Mobility

Abstract

Broadly speaking, mobility refers to the socio-cultural processes surrounding movement. As a focus of anthropological research, mobility engages with the notion that human social worlds are in multiple states and forms of circulating spatial and temporal flux, and, as such, are variously implicated in trajectories of movement between and among human actors, physical objects and intangible information, ideas and capital. Mobility studies emerged out of the celebration of postmodernism and globalization, and their concomitant links to global flows of people and things in contexts of both migration and transnationalism. New forms of human interaction and engagement amid sea changes in the capacity for people, things, and representations to move fast and far have led to new intellectual theorizations, perspectives, approaches, and provocations, denoting mobility as a new point of departure for contemporary analyses of the social world in the 21st century. Since the early 2000s, scholars have worked to develop the theoretical underpinnings of a “new mobilities” paradigm which would, in turn, lead to a “mobility turn” in the social sciences and beyond. The paradigm challenges a number of assumptions within the social sciences including the static, bounded concepts of culture and society as a unit of analysis, the assumed center-periphery nature of movement of peoples from developing to developed areas of the world, and the close association of mobility with freedom (and immobility with oppression). Studies of mobility go far beyond researching mere movement, and now even comparatively sedentary concepts such as society and nation are being upended with interlinked, shifting, and mobile things, ideas, and individuals. Mobility research has been characteristically cross-disciplinary, finding traction early on in the fields of sociology and geography before being taken up by the theoretical considerations and ethnographic research of social and cultural anthropologists (though of course studying movement—of both humans and non-humans—was nothing new for anthropologists). Scholarship across distinct strands of mobility research has fostered dialogue among otherwise spatting social science fields, and scholars from other disciplines, such as cultural and migration studies, tourism and transport studies, media studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) have also made important contributions to literature on mobility that is either anthropological in focus or approach, or heavily used by anthropologists in their mobility scholarship. Because research into mobility comprises such a wide range of area specializations, theoretical interests, and methodological approaches, however, exactly what constitutes mobility research can mean different things to different scholars in different disciplines—from research on communities of people who physically move for their jobs (e.g., commuters, expatriates, or seasonal agricultural workers) to studies of societal systems, infrastructures, and regimes such as vehicular transport or border control. And, as expected, the normative categories established by a number of scholars of mobility to study the field have themselves received no small amount of critique from anthropologists for their privileging certain types of mobile movement and deprecating others. This bibliography outlines the scope of literature on mobility that is particularly anthropological in its approach, method, and object, while also considering some of the seminal works in sociology and geography that have both influenced anthropological thinking on mobility and proven foundational to the development of the “mobility turn” in the social sciences more generally. There is inherently overlap between some of the sections set up here (e.g., Migration and Labor and Work), but they have been structured via these categories more to facilitate reader accessibility than to set up any hard and fast distinctions for how the scholarship discussed in this article should be framed or understood.