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The recent “mobility turn” in the social sciences has emphasised the increasing scale and speed of movement in our modern world. It also invites critical analyses of the politics of mobility: how movement is conceptualised and regulated and what these processes reveal about power and marginalisation within societies. However, within this literature to date, there have been relatively few empirical, geographical analyses of mobile (or nomadic) cultures: those peoples whose identities and lived experience are often contested through the interplay of population (im)mobilities and state regulation. Though these mobile cultures – including pastoral nomads, Indigenous hunter‐gatherer peoples and Gypsy/Traveller peoples – are vastly different in many ways, they share a set of common experiences which suggests that an analysis of the politics of mobility for one is likely to have relevance to others. As a call to future comparative efforts, this paper begins by setting out four commonalities across diverse mobile cultures, related to: experiences of oppression; disciplining discourses; forced confinement/sedentarism; and contemporary socio‐economic marginalisation. We then present a set of empirical findings that elaborate the related experiences of one mobile culture in situ. Here, we examine the politics of mobility regulation in the context of Indigenous Australians and state housing policy. The findings reveal how state practices that ignore or attempt to regulate the spatial/population mobilities of mobile cultures have questionable efficacy, and can further entrench the marginal status of mobile cultures. They also show how mobile cultures challenge sedentarist policy parameters that insist on fixity in household tenure and composition. These observed struggles with respect to cultural identity and movement regulation constitute important empirical challenges to the nomadic metaphysics within the mobility turn.

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Migration from the African continent to Australia has increased in volume and diversity in the last three decades, with the most recent census identifying 2.6 % of the total Australian population as either born in, or having at least one parent born in, Africa. In examining demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, and interrogating political, economic, social and cultural transnational practices, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines demography, political science and sociology, this paper seeks to identify in what ways and for what purposes this population might be considered a pan-African diaspora. We argue that there is some evidence of (i) pan-African consciousness underpinning the collective identity of African-Australian community organisations; (ii) governments, NGO s, communities and individuals engaging in activities that contribute meaningfully to Australian society, countries of origin and identity formation; (iii) significant diversity and important cleavages among these populations. Broader research is required to more adequately identify and measure the multifaceted transnational contributions of African-background peoples in Australia.

Indigenous migratory practices have never been comfortably explained using deterministic theories of migration. In this paper, we argue that translocalism offers new hopeful possibilities for building more robust and nuanced understandings of Indigenous migration and for extending theorisations of translocality in postcolonial settler‐states. Drawing on empirical evidence from a small‐scale exploratory study of Indigenous adults who migrated from rural/remote Australia, to Perth, Western Australia, to study at a university, we suggest that a particular politics of place‐making characterises Indigenous translocal subjectivities in settler states. These politics are evidenced by the ways in which the very act of movement from rural/remote areas to large cities for education can draw the authenticity of Indigenous identities into contestation. It also speaks to the resultant importance of translocal networks and places that provide relational spaces to share experiences of, and respond to, these contestations. The participants in this study made use of Indigenous student centres at their universities to develop a sense of place, build translocal networks, nurture their cultural identities, and contest settler assumptions that situate “authentic” Indigenous identities in a remote wilderness past.