongside other factors (economic depression, political turmoil, chain migration, remittances).

SAIL will fill a scholarly gap, develop tools for researching migrations, and reflect on Sicily’s past and its present as one of the main gateways into Europe. Through activities involving academic and non-academic audiences, SAIL will stimulate a debate and raise awareness around one of Europe’s most pressing concerns: safeguarding the right to safe migration.

Know more:

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101149130

The research project focuses on the history and future of text and textuality, drawing on scholarship in book history, media and communication studies, and digital history. It takes advantage of the extensive research that has converged at MoHu in recent years to design and implement a teaching program with the Tokyo College on the history and future of the text.

In the summer of 2024, Paola Molino and Federico Mazzini spent two weeks and one month, respectively, at the University of Tokyo, collaborating with Professors Michael Facius and Cintia Vezzani to co-teach the BA course “The Future of the Text.” The central inquiry addressed in this course sought to ascertain whether the “written word,” a concept with a centuries-long history, retains a future within the digital landscape. Contemporary trends, such as the replacement of novels by movies and subsequently video games as the predominant cultural form, the transition from text to audio and video in messenger apps and social media platforms, a concomitant loss of concentration and focus, and declining rates of functional literacy in many developed countries, appear to suggest a negative answer to this question. This is further compounded by the fact that, just a year after the emergence of major language models like ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has already begun to perform a significant amount of reading and writing on our behalf. In this interdisciplinary course, we approached these trends not as absolute truths, but as a point of departure to explore the intricate relationship between literacy, media, and society through a comparative lens. We examined long-term trends in diverse textual media, the evolution of technologies from the printing press to social media platforms, and the social contexts of reading and literacy. This enabled us to contemplate past, present, and future trajectories of textuality.

The subsequent phase of the project entails the execution of the Summer School “The Future of the Text” (June 16-20, 2025), which will be hosted at the Center for Advanced Studies in Mobility and Humanities in Padua and is supported by the Universities of Padua and Tokyo. The Summer School aspires to delve into the historical progression of textual practices and technologies, providing insights and stimulating debates on the present and future of texts. The program will feature a series of traditional lectures on the history of the book, digital history, the mobility of texts and maps, and the challenges of writing English texts in the era of AI. These lectures will be complemented by hands-on workshops in libraries, museums, and exhibitions in Padua and Venice. The Summer School will be offered to international postgraduate students from Padua and Tokyo. It will be a collaborative effort, with instruction provided by Paola Molino, Federico Mazzini, and two colleagues from the University of Tokyo, Michael Facius and Naoko Shimazu. Further details regarding the Summer School, including the call for applications, will be made available on this website by mid-February 2025.

Postdoctoral researcher: Claudia Addabbo

This two years research project explores natural history collections and their mobility as interdisciplinary objects, between history, botany and art. The aim is to focus on the figure of the Italian botanist and art collector Achille Forti (1878-1937) and on his considerable Algae Herbarium, today preserved at the Botanical Museum of the University of Padua. It includes around 40,000 specimens of algae from all-over the world, collected by different people and in different scientific expeditions between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
The main objective of the project is to reconstruct the history of the formation of Forti’s Herbarium and to consider its “mobility” in space and time, thanks to an integrated and extensive study of archival material, museological collections and primary literature, in the light of history of science and mobility studies.

Delving into the area of interest emerging from the overlapping fields of tourism and mobility studies, the DeterTour research project proposes an interdisciplinary investigation of contemporary urban policies, materialities and narratives of deterrence implemented to bound unwanted tourist mobilities.
Drawing on the legacies of the pandemic, the interpretive lenses of cultural geography and urban studies combine to analyse recent and upcoming laws and regulations aiming to contain tourist mobilities. As a result, the analysis identifies reworked versions of key concepts regulating the limitations on personal mobility during the pandemic, namely footfall and border, as co-constitutive elements of contemporary strategies of deterrence. Significantly, they operate at different scales while disseminating narratives concerning the restrained access to heavily touristed areas, specifically urban destinations.
Emphasising the potentialities of an approach merging mobility and the humanities, DeterTour will employ methodologies that combine critical discourse analysis with im/mobile phenomenological, non-representational explorations of urban spaces to gather and analyse perceptions and experiences of contained tourist mobilities participating in the co-production processes of heavily touristed Southern European urban spaces.

Research group:
Peter Adey, Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory and Urban Design at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark
Kaya Barry, Senior Lecturer of Cultural Geography at Griffith University, Australia
Antonio Paolo Russo, Professor of Tourism and Geography at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

Main partners:
OMERO – CENTRO DI RICERCA IN STUDI URBANI, based at the UNIVERSITY OF TURIN and chaired by Alberto Vanolo
FRINGE URBAN NARRATIVES, based at the UNIVERSIDAD DE ALCALÁ, SPAIN and chaired professor Patricia García

The research project aims to improve our knowledge of gender dynamics within the workplace in the pre-industrial age, focusing on the Italian peninsula between the 15th and 19th century. The objective is to quantify in which activities and in what percentage women and men were engaged and to reconceptualize of some of the main categories in historical analysis and in the current debate, such as productive/unproductive, paid/unpaid, public/private, and domestic/care/non-domestic work. Therefore, the project includes every form of work, be it rewarded with money, non-monetary means, or carried out in compliance with family duties and forms of reciprocity between family members, parents, neighbours.

While previous studies have focused mainly on urban areas, this project will also examine the rural context, which it will attempt to quantify through a geo-referenced analysis, owing to the wealth of information available for Italy. Attention will also be paid to short and long-distant mobility.

New research will be carried out in the Italian archives, making innovative use of the abundance of information especially in criminal sources. The results will then be compared in a European perspective through a final conference. The project will create a qualitative and a quantitative database using a novel methodology that links the language used, space utilisation, and forms of mobility to accomplish its goals. It will also enable us to broaden the knowledge of the dynamics affecting the world of work in the pre-industrial age by linking gender, work, workplaces and mobility in a comparative and quantitative way for the first time.

A long term perspective will offer insight on dynamics that are very important for the current debate, which the outbreak of the pandemic has exacerbated. These include gender discrimination in the workplace, the work done in the domestic sphere, gender roles, and women’s contribution to national income.

In today’s world, the concept of borders extends beyond geographical lines etched on maps. Borders are dynamic and constantly evolving. They shape, and are shaped by, the flows of migration, the rise of nationalism, and the stories of people, ideas and objects moving across them. As Etienne Balibar (2002: 84) reminds us, “Borders are no longer the shores of politics, or the edges of power; they have become the space of the political itself.”

In a world grappling with migration crises, reactionary nationalism, and the never-ending building of walls, MOBILITY ON THE EDGE offers a multidisciplinary approach across geography, history, and anthropology to reflect on the profound impact borders have on human mobility and the environment we inhabit, asking how we can create a more sensitive cartography of these edges.

By exploring “zones of transition” where borders do not neatly divide but overlap and entangle (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), the project is thus interested in mapping spaces of friction and negotiation, where movement and containment are constantly renegotiated. “Borderworlds”—a term coined by Gloria Anzaldúa to capture the hybrid spaces at the margins are also “borders-as-skins” — a term used by Franck Billé (2017) to highlight the perceptual, bodily, aptic and sensous processes that challenge walling and de-walling practices.

Borders, in this sense, are seen by participants of this project as dynamic processes that affect human and nonhuman actors alike—maps and technologies, but also bodies, animals, and plants, all of which co-create these boundaries.

The project is also anchored in geo-philosophies of movement and processuality (Merriman, 2019), drawing attention to the ways in which human and nonhuman mobilities both transgress and reproduce borders and aims to engage with critical cartography to unpack the inherent instability of territorial borders and the ways they are continuously re-inscribed.

In this sense, one of the project’s highlights is its innovative approach to critical and cultural cartography. Students of the MA in Mobility Studies will be actively involved in the project by creating an “Alter-Atlas of Borders” — a cartographic project that rethinks borders (and mapping) using graphic, tactile, cinematic and sound-based approaches.

Some of the questions we will afford are:

• In what ways do borders materialise through everyday practices and state policies, and how do they shift in response to geopolitical changes, migration flows, or environmental factors?

• How do the movement of human and nonhuman actors, as well as data and ideas, complicate and transgress borders?

• What kinds of experiences emerge in liminal spaces, or “borderworlds”, where traditional divisions between inside and outside, citizen and foreigner, are blurred?

• How can critical cartography challenge dominant representations of borders as fixed lines on maps and propose alternative ways of understanding borders, migration stories, and mobility patterns?

We will try to tackle these questions through the following activities:

• Organising a series of seminars held at the MoHu Centre, inviting international experts on borders, critical cartorgaphy, mobility, and migration.

• Conducting an overseas mission at the Department of Geography and the Centre for Silk Road at Berkeley University to open scientific discussions on the project theme and explore potential future collaborations.

• Collaborating on creative outputs, engaging students in producing a critical and artistic exploration of borders through mapping. This creative exploration will challenge traditional map-making and offer new perspectives on global migration issues.

By focusing on these activities, participants will be able to explore the multifaceted ways in which borders are enacted, negotiated, and contested through mobility, mapping, and interdisciplinary research.

External Collaborators:

• Frank Billé, Cultural Anthropologist, Assistant Professor, Berkeley University
• Peter Merriman, Geographer, Full Professor, Aberystwyth University
• Clancy Wilmott, Geographer and Media Scholar, Assistant Professor, Berkeley University

Contact & More Information
For further details on the Mobility on the Edge project, upcoming events, or collaboration opportunities, please contact Laura Lo Presti at  laura.lopresti@unipd.it.

Circu.I.T.I.N.G. – Circulation of Ideas and Things within Intellectual networks around the Globe aims to promote seminars, research activities, and dissemination practices focused on the circulation of ideas from a processual and historical perspective, with particular attention to the relationship between symbolic and material infrastructures and the role played by the formal and informal fields that codify the possibilities of ideational and scholarly exchange.

As suggested by our acronym, we aim at reconstructing the circuits through which ideas and things, and more generally cultural objects, are mobilized within globally-extended intellectual networks. If seen as scholarly fields, scientific and humanistic disciplines develop simultaneously a “national” dimension (as they emerge from connections and networks rooted in local traditions that have been organized, since the 19th century, in a close relationship to national institutional and governmental bodies) and a “transnational” dimension (as they are able to connect scholars from different geographic areas). What are the effects of the international extension—which does not mean, necessarily, a globalization—that affects the processes of creation, production, and circulation of ideas and other cultural objects? Can we describe and explain the relationships between the mobility of people (scholars and intellectuals, but also students and experts) and the mobility of ideas? More technically: what are the implications of the digital turn in terms of both the access to “dematerialized” sources and the growing availability of secondary literature—a process which raises questions of selection and capacity for critical comparison? And what is the relationship between the new ways of circulating ideas and the professional personas that intellectuals and intellectuals form of themselves as authors?

We will try to tackle these questions organizing two cycles of seminars and meeting, focused on two wide different but intertwined programs:

• The study of scientific and humanistic disciplines as historically-bounded spaces of expert knowledge production within which cultural objects—such as the products of social-historical research, which crystallize ideas, debates, and discoveries into different kinds of textual forms—are reflected upon, written down, circulated, and discussed. We understand the study of disciplines as focused on the infrastructures enabling scholarly and cultural exchanges: academic institutions; public and private research centers; publishing houses and their editors; networks of authors, readers, translators and critics; brokers who can circulate scholarly ideas to wider audiences, such as journalists, essayists, and science communicators;

• The relationship between material and digital cultural objects and the relevance of technologies in the practice of research, archiving, writing, and dialogue among scholars from different disciplines, with particular attention to the effects of the so-called “digital turn” on primary sources (e.g., with regard to their digitization and dematerialization) and secondary sources (e.g., with regard to the increasing availability of secondary literature, the ability to assess its quality and usefulness, and the selection options that arise in the face of its increase).

The two cycles will involve faculty members belonging to different institutions and disciplines, encouraging the participation of early career researchers, assignees and doctoral students, and complementing, where possible, the activities of the departmental Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Humanities (MOHU) and the Inter-University Center for Cultural History (CSC), with a view to consolidating existing relationships and creating future research collaborations and publication possibilities. In this regard, efforts will also be made to foster collaboration with the History of Sociology section (RC08) of the International Sociological Association (ISA), of which the PI of this project is vice president for the five-year period 2023-2027, by promoting joint initiatives on the historical study of disciplines and the relationship between digital sources and historical research.