Mobility and the humanities

Abstract

This special issue showcases new and emerging work on mobilities by scholars working in arts and humanities disciplines. In this introductory article we counter the conventional genealogy of mobility studies and the new mobilities paradigm as having emerged from the social sciences, tracing the long entanglement of mobility thinking with debates in the arts and humanities, from writings rooted in process philosophy and post-colonial thinking, to engagements with transport history and artistic representations of movement. We argue that arts and humanities approaches to movement and mobility can usefully be guided by a broadened understanding of ‘kin-aesthetics’, through which scholars can examine how movement is enacted, felt, perceived, expressed, metered, choreographed, appreciated and desired. In the final section we introduce the articles in the special issue, examining some of the different texts, methods and theoretical frames through which the authors approach movement and mobility in its different forms.