Mobility Turn Research Articles

Queuing (im)mobilities: mobilizing the study of waiting in line

ABSTRACT Waiting in line (or queuing) is a mundane and wide-spread activity across the world. As an everyday phenomenon, this behavior features taken-for-granted dimensions that are rarely reflected upon and deserve further examination as they can shed light on the organization of social interaction and urban life. In this paper, we propose a research agenda for queuing practices that connects mobilities and design research while drawing on sociological thought. In line with the “mobilities turn”, we first highlight that queuing is more than simply being immobile. Waiting in line is a complex practice that is governed or “staged from above” through formal rules, legal procedures, and administrative procedures. Simultaneously, it is “staged from below” through the complex interactional patterns of behavior in the everyday life of millions of people. Moreover, we connect the mobilities-inspired understanding of this queuing to themes and ideas within the design realm. The article demonstrates how the act of waiting in line is “afforded” by the material and spatial layout of the environment, thus positioning mundane situations of waiting and queuing as windows into the norms and ideas governing co-presence and propinquity. After thus proposing an analytical framework that focuses on the nexus between waiting bodies and material environs, we will illustrate the value and reach of this approach through three ethnographic vignettes (supermarkets, stadiums, and airports). We conclude by identifying future research avenues for a more detailed exploration of queuing (im)mobilities.

Circular economy in tourism and hospitality: A micro-meso-macro framework for inter-disciplinary research

This contribution elaborates on the theoretical and practical implications of the circular economy in tourism and hospitality through an inter-disciplinary approach advancing novel possibilities for future research. Acknowledging the literature gap on circular economy in tourism and hospitality as an under-researched and under-theorised area of research, this contribution identifies a set of theoretical lenses that can help to elaborate the notion of circular economy and unpack it through an inter-disciplinary approach for future research. It does so by discussing the notion of circular economy through a micro-meso-macro framework combining practice theory, network theory, complexity theory, and the spatial and mobilities turn in social sciences. The originality of this work lies in its inter-disciplinary approach based on a micro-meso-macro theoretical framework offering novel opportunities to discuss, envision, and operationalize circular regenerative processes in tourism futures in terms of multidimensional, networked, complex, practice-based, and localised processes and operations.

How does knowledge move? Investigating the epistemic mobilities of “climate migration” with diverse conceptual metaphors

The production of knowledge is a mobile process. Efforts to conceptualise the mobilities of knowledge draw on a wide range of metaphors to conceptualise the ways in which knowledge moves and changes as it moves. In this paper, I present the theoretical origins and methodological implications – often tied to specific disciplines – of concepts in use. I distinguish between sedentarist metaphors (construction, transfer) and mobile metaphors (focusing on translation, contagion, friction, and circulation). I show that, although all these metaphors share a common attention to knowledge as mobile, they are neither synonymous nor interchangeable. They each structure how we think about and research epistemic mobilities in their own way. I find that mobile metaphors in particular are most compatible with, and can contribute to, the development of the mobile ontology that characterises the mobilities turn. I illustrate this using a case study of the epistemic mobilities of the idea of climate migration in the French context. From this example, I draw key lessons for studies of epistemic mobilities. I argue for a diverse, nuanced conceptual vocabulary of epistemic mobilities, leading to a nuanced, relational understanding of space, scale, and how to trace the mobilities of knowledge in practice.

Dispelling the New Mobility Paradigm: A Cutting-edge Look at the Mobility Turn

Dispelling the New Mobility Paradigm: A Cutting-edge Look at the Mobility Turn

The Adriatic Catholic Marian Pilgrimage in Nin near Zadar as a Maritime Pilgrimage

Following the general approach to pilgrimage as established by anthropologists and other scientists, the paper analyses the pilgrimage in Nin to Our Lady of Zečevo. More specifically, this pilgrimage will be observed as a maritime pilgrimage, following relevant recent research. Based on the oral story about the apparition of Virgin Mary to a widow, the statue of Mary is transported from Nin in a boat procession via sea to a mediaeval church on the nearby uninhabited island of Zečevo. Pilgrimage practices include many sensorial and symbolic practices, so it will be analysed from several points of view and more than one theoretical approach, including the relational approach and mobility turn, applied also to maritime pilgrimage with a reflection on influence of tourism on pilgrimage activities, especially in the Mediterranean. The paper relies on the field research from 2020–2023 in Nin near Zadar in Croatia which has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project ‘PILGRIMAR’ (UIP-2019-04-8226).

The uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) in measuring people’s exposure to green space using the integrated 3S approach

The “mobility turn” in environmental health studies promoted the integrated 3S (GIS, GPS, and remote sensing) approach in the study of urban residents’ exposure to green space and corresponding health outcomes. However, few studies have examined the uncertainty induced by contextual settings when measuring people’s exposure to green space using the conventional and integrated 3S approaches. In this paper, we compared the differences in green space exposure obtained from different geographic contexts using residence-based and mobility-based methods, multiple spatial resolutions, and buffer zones. We collected 7-day GPS trajectories from 208 participants at the 1-minute temporal resolution in Hong Kong. Entire Hong Kong’s green space was delineated using multiple remote sensing data sources at 3 m, 10 m, and 30 m spatial resolutions. Lastly, the residence-based and mobility-based measurements of exposure to green space were calculated for each participant using 100 m, 300 m, and 500 m buffer zones at three spatial resolutions. Descriptive analyses, t-tests, and logistic regression were employed to examine the influence of different contextual settings on different measurements of green space exposure and their health effects. The results indicate multiple significant disparities. The most striking difference is that mobility-based measurements of exposure to green space are significantly higher than those of residence-based measurements, manifesting the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP). For future studies, we suggest using mobility-based measurements of exposure to green space, smaller buffer zones, and finer spatial resolutions, which enable more accurate measurements of green space exposure for the study of green space’s health effects.

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

Critics have read Eliot's Romola (1862–3) and Middlemarch (1871–2) as historical novels, as examples of the female Bildungsroman or as oddities and successes, respectively, within Eliot's realist oeuvre. This essay brings these strands of enquiry together in a formalist analysis, suggesting that these must not be seen as separate but connected debates about time, space and Eliot's novelistic poetics. Using Bakhtin's idea of the meaning-making nature of the chronotope, the essay reads momentous ‘road’ scenes in Eliot's two novels. As I argue, the road chronotope does not just represent moments of crisis for the protagonists and is, thus, an agent of narrative and mental change, but it also creates the symbolic, generic and affective registers in which these two novels operate. The road chronotope reveals Eliot's self-conscious experimentation with realism as she grapples with history, the individual's place in the world, and also sympathy, which is central to both her novels and her realist poetics. On a broader scale, the essay thus participates in ongoing scholarly debates about nineteenth-century novelistic form while also acknowledging the current ‘mobilities turn’ in analyses of Victorian fiction.

Communes and Other Mobile Commons

The article is the introduction to the special issue of Theoretical Practice which is dedicated to “the communes and other mobile commons”. The editors of the issue explain how we could conceptualize various attempts to create communes in terms of mobile commons and mobile commoning. Since the exemplary case of the Paris Commune many social movements – urban, rural, indigenous, feminist, or migrant – experimented with communes as alternatives to state and capitalism and redefined in this way the meaning of spatial practices, work and the labor movement. Against the assumption that the commune is a necessary localized and sedentary political form, the authors who contributed to the special issue propose to grasp it from the perspective of subversive mobilities: as kinetic entities. The introduction presents the common ground on which these proposals meet each other and come into dialogue. Various models of mobile commons described here – communal, insurgent, liminal, temporary, latent, care, fugitive, maroon, black, indigenous, undercommons, uncommons, and many more – testify of a recent mobility turn in the theories of the commons.

Towards an Understanding of Digital Nomadic Mobilities

Abstract This paper instigates a discussion on the applicability of a mobility lens to digital nomadism. Digital nomadism defines the lifestyle of highly mobile professionals, known as digital nomads, who work while traveling on a (semi)- permanent basis. Digital nomads encompass the mobility changes that have taken place both at a personal and at a societal level and serve as an example of the mobility changes brought about by “the mobilities turn.” This article outlines how mobility and immobility are present in digital nomadism, and how mobility regimes shape the digital nomadic lifestyle. It further discusses digital nomadism in relation to work and travel to examine how this phenomenon challenges and broadens our understanding of and perspectives on mobilities.

Transitions of Mobilities in Rural Areas?

project aims to contribute to the field of sustain mobility in rural areas. Where rural areas traditionally have been embossed by an individual car-based automobility, this project focus to investigate how the city of Lihme can transform into a more sustainable mobility future. By using the 'Motility' framework by (Kaufmann, Bergman, & Joye, 2004), and including the citizens from Lihme through a survey, it has enabled this project to research Lihme within the science of 'Mobilities Turn'. This science evolves mobility, as something more than just going from A to B compared to more conventional way of approach the science of mobility, that focuses more upon the physical structures.This project is designed in a both qualitative and quantitative research style, as it uses a survey as the main methodological approach, where the respondents were allowed to elaborate on their reasoning and mobil-ity behavior. Furthermore, the project is done using the hermeneutic philosophy of science, as the analysis is structured by the theoretical approach by analyzing through interpretations and understandings.The project shows, that there is a great usage of the car as a main mode of transportation for everyday commuting in Lihme. This is mainly caused by the culture, but also there are identified to many limitations for using other alternative mobilities, such as infrequent schedules and coverage for the existing public transport. However, there is a recognition from the citizens in Lihme, that there are other mobilities, that can improve the current mobility situation in Lihme.This project identifies four different 'Ideal Types', distinguished by their 'Potential to be Mobile' and 'Adap-tion Level'. These ideal types represent different groups of individuals and their factors for 'Mobility Coping Strategies'. Thus, these identified ideal types enable planners to select mobilities that fits into what is wanted by citizens living at the certain area. Furthermore, this identification shows, that when individuals are switching between life spaces, there are created 'Transition Stages' where individuals are more open and exposed to be transformed into more sustainable mobilities.The project concludes that it is possible to transform individual and car-based mobility into sustainable mo-bility if the citizens are being included. This means, that implementations of new mobilities need to be suit-able for the demands the citizens might have, as they themselves as citizens constitute the solution for transforming.

Between escape and return: Rethinking daily life and travel in selective unplugging

Selective unplugging refers to being partially connected or disconnected from information and communication technologies (ICTs) during travel. This study explores the processes of escape and return (i.e., linking with the everyday life domain) in selective unplugging and rethinks the relationship between daily life and travel. Based on the analysis of user-generated content and semi-structured interviews, findings show that: (1) tourists disconnect to reestablish the boundaries between daily life and travel blurred by ICTs; (2) tourists might reconnect to contact with the everyday environment driven by social obligations and inner needs; (3) even if the digital connection is cut off, tourists do not completely leave everyday life behind and would experience a special ideal home. Overall, the relationship between daily life and travel appears to show these two elements are interlaced. This study echoes the mobility turn and further discusses the dialectic of virtual mobility and virtual mooring.

Climate disasters, altered migration and pandemic shocks: (im)mobilities and interrelated struggles in a border region

Shocks linked to climate disasters are increasingly understood as intertwined with inequities, devastating livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurities and impacting migration economies. Yet there is often a lack of sustained and situated attention to how these – and diverse secondary and tertiary shocks – are experienced in relation to gender and class inequalities, other social differences and underlying forces shaping differentiated mobility-related challenges over time. Divergent experiences and histories of shocks are often simplified, with (im)mobility-related struggles misunderstood or only abstractly represented. Amid these concerns, this article explores the ‘mobilities turn’ in climate disaster research, focusing on experiences articulated by people along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border, examining multiple impacts of climate disasters and changing dynamics of (im)mobility converging with pandemic shocks and interrelated political and socio-economic struggles. In this region, impacted by one of the world’s most severe tropical cyclones in recent memory, we explore the embeddedness of shocks in dynamic political-economic landscapes and life trajectories. Part of a multi-method 5-year project, we focus on stories where articulations around mobilities, translocal connections and mobility disruptions, including from COVID-19, call for carefully understanding socio-economic ties and histories, land alienation and access inequities, mutating meanings of borders, and factors intensifying economic insecurities amid increasingly severe and frequent climate shocks.

Managing Student Mobility during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Immobility Turn in Internationalized Learning?

This article looked at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the management of internationalized learning, and the disruption to the transitions to adulthood among students reliant upon the freedom to move within and between countries. We started by outlining the place of mobility in transitions, connected to debates about the ‘Mobility Turn,’ with particular relevance to developments in the European context, including the expansion of successive Erasmus student mobility programmes. Following the start of the pandemic, we hypothesize that we are now experiencing an ‘Immobility Turn’ in youth transitions, which, even if temporary, has the potential to disrupt personal and professional development of many young people in problematizing stays abroad at foreign universities. To explore this issue, we drew on evidence from Portugal, discussing issues including the measures taken by host institutions to maintain a safe environment and secure the integrity of educational courses for their international students, thus keeping open their mobile transition pathways. This research also enables us to illustrate the changes in the materiality of internationalized higher education that took place during the pandemic, and the challenges facing academic staff members. In conclusion, we look towards the future of mobile transitions, recognizing the important role played by staff members, and look towards future developments, including the heightened use of virtual mobility platforms for students with the potential to further transform the meaning of internationalized tertiary education.

Cosmopolitanism, Comparison and Affect: Decolonising Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899)

ABSTRACT This essay reads anew Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) as a pedagogical project taking the reader through an ethical, affective journey that upends certain racial, cultural ideologies regarding China. Invoking concepts such as Victorian globalism and free-trade cosmopolitanism, it first examines the ways in which Bird’s interest in the China trade relates to an ethical vision of cosmopolitan community propelled by the ameliorative roles of nineteenth-century globalization. It turns then to explore the use of comparison as a humbling way of seeing self and other in the liminal space of traveling encounters. Finally, it shows the affective, liberating potency of female mobility, contributing to the rise of empowering emotions that shape productive interactions with proximate locals. This essay contributes to debates surrounding the decolonising of Victorian studies and the paradigm shift brought forth by the mobility turn in travel writing studies.

Anti-sedentarism and the anthropology of forced migration

Anthropologists of forced migration have advanced unique perspectives exploring identity and community as they relate to space. With its critique of naturalized conceptions of rootedness, boundedness, and territorialization, anti-sedentarism stands as an important conceptual development emanating from this work. And while expressions such as ‘sedentary bias’ and ‘sedentarist thinking’ are found throughout this body of literature, anti-sedentarism per se has not received a proper treatment of its disciplinary underpinnings and intellectual horizons. This article identifies some of the genealogical traces of anti-sedentarism, discussing it through anthropological contributions in both the cultural and mobility turns. Informed by the work of anthropologists of forced migration, a working definition of anti-sedentarism is provided, followed by a critical discussion on key debates related to this concept. A selection of migrant and refugee ethnographies produced during the mobility turn (1990s onward) is then used to explore the extent which anti-sedentarism has translated to the empirical work of anthropologists and ethnographers engaging with displacement, dispossession, and deterritorialization.

Placing automobility in postcolonial cities: Towards an ontology of a displaced past

The mobility turn offers a rich terrain for research to investigate the exercise of politics and power in movement through attention to associated meanings and practices. Despite this, the ontologies that can anchor this research within a historical imagination remains largely uncharted. Happily for us, coming from the opposite direction history, and especially the field of transport history, has grappled with mobilizing history in the face of the mobility turn. Several scholars have offered “usable past” as a mode of mobilizing mobility cultures of the past to inform policy actors about future choices. But is the ontology of a usable past appropriate for countries enmeshed within pre/post/colonial histories of displacement in their society and culture? Employing a case of automobilization in the city of Bengaluru in India, this paper sketches an exposition of the “displaced past” in sedimented residues that continues to live and contest the enterprise of automobility.

Social Sustainability and Professional Migration in the Educational Space of Russian Schools Based on the Results of a Sociological Study

This research aims to substantiate the legitimacy of the simultaneous application of two competing sociological paradigms in studying professional (labor) migration of teachers and teacher education graduates, i.e., to use the “strategy of mixing methods”: the mobilities turn and the place attachment. This synthesis-based methodological approach includes micro and macro levels and neo-positivistic and individualistic phenomenology. It was substantiated during a sociological survey in 18 regions of the Russian Federation in August–September 2021. The survey respondents were 3065 teachers and 1132 teacher education graduates, and 255 respondents acted as experts, including six rectors of higher educational institutions of Russia, heads of regional and municipal education authorities (47 persons), and 202 directors of Russian schools. This study has highlighted the unique characteristics of labor migration in the educational space of the Russian school. As empirical research has shown, the reasons for professional migration, in general, and the migration of teachers and teacher education graduates, particularly, are largely similar and stem primarily from material factors. It has also shown that the reasons associated with personal and professional development opportunities should be considered. The identification of ideal factors was made possible by dividing respondents into five groups by criterion of integrating micro- and macro-problems.

Journalists as mobility agents: Labor mobilities, individualized identities, and emerging organizational forms

As mobility is becoming a distinctive feature of 21st century journalists, this theoretical article proposes a mobility turn in journalism studies. Drawing on sociological perspectives on mobilities, individualization, and turnover, it puts forward a shift from the analysis of news workers as static and fixed to the organizations that employ them to their analysis as mobility agents. By stressing that their capacity to move is transforming their employment and identities, it invites contemporary journalism scholars to recognize how this bottom-up disruption is reshaping the institution, the organizations and the labor of journalism. Since journalism’s corporate and industrial structures have not fully crumbled, this article’s emphasis on labor, physical and virtual mobilities offers an alternative to current theorizations of change in journalism.

Tourist and Viral Mobilities Intertwined: Clustering COVID-19-Driven Travel Behaviour of Rural Tourists in South Tyrol, Italy

Travel patterns have dramatically changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tourism has been both a vector and a victim of the disease. This paper explores the pandemic’s impact on rural tourism, using the theoretical framework of the “mobilities turn” to investigate issues of corporeal and communicative travel found between the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. A sample of 874 guests visiting the Italian region of South Tyrol, where rural tourism is the norm, identified different patterns of physical travel and approaches to collecting on-site information on COVID-19. Results from a principal component analysis (PCA) and a cluster analysis highlighted at least two different approaches from visitors to the region: the first is more cautious, mostly practiced by domestic tourists, with limited mobility on-site, coupled with a need for information; the second is instead a more adventurous approach, with higher on-site mobility, more use of sustainable forms of transport and less interest in data evidence on COVID-19. Implications for rural tourism and its future are discussed. The hypothesis of an inverse relationship between corporeal and communicative travel needs further exploration in future research.

Pedestrians as floating life - On the reinvention of the pedestrian city

Walking with its average speed of 5 km/h was for a very long period the primary mode of moving and engaging with the immediate material environment for humans. However, over the past half-century, the socio-technical systems of automobility as well as other forms of non-human powered mobility have changed the ways in which cities are experienced. Most recently, however, the pedestrian mode has been reprioritised resulting in a shift of emphasis, particularly in European cities, toward recognising the destructive forces of automobility. This shift has been accompanied by a variety of pedestrian reprioritisation strategies including the pedestrianisation of city streets as well as restricted vehicular access to particular inner city zones at prescribed times. The challenge for many cities is how to legitimately change mindsets, from automobility to walking. This paper explores the reprioritisation of urban walking not as ‘infrastructure’ or an ‘intervention’ but as transitory, ‘floating life’ across space and time. We conceptualise walking as a multi-sensorial, effective, and mobile engagement with the material environment. In doing so, we ask how the ‘floating life’ of pedestrianism may be reflected upon as part of the so-called ‘mobilities turn’ and in particular how theories of materiality, embodiment, design and experience interlink with walking. In this paper walking as a pedestrian is therefore a particular quality of mobility. The way in which we ‘inhabit’ the city is significant when we walk, and turning to walking as ‘floating life’ pays attention to this underemphasised ontological dimension.