Introduction to Volume 2: Objects, people and texts

This two-volume book can be understood as a series of texts, as a couple of objects, as a sum of ideas, and, above all, as the physical, temporal and symbolic journeys that different researchers undertook between 2018 and 2022, when the Mobility & Humanities project ran at the University of Padova. This second volume provides a framework for considering multifarious assemblages of mobilities made up of objects, people and texts. The Objects section explores the different forms of objects circulating in space and time and the way in which mobility transforms their materiality, economic and symbolic values, and functions. The People section delves into whether and how renewed attention to people’s mobilities practices and flows – by adopting a long temporal and chronological perspective merged with diachronic and comparative approaches – can fruitfully influence the already consolidated studies that characterise mobilities studies. Finally, the Texts section focuses on the spatial, chronological and conceptual mobility of books and texts, intertwining different disciplines in the humanities and following multiple thematic perspectives, within which tradition (in its broadest sense) and identity assume decisive significance.