Mobilities

Mobilities is a contemporary paradigm in the social sciences that explores the movement of people (human migration, individual mobility, travel, transport), ideas (see e.g. meme) and things (transport), as well as the broader social implications of those movements. Mobilities is a contemporary paradigm in the social sciences that explores the movement of people (human migration, individual mobility, travel, transport), ideas (see e.g. meme) and things (transport), as well as the broader social implications of those movements. A mobility 'turn' (or transformation) in the social sciences began in the 1990s in response to the increasing realization of the historic and contemporary importance of movement on individuals and society. This turn has been driven by generally increased levels of mobility and new forms of mobility where bodies combine with information and different patterns of mobility. The mobilities paradigm incorporates new ways of theorizing about how these mobilities lie 'at the center of constellations of power, the creation of identities and the microgeographies of everyday life.' (Cresswell, 2011, 551) The mobility turn arose as a response to the way in which the social sciences had traditionally been static, seeing movement as a black box and ignoring or trivializing 'the importance of the systematic movements of people for work and family life, for leisure and pleasure, and for politics and protest' (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 208). Mobilities emerged as a critique of contradictory orientations toward both sedentarism and deterritorialisation in social science. People had often been seen as static entities tied to specific places, or as nomadic and placeless in a frenetic and globalized existence. Mobilities looks at movements and the forces that drive, constrain and are produced by those movements. Several typologies have been formulated to clarify the wide variety of mobilities. Most notably, John Urry divides mobilities into five types: mobility of objects, corporeal mobility, imaginative mobility, virtual mobility and communicative mobility. Later, Leopoldina Fortunati and Sakari Taipale proposed an alternative typology taking the individual and the human body as a point of reference. They differentiate between ‘macro-mobilities’ (consistent physical displacements), ‘micro-mobilities’ (small-scale displacements), ‘media mobility’ (mobility added to the traditionally fixed forms of media) and ‘disembodied mobility’ (the transformation in the social order). The categories are typically considered interrelated, and therefore they are not exclusive. While mobilities is commonly associated with sociology, contributions to the mobilities literature have come from scholars in anthropology, cultural studies, economics, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, and tourism and transport studies. (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 207) Mobilities as a specific body of research remains associated with a small group of largely British researchers, notably John Urry, Mimi Sheller, Peter Adey, Tim Edensor, David Bissell, and Tim Cresswell. However, Cresswell (2011, 555) notes that 'many people involved in research on mobility topics do not see themselves as part of a new paradigm or turn' (e.g. Noel B. Salazar). The community of mobilities researchers, as well as the areas they research, have expanded across the globe. The eponymous journal Mobilities provides a list of typical subjects which have been explored in the mobilities paradigm (Taylor and Francis, 2011): Sheller and Urry (2006, 215) place mobilities in the sociological tradition by defining the primordial theorist of mobilities as Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel's essays, 'Bridge and Door' (Simmel, 1909 / 1994) and 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' (Simmel, 1903 / 2001) identify a uniquely human will to connection, as well as the urban demands of tempo and precision that are satisfied with mobility. The more immediate precursors of contemporary mobilities research emerged in the 1990s (Cresswell 2011, 551). Historian James Clifford (1997) advocated for a shift from deep analysis of particular places to the routes connecting them. Marc Augé (1995) considered the philosophical potential of an anthropology of 'non-places' like airports and motorways that are characterized by constant transition and temporality. Sociologist Manuel Castells outlined a 'network society' and suggested that the 'space of places' is being surpassed by a 'space of flows.' Feminist scholar Caren Kaplan (1996) explored questions about the gendering of metaphors of travel in social and cultural theory.