This volume examines the various forms of mobility in the cinema of the Visegrad countries and Romania, bringing together the cross-disciplinary research of mostly native scholars. Divided into four thematic sections, it expands the reader’s understanding of the political transition and the social changes it triggered, the transforming perceptions of gender roles and especially masculinity. The spaces of “in betweenness” and contact zones, whether geographical, interethnic or communicative, (im)mobility and transmedial encounters of Eastern European subjectivity are recurring figures of both cinematic representations and their theoretical analyses. In-depth and transcultural in their nature, the investigations gathered in this volume are informed by political, social and cultural history, genre, gender and spatial theory, cultural studies, sociology and political science, and, of equal importance, the rich personal experience of the authors who witnessed many of the discussed phenomena in “close-up”.

This interdisciplinary collection explores what mobility meant, and still means, in the specific contexts of Soviet and East European socialist and post-socialist societies. Together the chapters consider diverse practices of mobility and their different contexts of power, resistance and inequality.

In the last twenty-five years, the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities. Whereas previously the social fabric of these cities ran on socialist modes of mobility, they are now overtaken by a culture of privately owned cars. If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic cases studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, maneuverability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatized mobility reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.

The beginning of the 21st century has seen important shifts in mobility cultures around the world, as the West’s media-driven car culture has contrasted with existing local mobilities, from rickshaws in India and minibuses in Africa to cycling in China. In this expansive volume, historian Gijs Mom explores how contemporary mobility has been impacted by social, political, and economic forces on a global scale, as in light of local mobility cultures, the car as an ‘adventure machine’ seems to lose cultural influence in favor of the car’s status character.

This volume offers a unique exploration of how ageing masculinities are constructed and represented in contemporary international cinema. With chapters spanning a range of national cinemas, the primarily European focus of the book is juxtaposed with analysis of the social and cultural constructions of manhood and the "anti-ageing" impulses of male stardom in contemporary Hollywood. These themes are inflected in different ways throughout the volume, from considering how old age is not the monolithic and unified life stage with which it is often framed, to exploring issues of queerness, sexuality, and asexuality, as well as themes such as national cinema and dementia. Offering a diverse and multifaceted portrait of ageing and masculinity in contemporary cinema, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film and screen studies, gender and masculinity studies, and cultural gerontology.

This book explores the function of the “everyday” in the formation, consolidation and performance of national, sub-national and local identities in the former socialist region. Based on extensive original research including fieldwork, the book demonstrates how the study of everyday and mundane practices is a meaningful and useful way of understanding the socio-political processes of identity formation both at the top and bottom level of a state. The book covers a wide range of countries including the Baltic States, Ukraine, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and considers “everyday” banal practices, including those related to consumption, kinship, embodiment, mobility, music, and the use of objects and artifacts. Overall, the book draws on, and contributes to, theory; and shows how the process of nation-building is not just undertaken by formal actors, such as the state, its institutions and political elites.

In eleven ethnographic chapters of Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe examines how issues of global economic and cultural dependencies, mobilities, citizens activism, social movements, and socio-political aspects of post-socialist modernities articulate on the level of everyday discourse and practices.

The collapse of state socialism ushered in dramatic political and economic change, producing new freedoms and opportunities, but also new challenges and disappointments. Focusing on laborers, professionals, youth, women, sexual minorities, foreign students, and emigrants, Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe explores these multifaceted changes and people’s varied experiences of them. The featured narratives complicate hegemonic representations of transformation, revealing ruptures and continuities, progress and reversals. Highlighting the multi-directionality of change over the last thirty years, the book reappraises 1989 as an epochal event for all.

Returning migrants have been involved in post-socialist transformation processes all across Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Engaged in politics, the economy, science and education, arts and civil society, return migrants have often exerted crucial influence on state and nation-building processes and on social and cultural transformations. However, remigration not only comprises stories of achievements, but equally those of failed integration, marginalization, non-participation and lost potential - these are mostly stories untold. The contributions to this volume shed light on processes of return migration to various Eastern and Southeastern European countries from multidisciplinary perspectives. Particular attention is paid to anthropological approaches that aim to understand the complexities of return migration from individual perspectives.

Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on often forgotten, but some of the most essential, aspects of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation. As the skeletons of cities, infrastructures capture the ways in which urban environments are assembled and urban lives unfold. Focusing on post-socialist cities, marked by neoliberalisation, polarisation and hybridity, this book offers new and enriching perspectives on urban infrastructures by centering on the often marginalised aspects of urban research—transport, green spaces, and water and heating provision. Featuring cases from West and East alike, the book covers examples from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Tajikistan, and India. It provides original insights into the infrastructural back end of post-socialist cities for scholars, planners and activists interested in urban geography, cultural and social anthropology, and urban studies.