Keywords of mobility: Critical engagements

Keywords of mobility: Critical engagements, 2016

As a concept, mobility captures the common impression that one's lifeworld is in fl ux, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. While history tells the story of human mobility, the scholarly literature is replete with metaphors attempting to describe (perceived) altered spatial and temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and scapes; time-space compression, distantiation, or punctuation; the network society and its space of fl ows; the death of distance and the acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. The academic interest in mobility goes hand in hand with theoretical approaches that reject a "sedentarist metaphysics" (Malkki 1992) in favor of a "nomadic metaphysics" (Cresswell 2006) and empirical studies on the most diverse kinds of mobilities (Adey et al. 2013), questioning earlier taken-for-granted correspondences between peoples, places, and cultures. The way the term is being used, mobility entails, in its coinage, much more than mere physical motion (Marzloff 2005). Rather, it is seen as movement infused with both self-ascribed and attributed meanings (Frello 2008). Put differently, "mobility can do little on its own until it is materialized through people, objects, words, and other embodied forms" (Chu 2010, 15). Importantly, mobility means different things to different people in differing social circumstances (Adey 2010).

Acharya, Malasree N. (2018, 2016), "Cosmopolitanism" in Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements, Salazar, Noel B. and Kiran Jayaram (eds.), New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 33-54., 2018

Book Chapter in Edited Volume, Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements, Noel B. Salazar and Kiran Jayaram (eds.). 196 pages, bibliog., index ISBN 978-1-78533-146-6 $110.00/£78.00 Hb Published (June 2016) ISBN 978-1-78533-815-1 $27.95/£19.00 Pb Published (March 2018) eISBN 978-1-78533-147-3 eBook Purchase Book Here: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SalazarKeywords

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013

Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This article and Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, the special issue of JEMS it introduces, build on, as well as critique, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, this issue challenges conceptual orientations built on binaries of difference that have impeded analyses of the interrelationship between mobility and stasis. These include methodological nationalism, which counterpoises concepts of internal and international movement and native and foreigner, and consequently normalises stasis. Instead, the issue offers a regimes of mobility framework that addresses the relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and transnational connection, experiences and imaginaries of migration, and rootedness and cosmopolitan openness. The introduction highlights how, within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although the authors examine nation-state building processes, their analysis is not confined by national boundaries.

This introductory piece sets the context for the special issue and explains its rationale. It offers a series of reflections on the rise of the mobilities turn and its relations with preexisting research traditions, most notably transportation geography. Rather than placing different approaches in opposition and favoring one over others, we contend that all need to be seen as situated, partial, and also generative modes of abstraction. Each of these approaches makes mobility exist in specific and ultimately simplified and selective ways. In addition, we argue that geography as a pluralistic discipline will benefit from further conversations between modes of conceptualizing, theorizing, and examining mobility. We outline five lines along which such conversations can be structured: conceptualizations and analysis, inequality, politics, decentering and decolonization, and qualifying abstraction. The article concludes with discussion on three fruitful directions for future research on mobility.

Figures of mobility, from nomads to flâneurs and tourists, have been used to describe both self and other in the social sciences and humanities for a long time. They act as a conceptual shorthand in contemporary scholarly debates, allowing social theorists to relate broad-scale phenomena to the human condition. This repeated usage highlights how these figures have become 'keywords', in the sense given by Raymond Williams, which typify much of the vocabulary constituting the study of human mobility today. In this general introduction, I lay out the overall conceptual framework behind the various contributions to this special issue.

2018

Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 2012

The 21st century seems to be on the move, perhaps even more so than the last. With cheap travel, and more than two billion cars projected worldwide for 2030. And yet, all this mobility is happening incredibly unevenly, at different paces and intensities, with varying impacts and consequences to the extent that life on the move might be actually quite difficult to sustain environmentally, socially and ethically. As a result 'mobility' has become a keyword of the social sciences; delineating a new domain of concepts, approaches, methodologies and techniques which seek to understand the character and quality of these trends. This Handbook explores and critically evaluates the debates, approaches, controversies and methodologies, inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. It brings together leading specialists from range of backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessib...

The movement of people and the associated flows of tangible and intangible resources have attracted increasing attention from policy-makers and practitioners, as well as researchers, seeking to understand the processes involved and the potential of such movements for enhancing debates around mobility which includes not just migration, but other forms of movement such as commuting and journeys to school. This paper considers key dimensions of the perceived relationships between mobility and development, highlighting how mobility can be both a route to challenge social exclusion and poverty as well as a mechanism for reinforcing such disadvantage. The paper also provides an overview of the key themes addressed in the eight papers making up this special issue on mobility and migration.

A polysemic term, the concept of mobility  as this paper attempts to explain  is still commonly confounded with other concepts and ideas, such as circulation, accessibility, traffic, transit and transportation. However, its use in the sciences in general is more recent than these other terms, and its appearance did not replace any of them. The concept of mobility arose in order to throw fresh light on new social transformations that have become more important as the social divisions of labor have deepened during the past few centuries. This concept of mobility has acquired different shapes and can be deployed for assorted purposes and explanations. Daily mobility entails residential mobility and mobility of labor, and more recently, symbolic mobility. Other forms of mobility include: commuting, tourism and recreation, extending as far as nomadism and even immobility. All types of mobility are related systemically to the social and territorial division of labor and to modes of production. These modes of production shape the social and territorial space at many different scales, requiring modern human beings to plunge deeper into the life of relationships, including with objects, which become more numerous and portable. In the course of history, the appearance and predominance of movement become one of the most important key elements to define individuals and societies. This article reveals theoretical and practical examples of the intense and intimate relationships between the various forms of mobility, thus proposing new approaches of this concept. Focusing on new approaches to the daily mobility concept, the main objective is to overcome dichotomies between sectors and areas of science. Believing that together with people in each location, with social participation, we can improve the knowledge of reality and also improve public policies and contribute with them to reach their target.