  | A new article, "Mobility Hub or Hollow? Cross-border Travelling in the Mediterranean, 1995-2016" was just published in Global Networks. The paper, co-authored with Ettore Recchi (Sciences Po/EUI) and Federica Bicchi (LSE/EUI) is based on joint work in the Global Mobilities Project at the EUI's Migration Policy Centre. We show that moblity in the Mediterranean is distributed extremely unequally. Mobility is much higher and increasing more strongly along the northern than along the southern shore, thus creating a growing mobility divide (see figure on the left). South‐north and north‐south movements are even scarcer and stagnate or even decline over time. Mobility between France, Spain and Italy constitutes almost 57 percent of all mobility in the Mediterranean althouth these three countries account for little more than one percent of all country pairs in the region. Community detection algorithms reconfirm that mobility predominantly takes place in disparate clusters around the Mediterranean, not across it. These findings imply that much like the Rio Grande in the U.S., the Mediterranean still constitutes a dividing obstacle to mobility in the 21st century. Multivariate regression models for network data suggest that geographical distance and, to a lesser extent, political visa regulations, explain the unequal mobility structure better than differences in economic well‐being. The paper is open access and can be read in full here. |
 On February 1, 2019, I started a new position as Akademischer Rat (equivalent to senior lecturer or assistant professor) at the University of Göttingen. I will work with Céline Teney at the Chair for Fundamentals of Social Science. We are currently searching for a PhD student or postdoc to complete our team. Deadline for applications is February 10, 2019 (see the job advert in English and German).
I will remain affiliated with the Global Mobilities Project at the European University Institute's Migration Policy Centre as an External Collaborator.  A new article, titled "Transnational Social Practices: A Quantitative Perspective", co-authored with Céline Teney, was just published in Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Transnational social practices (TSP) can be defined as sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges between individuals across national borders. Over the last decades, TSP have not only become more common, but they have also developed into an increasingly salient subject of quantitative sociological research. After highlighting seminal foundational research, we introduce a set of salient topics in this emerging strand of research, including the social stratification of TSP, the link between TSP and cosmopolitan attitudes, and the issue of classifying TSP into meaningful subdimensions. We conclude with a discussion of several avenues for future research, including the relation between TSP and the increasing societal polarization between “locals” and “globals,” the need to go beyond the field's current Eurocentrism to study TSP comparatively in all parts of the world, and the prospects of methodological and technical advances in research on TSP, including network‐analytic approaches and geo‐tagged digital‐trace data. A free pre-print version can downloaded here.
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