Abstract
This paper engages with theoretical insights into understanding everyday travel (from the mobility turn and theories of social practice) in an analysis of everyday mobility using data from ethnographic research. The analysis of mobile performances draws attention to how travellers incorporate valued dispersed practices into mobility. We argue that incorporating such contingent practices into travel generates affective satisfactions consistently sought across transport mode changes through the life-course. These findings complement existing abstract analyses of modal choice and are explored to draw out the implications for the attractiveness of different modes and the potential for broader transitions to lower carbon mobility.
Highlights
The ‘mobilities turn’ and the shift of focus to mobility as a social phenomenon in its own right (Cresswell 2010; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006) has done much to qualify assumptions in traditional transport research about everyday mobility practices
Monitoring is a practice dispersed across many fields of activity, but when it is applied to maintaining fuel efficiency on a motorway journey or to tracing a heartbeat on a leisure run its meaning, purpose and affective charge is transformed by its incorporation in a larger, integrative practice. It is in this sense that we describe monitoring, listening to music, acquiring and using appropriate equipment, and two forms of navigation as dispersed practices incorporated into performances of the broader integrative practices of getting to work, visiting family, weekly shopping and so forth. We show how this incorporation is central to the affective satisfactions gained from mobility, and through life-history analysis reveal how satisfactions generated through incorporation can transfer between different modes of transport in a dynamic manner through the life course
Full analysis of the many different practices that might be incorporated into mobility performances to achieve satisfaction is not possible in the space available in this paper – we have focused on affect rather than merely effectively using travel time in a ‘utility’ model (Jain and Lyons 2008)
Summary
The ‘mobilities turn’ and the shift of focus to mobility as a social phenomenon in its own right (Cresswell 2010; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006) has done much to qualify assumptions in traditional transport research about everyday mobility practices. Faulconbridge ‘non-rational’ and affective factors highlighted in existing mobilities research, which are often associated with the social and material-aesthetic experience of being mobile, affectivities relate to the way mobility allows other valued practices to be achieved We illustrate this through analysis of how the practices of route-planning and navigation, listening to music, monitoring, and acquiring and using ‘the right equipment for the job’, are incorporated into mobility (i.e. performed whilst mobile) and contribute to making mobility meaningful and affective for those we studied. It is in this sense that we describe monitoring, listening to music, acquiring and using appropriate equipment, and two forms of navigation as dispersed practices incorporated into performances of the broader integrative practices of getting to work, visiting family, weekly shopping and so forth We show how this incorporation is central to the affective satisfactions gained from mobility, and through life-history analysis reveal how satisfactions generated through incorporation can transfer between different modes of transport in a dynamic manner through the life course. This suggests the role of dispersed practices needs to be better considered in work that uses practice theory to understand mobility, and in work that considers the implications of affectivity for modal shift policies
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