Mobility Turn Research Articles

Geographies of Pilgrimage: Meaningful Movements and Embodied Mobilities

AbstractThis article argues for the importance of geographic engagements with pilgrimage and its analysis through the lenses, considerations and sympathies of the mobilities turn. Pilgrimage is being increasingly recognised as a multifaceted sociocultural spatial practice that plays a significant role in the lives of millions of people and in numerous sites across the world. The geographies of mobilities' emphasis on movement and practices in shaping the world enable the formation of new understandings of pilgrimage. This article builds on the links being forged between the study of pilgrimage and the mobility field, by showing how pilgrimage, as an activity that is focused on performances in specific places, can be analysed as an embodied mobility. Pilgrimage is explored as a meaningful journey in which the performance entwines the outer physical and inner spiritual/emotion journey in a process that defines and shapes the people and places involved.

(De)politicising and Ecologising Bicycles

Self-service bicycle systems are today being set up in a number of cities across the world. Seen as a means to promote a sustainable city and new forms of ecology, and valued for their ‘planet friendly’ character, these systems have become a hallmark for cities that want to become part of the so-called green culture. Drawing from the experience of the Vélib’ programme in Paris and adopting a pragmatist perspective, this paper analyses the controversies which developed as this transportation infrastructure was implemented, as well as the definitions of ‘ecology’ which were at the centre of the dispute. In doing so it shows the capacity of the private firm involved in the system, JCDecaux, to ‘hijack’ and integrate the ecological critique, its rather powerful capacity to persuade other actors, and the popularity that the project achieved through a hard-won process of justification. At the same time, this paper argues that the mobility turn played a performative role in the justification and the definition of this new transport project.

Mobilities in South - East Asia

In the current of time and space compression, one finds people (e.g. tourists, migrants, refugees, researchers) as well as material and immaterial objects or re- sources (e.g. capital, vehicles, information, ideas) to be increasingly on the move, leading to the idea that we are living in an of [.which] has replaced the sedentary age (Rolshoven, 2007, p. 17). For more than two decades, this shift has been noted in various academic disciplines (such as geography, anthropology, and sociology, to name few), and most importantly in the field of and tou- rism studies - areas of study where pronounced interest in issues of has emerged (Husa, Trupp, & Wohlschlagl, 2014).For some decades now, South-East Asia has been characterized by rapid economic and socio-cultural transformations involving large of people and goods within and between countries as well as rural and urban areas (Rigg, 2003). In ad- dition to classical spatial patterns of rural-urban migration, international labor migration, and international tourism becoming increasingly dynamic, forms of multi-local household arrangements, skilled migration, transnational communities or long-term tourism and domestic tourism have emerged. In this context, one can observe number of interdependent forms of mobility, including the physical move- ment of people for reasons of work, leisure, family, or lifestyle as well as the physical movement of objects from and to producers, consumers, retailers, and the different places where people live, work, or go on holidays (Larsen, Urry, & Axhausen, 2006).The prevailing mobility turn (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011) and the mobilities (Sheller & Urry, 2006) criticize the notion of sedentarism, which locates bounded places, regions, or nations as the fundamental basis of human identity and experience and thus, the main unit of social research analysis. In contrast, the mo- bilities paradigm emphasises that all places are tied into at least thin networks of connections that stretch beyond each such place and mean that nowhere can be an 'island' (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 209). Although different forms of have al- ways shaped human life, academia only recently (re)discovered the and value of including notions of in research. This emerging emphasis brought with it not only the acknowledgement of an increasing movement of people and ob- jects, but also broader transformatlions] of social science, generating an alternative theoretical and methodological landscape (Buscher, Urry, & Witchger, 2011, p. 4).In recent years, an increasing number of empirical and theoretical studies dealing with in Asia have focused on international forms of movements. Impor- tant research areas in this context are tourism (Hitchcock, King, & Parnwell, 2009) and transnational flows (Hewison & Young, 2005; Yeoh, Willis, & Fakhri, 2003). Nevertheless, we cannot ignore that large number of people moves within the borders of their country of birth (Skeldon, 2006, p. 17). Therefore, the dominance of 'transnational migration' as an object of study over and above other forms of in the region [in Asia] is somewhat at odds with its numerical importance (Elmhirst, 2012, p. 275). Based on this argument, Olwig and Sorensen (2002) seek to redirect migration research away from the narrow focus on international popula- tion movements and instead call for a broader investigation of mobile livelihoods and the fluid fields of social, economic and political relations and cultural values that these livelihoods imply (p. 2). Elmhirst (2012) suggests that the popularity of transnational (and international) on the international research agenda can be traced to political fears that this type of provokes in the context of global security as well as the possibilities that come with it, such as in the context of economic remittances. …

The mobility turn: a new paradigm for the social sciences?

A new paradigmatic turn has reached migration studies, the mobility turn. Following on from many turns in the recent past, such as the linguistic turn, the cultural turn and the spatial turn, the mobility turn seems to be the newest effort in diagnostic descriptions of modern society. Like other turns, the mobility turn generalizes one aspect of contemporary society to the detriment of other features. While such a turn may usefully highlight various forms of spatial mobility, it cannot be fruitfully employed unless the scholars working with this paradigm critically reflect underlying political assumptions about the nexus between spatial and social mobility. Moreover, any analysis of spatial and social mobilities needs to go beyond descriptions and start accounting for the mechanisms underlying the production of social inequalities.

Entr’acte: Mobile Choreography and Sydney Rail Commuters

The significance of the journey as a component of travel has been overlooked. The mobility turn has remedied this. There is now intense interest in mobility practices, in life on the move, and the cultures generated in vehicular environments. Though commuting is one of the most mundane, popular and ubiquitous forms of mobility, it is only beginning to receive the attention that is its due. In this paper, a mobile ethnography of commuting in Sydney is undertaken. It focuses particularly on the corporeality of commuting, on the territorialising and de-territorialising that occurs within crowded spaces of trains and on platforms during peak hours. It argues that passengers engage in complex ‘choreographies’ to avoid contact with one another.

‘Home is Never Fully Achieved … Even When We Are In it’: Migration, Belonging and Social Exclusion within Punjabi Transnational Mobility

ABSTRACTDrawing upon transnational research in the UK and India, primarily over 150 semi-structured interviews in Newcastle, UK and Doaba, Punjab, as well as the ‘mobilities turn’ within contemporary social science, this paper examines the pursuit of ‘home’ within a diasporic British Indian Punjabi community. It is argued that this transnational pursuit of home is significantly shaped by the dynamic social context of South Asia, in particular processes of social inclusion and exclusion therein. Thus, returning Punjabi migrant attempts to distinguish themselves from the resident population through conspicuous consumption, and simultaneous attempts from Punjabi residents to exclude Non-Resident Indians from ‘real’ Indian status, lead to a continual reprocessing of home across different sites of mobility, as well as demonstrating the ‘never fully achieved’ nature of home.

Gender Trends in Tourism Destination

Abstract The tourism experience was perceived traditionally in terms of products, destinations and consumption patterns. The “new mobility turn” sees the holiday experience as “performance”, “surveillance”, “play”, relationships “at-a-distance”, the impermanence of “sandcastles”, place making, etc. Gale (2007) stated five principles of this turn in tourism: it studies the mobility of individuals; it acknowledges material and immaterial structures; it deals with immobility and power relations; it recognizes virtual and imaginative forms of mobility; and it is concerned with environmental and global consequences. Destinations are not perceived now as fixed unities but as“sandcastles” made of objects, mobility and proximities (Baerenholdt et al., 2004). In the context mentioned above the holiday experience can be evaluated as a process, wherein gender relations are constructed, legitimated, reproduced and reworked” (Aitchison, 2003). These experiences can affect the identities of tourists, locals and employers positively and negatively (Crouch, 2002) and also affect gender identities slightly differently. The Global Gender Gap Report for 2010 found that while 93% of the global education gap and 96% of the global health gap has been closed, only 60% of the economic participation and 16% of the political gender gap has been closed and this gender differences in social and economic roles and responsibilities exacerbate vulnerability. Through this paper we intend to investigate the most important gender trends affecting tourist destination and tourism in general, based on the premise that destination is actually a perceptual concept, interpreted subjectively by consumers and also a result of the moment, the people and artifacts present. The aim of the paper is to get an assessment of future destination in terms of the influence of gender and offer solutions to adapt to trends investigated and to shape a tourism industry more welcoming for women.

Problematizing Mobility: A Metaphor of Stickiness, Non-Places and the Kinetic Elite

A ‘mobilities turn’ has taken place in the social sciences, which is finding its way into organization studies. As research highlights how work and organization are mobile and spatially dispersed, metaphors of liquidity, flows, fluidity and nomads have become significant. This article seeks to contribute to the mobilities turn by introducing the Sartrean metaphor of stickiness. In contrast to the currently dominant movement metaphors, this metaphor brings into focus ambiguities and frictions and overcomes problematic connotations of nomadism and sedentarism. The paper draws on the metaphor of stickiness to reveal the kinetic elite’s – the group of highly mobile elite workers – experiences of ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1995), which are ephemeral, interchangeable and monotonous spaces of mobility. Qualitative data gathered at two management consultancy firms show how the stickiness of being on the move can give rise to experiences of ambiguity, disorientation and loss: the lures of glamour, escape and liberation from places can collide with non-places that involve fixed instability, feeling stuck and that stick to one even when returning to places. In so doing, the article develops how the metaphor of stickiness can constitute an important lens for understanding and conceptualizing mobilities.

Walking together: The embodied and mobile production of a therapeutic landscape

This paper draws on a case study of led group walks in the South-East of England to explore the affective potency of shared movement for producing therapeutic landscapes (landscapes that through placed practices become associated with health and healing). The paper addresses the lack of attention to embodiment and movement in work on therapeutic landscapes through an exploration of how shared movement can produce supportive social spaces that are experienced as restorative. Drawing on an expansive conception of mobility inspired by the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences in the last decade, the paper explores how the therapeutic landscape concept can be enriched by being approached through the lens of the body in movement. A complimentary concern in the paper is the ways in which supportive socialities and group dynamics are integral to many therapeutic landscape experiences. Walking together is found to have a significant impact on social interaction and together embodied mobilities and supportive socialities transform the countryside walkscape into a mobile therapeutic landscape and a site for shared therapeutic body work.

Planning regional development in Australia: questions of mobility and borders

Radically changing ideas and practices around mobility and borders have made the question regarding how best to approach and plan regional development in Australia more complex. Using the conceptual tools offered by the ‘mobility turn’ and ‘relational regions’, this paper assesses the usefulness of place-based development (PBD) approaches in addressing contemporary planning challenges of mobility and borders. Through a case study of the Latrobe Valley's ‘Industry and Employment Roadmap’, this paper concludes that PBD approaches to regional planning offer a means of recognising: (1) both mobility and place in processes of regional development; and (2) the fluid nature of borders in these processes.

Disciplined Mobility and Carceral Geography: Prisoner Transport in Russia

This paper identifies and addresses a significant weakness in the literature on mobility – the theorisation of mobility and power, and specifically, the consideration of mobility as an expression of power. It argues that the ‘mobilities turn’ has tended to draw a connection between mobility, autonomy and freedom, and in so doing has inadequately explored and theorised involuntary and coerced mobility. To illustrate this, the paper draws together two literatures that have thus far been poorly integrated, and that at first seem an unlikely pairing – the mobilities work that has exploded in scope and diversity over the past decade and that seeks to ‘undermine sedentarist theories’ in geography, and the nascent field of ‘carceral geography’, a body of work beginning to coalesce around the spatialities of detention and imprisonment, but that, in its focus on spatial regulation, has thus far tended to overlook the mobilities inherent in carceral practices. The two are drawn together through consideration of an example of ‘disciplined mobility’ – contemporary prisoner transport in the Russian Federation, which serves as an illustration both of punitive power expressed through mobility and of mobility in the carceral context. The paper then argues that future research in mobilities must consider more fully the disciplinary nature of mobility, and suggests that the concept of ‘disciplined mobility’, may form a framework for such future research.

Travelling near and far: Placing children's mobile emotions

Dominant discourses of childhood and mobility lead to the social, spatial and temporal placing of children. Children are considered to transgress mobile space in a way that requires curtailment and restriction but is nevertheless considered a ‘right of passage’. In both playing out and challenging these discourses children exhibit an array of emotions that are contingent on mobile space. Mobility may be fleeting in both time and space, part of the everyday corporeal mobility of children, or it may be less so, a mobility that is experienced less frequently, is less everyday, and more immediately transformative. This article explores children's emotional experiences of travel, both nearer and further, drawing from the ‘mobilities turn’ in social science and conceptualizations of childhood that illustrate how children are situated in relation to adult-centred hierarchies of power, and children's contestation of these power differentials. It draws from two different aspects of children and young people's mobilities: an ethnographic study of everyday mobilities with children travelling relatively short distances on a daily basis, using self-directed video and film-elicitation interviews; and a project that explored children's mobile experiences of long distance travelling and particularly notions of belonging. Drawing from the intersections of these studies demonstrates how the emotional connection with space and place constructs childhoods and challenges notions of childhood, risk and spatial emotionalities.

To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility and the Assemblage of Circulation

ABSTRACT The ‘mobilities turn’ in human geography and cognate disciplines has a natural methodological predisposition towards privileging mobile subjects, or the structures, policies, or authorities that constrain them. The article sets out two additions to mobility studies’ theoretical toolbox: the idea of the assemblage and the foregrounding of circulation. The civil aviation sector demonstrates the utility of this frame.

Young People’s Urban Im/Mobilities: Relationality and Identity Formation

There is a mobility turn in the social sciences affecting how we scrutinise, research and represent the city. In recent scholarship on mobilities, global human mobilities have been identified as predominant. Nevertheless there have been calls for research that focuses on issues relating to everyday transportation, materialities and the spatial contexts of im/mobilities. This article is a response to those calls with a specific focus on young people’s local experiences of urban im/mobilities. It is also a challenge to the lack of attention afforded young people by urban studies. Young urbanites are of an age where personal physical mobility to take advantage of all the resources, recreation and sociality offered by an urban landscape is an important part of ‘growing up’ and identity formation. Utilising two of mobility studies’ conceptualisations, relationality and identity formation, this article examines young Aucklanders’ im/mobilities through urban space.

The Design, Experience and Justice of Mobility

The central argument of the ‘mobilities turn’, that sedentarist frameworks have dominated social sciences for a long time, which has limited our understanding of mobilities (e.g. Cresswell 2006, 2010; Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller & Urry 2006; Urry 2007) – also applies to the spatial disciplines, andhumangeography in particular. Ofcourse, themovementandtransport ofgoods and people have always been on the agenda of the spatial sciences. However, these mobilities have mostly been analysed from the position of fixed points. In mainstream transport research, mobility has typically been perceived as ‘merely’ a derived demand, warranting study only as a connector between desired activities. In line with this conceptualisation, movement between places is, either implicitly or explicitly, considered as friction and a loss of time that has to be limited. Equally so, the push-pull models of migration studies presented the mobile part as a static point-to-point movement without any further social meaning or transformative power. From the position of fixed points, mobilities have thus been perceived as ‘residual death time,’ ‘friction’ or ‘empty spaces’ (e.g. Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007). Scholars who engage themselves in the mobilities turn approach spatial interaction and mobility differently. First of all, mobility is seen as a process and a motor of change. Both places of origin and places of destination change through the movement of people, goods, money and information from one place to the other, and thus mobility is seen as a major factor in space- and place-making. This goes beyond the traditional geographical approach, which focuses primarily on changing spatial structures as a resultant of spatial interaction potentials. Second, these mobilities researchers explicitly explore how people, as well as other material and immaterial objects of exchange, change themselves through the process of relocation, something which has largely been ignored in the spatial disciplines, and mainstream transportation research in particular. While this new mobilities’ research is an interdisciplinary debate bringing together, among others, geographers, anthropologists, planners, political scientists and sociologists to re-think the role of mobility in different societies (Hannam et al. 2006, Urry 2007), authors strongly share these basic starting points. The emerging new mobilities literature, we argue, has the potential to substantially enrich mainstream transportation research. However, this requires transcending existing boundaries and bridging the divide between the world of ‘transport mobility’ – perceiving mobility a way to overcome the friction of distance and a functionalist force and (re)structuring the urban landscape – and the world of ‘practice mobility’ – approaching mobility as a transformative power opposing the fixity and boundedness of space and place (Massey 2005; Cresswell 2006; Sheller & Urry 2006). The differences are not only to be found in terms of disciplinary jargon and research topics, but also in terms of methodology and conceptual frameworks. To create a common ground for debate, we have identified three potential bridging concepts that may help evoke a border-crossing debate. These dimensions are: designs, experiences and justice. Before discussing the extent to which the different contributions in this special issue invoke these bridging concepts, we first articulate the ways we think they can bring both sides of the divide closer together.

How to ‘catch’ floating populations? Research and the fixing of migration in space and time

The recent ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences suggests that research always fixes mobility somehow in time and space, in order to understand it. Migration, being a form of mobility, has to be fixed on certain times and spaces in order to make it possible to define and research it. Being a geographer, I build on this insight in the first part of the article to re-read the critiques on post-war methodological nationalism. Reflecting on my own past research practice, I argue in the second part that leaving behind the methodological nationalism paradigm does not mean leaving behind the necessity to fix migration in time and space, on either the ontological or the practical methodological level. New ways of fixing are chosen and, out of recurring ontological and methodological choices, new migration stereotypes are developing such as what might be called ‘methodological ruralism’ in the case of Romanian migration.

Moving Home: Theorizing Housing Within a Politics of Mobility

It has been argued that the social sciences have undergone a “mobility turn” over the last decade: a paradigm shift in which movement is seen to have become increasingly important to our social worlds. For the most part, housing studies is yet to extensively engage with this “paradigm shift”. In an attempt to engage with the ideas that the “mobility turn” has thrown up for housing studies this paper grapples with two key questions. First, where does housing studies fit in the new mobilities paradigm in the social sciences? And, second, how can housing studies contribute to this paradigm shift? This paper does this through an examination of how a politics of mobility can be usefully employed and extended by housing researchers. Looking specifically at two current dimensions of this politics: mobility as a right, and mobility as a resource, this paper argues that a third dimension – mobility as governmentality – should be introduced to the mobility turn’s politics of mobility.

Flows and Pauses in the Urban Logistics Landscape: The Municipal Regulation of Shipping Container Mobilities

The mobilities turn has demonstrated the importance of the social, cultural and political implications of travel for a variety of modes, though largely focused on people and vehicles, not freight. The transport of goods by shipping container has become the predominant means of freight transport since the 1960s, shaping places from port cities to rural distribution centers. This paper uses two North American case studies to explore temporary immobilities or pauses in the flows of shipping containers, showing that the problems containers pose to the places they pass through are not a function of the objects themselves, but their state of mobility. Pauses are important as a category of mobility because of the consequences of regulations that attempt to eliminate or redirect them.

Site-specific Performance and the Mobility Turn

September 2010. As I write, a truck leaves the grounds of Detroit's Museum of Contemporary Art and begins its ‘maiden voyage’ through the surrounding streets. It is heading towards Westland, a work...

Disciplined mobility and carceral geography: prisoner transport in Russia

This paper identifies and addresses a significant weakness in the literature on mobility – the theorisation of mobility and power, and specifically, the consideration of mobility as an expression of power. It argues that the ‘mobilities turn’ has tended to draw a connection between mobility, autonomy and freedom, and in so doing has inadequately explored and theorised involuntary and coerced mobility. To illustrate this, the paper draws together two literatures that have thus far been poorly integrated, and that at first seem an unlikely pairing – the mobilities work that has exploded in scope and diversity over the past decade and that seeks to ‘undermine sedentarist theories’ in geography (Sheller M and Urry J 2006 The new mobilities paradigm Environment and Planning A 38 207–26, p 208), and the nascent field of ‘carceral geography’, a body of work beginning to coalesce around the spatialities of detention and imprisonment, but that, in its focus on spatial regulation, has thus far tended to overlook the mobilities inherent in carceral practices. The two are drawn together through consideration of an example of ‘disciplined mobility’– contemporary prisoner transport in the Russian Federation, which serves as an illustration both of punitive power expressed through mobility and of mobility in the carceral context. The paper then argues that future research in mobilities must consider more fully the disciplinary nature of mobility, and suggests that the concept of ‘disciplined mobility’ (after Packer J 2003 Disciplining mobility: governing and safety in Bratich J Z, Packer J and McCarthy C eds Foucault, cultural studies, and governmentality State University of New York Press, New York 135–63), may form a framework for such future research.