Reflections on Marginal Mobile Lifestyles: 'New European nomads, liveaboards and sha´bi Moroccan men'

• Main Authors: Marko Juntunen, Špela Kalčić, Nataša Rogelja
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Helsinki University Press 2014-03-01
• Series: Nordic Journal of Migration Research
• Subjects: marginal mobilities; mobile lifestyles; new european nomads; liveaboards; sha’bi moroccan men
• Online Access: https://journal-njmr.org/articles/115

This article focuses on mobile people who are largely overlooked in the contemporary studies of migration and mobility. Today, a rather limited but constantly growing number of people from Global North and Global South are wandering along transnational trajectories, without extended settlement anywhere in particular. They remain mobile because of inability to make the living they hoped for in the place of their origin, or because of being dissatisfied with the values or way of living in home society. Based on our fieldworks among Western liveaboards in the Mediterranean, new European nomads who engage in a mobile life between Europe and Africa, and popular class (sha’bi)1 Moroccan men in the transnational space between Morocco and Spain, we demonstrate the central characteristic of these lifestyles that we prefer to conceptualise as “'marginal mobilities'”: they are highly mobile, not entirely forced nor voluntary lifestyles, which occur along loosely defined travel trajectories; they generally lack politicised public spheres; and they are marked by the sentiments of marginality, liminality and constant negotiation with the sedentary norm of the nation state.