The nexus of (im)mobilities: hyper, compelled, and forced mobile subjects

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay theorizes three types of mobile subjects: the hyper mobile (those who are allowed, and encouraged to, travel for work or leisure), the compelled mobile (those compelled, by design of the global economy, to move for work) and the forced mobile (those who move for survival but often end up contained, incarcerated or detained). I explore how these travelling subjects are simultaneously intimate, enmeshed, and disconnected. Theorizing the relationships between mobile subjects, which I term the nexus of (im)mobility, illuminates how settler colonial logics, racial hierarchies and capitalist accumulation produce mobility today. Bringing Black and Indigenous theories together with mobilities studies, I present case studies to investigate the ways that structures of private property, nation-states and their borders, tourism, and concepts of whiteness/Westernity as superior work together to normalize categories of (im)mobility.