Mobility – Marginality – Social control

In recent years, mobility studies have undergone a new flourishing: from fresh perspectives and with diverse sensibilities, historians have explored topics such as political exile and labour mobility, migration patterns and communication routes, travel documents and means of personal identification, and infrastructures and reception networks.

Within this broad field of enquiry, a particularly stimulating case study is that of Tyrol. Bordering with three states, this region—especially from the nineteenth century onward—functioned as a space of intense mobility, both intraregional and transregional. Labourers, seasonal migrants, itinerant traders, deserters, vagrants, and traveling performers continually crisscrossed the Tyrolean Land, remaining within it or crossing its borders, sometimes illegally, to move to other Länder of the Habsburg monarchy or to the neighbouring states: Switzerland, Bavaria, and the Kingdom of Italy.

The projects grouped within this research area aim to investigate specific aspects of the history of mobility, focusing in particular on the connections between mobility, social marginality, and the control and repression of “undesirable” mobile persons. In this context, particular attention is devoted to the phenomenon of vagrancy in all its nuances.