Mobilities最新文献

This article focuses on the ‘frictions’ felt by international backpackers who have been stuck and locked-down while they were living and working in regional Australian hostels. Backpackers play a central role as both tourists and migrant workers in Australia, where they undertake significant periods of required farm work in order to extend their visas. They are a highly visible and long-standing mobile population in Australia and are relatively under-studied given their significance to tourism cultures and economies. Based on forty semi-structured interviews with backpackers living and working in Bundaberg, Australia, we explore how experiences of immobilities prior to and during the pandemic restrictions manifest as experiences of escalating and alleviating frictions. Friction is understood as an embodied and relational feeling of tension produced by a shortage of space. Friction has always been a feature of hostel living but prolonged lockdowns and inconsistent health messaging escalated frictions into open conflict. We propose that the concept of friction sits between mobilities and immobilities, and that particular mobility contexts exacerbate such frictions. The article contributes to ongoing discussions on pandemic immobilities and the interwoven concerns of tourism, migration, and labour mobilities.

This paper analyzes the significance of disability for urban mobility assemblages by focusing on the uneven encounters of public transport infrastructures, wheelchairs and their users by connecting media studies, STS, and Dis/Ability Studies. The particular focus of this article is how knowledge and lived experiences concerning wheelchair mobility are related to dysfunctional media infrastructure spaces and their translation to social media activism as well as open data practices. In my analysis, I particularly focus on access work by initiatives in Berlin, Germany, towards inclusive mobile technologies and platforms (Elevate Project) and their potential impact on the field of dis/abling mobilities. The analysis suggests that wheelchair mobility is implemented in urban infrastructures of public transportation, where temporalities of broken elevators might emerge as a challenging effect and trigger responses that affect the lived experiences of the drivers. Some of the effects include social media activism and initiatives to build novel forms of knowledge, digital mapping or data processing.

What happens if one takes recreational mobilities as a point of departure for making sense of the compact city? This special issue offers interdisciplinary explorations of how one might approach studies of cities and metropolitan regions in new ways, using recreational mobilities as both lens and focal point. In so doing, the contributions aim to advance recreational mobilities as a critical theme for scholarship and practice. We specifically hope to demonstrate how such an approach is fruitful for grappling with the legacies of rationalism and modernism in spatial planning, with a focus on the contemporary ideal of the ‘compact city’ as both phenomenon and normative impulse that has come to dominate discourses of urban design and urban planning in recent decades. ¹

This interdisciplinary special issue brings mobility scholars and migration scholars together to examine how places and mobilities are entangled. It asks whether using place as an entry point for studying human movements can reveal new insights into our understanding and conceptualisation of mobility. In this introduction we demonstrate, based on the contributions gathered in this special issue, how using place as an entry point for studying mobilities enables us to address some of the serious criticisms that have been raised against migration and mobility studies. We find that such an approach allows us to overcome ethno-national epistemologies, goes beyond migranticised research designs that takes ‘migrants’ for granted, and has the potential to conceptually ‘unbound’ place. Furthermore, we identify three transversal dynamics that play a crucial role for the ways in which mobilities become (unequally) emplaced, namely regimes of mobilities, temporalities, and imaginations. We propose that using place as an entry point to study human movements offers a framework for future research to explore the dynamic categories and experiences that emerge at the intersection between places and mobilities without falling back on well-rehearsed assumptions.

This paper studies recreational mobility as it unfolds as an integral part of the heterogeneity of practices staged in front of a camera on a busy street in Stockholm, Sweden. By analyzing the production- and recognition-work of ‘doing-jogging/dog-walking-in-the-city’ we argue that recreational mobility accomplishes something more than walking in these settings. In the modern layout of a condensed city, mobility is prioritized due to its utility. In this context, recreational mobility, in all its forms, becomes what anthropologists and sociologists describe as an ‘othered’ – and as such it exists as an odd curiosity. While this puts recreational mobility at a marginal position it also enables us to better understand mobility in general – though the alterity of recreational mobility. Based on the empirical observations the paper highlights three findings in relation to recreational mobility: (1) its nestedness within everyday mobility; (2) its work of being different than ordinary use of the space – as alterity; and (3) its role as a methodological challenge, especially for studies of on-street level mobility, where different teleologies of mobility and different modalities coexist. Here the materiality of the street and the assemblages play a crucial role as observable materialities within the production- and recognition-work of doing more than walking.

Seasonality plays an important role in determining how and where everyday activities are conducted. Yet how seasonality shapes recreational mobilities in the city, and how it matters for everyday urban life, remain largely unexplored. Inspired by recent research on the weather as lived, this paper contributes to the understanding of urban recreational mobilities as shaped by runners negotiating the urban environment and its seasonality. Thereby, we also explore a specific way to examine the city. We studied recreational running during the dark season in Sweden, based on diary-interviews with thirty runners, employing practice theory and affordance theory to explore how places, practices, and affordances characterize running during this season. Our findings reveal ways in which runners engage in different running practices in different settings, with the forest, pavement, and hills as our examples, and with lights as an additional analytical lens. We show how runners, in their strategies for dealing with the dark season in a city, tend to avoid some characteristics of the city (traffic, noise) while taking advantage of others (street illumination, road, and pavement maintenance). Thus, running practices are partly formed by urban planning and maintenance.

Against the backdrop of growing prevalence of digital platforms in higher education, strong considerations are being made for the potential of virtual student mobility in the aftermath of the pandemic. While extant literature on digital education platforms has shed light on the relationships between platform interfaces and wider political economies, less is known about students’ experiences of virtually mediated mobility and immobility. This article draws upon research that examines how students and universities are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent impact on border control and international travel. First, it discusses how the socio-technical platform of Zoom extends and stabilises students’ imagined, communicative, and aspirational mobilities in a context of stalled physical mobility. Second, it underlines the crevices and moorings of digital platforms in the mediation of students’ experiences of mobility and immobility. Third, it examines how students refashion their (im)mobile subjectivities in and through digital spaces vis-à-vis a negotiation of co-presences in a renewed context of virtual interaction. In doing so, we argue the role of corporeal mobility, social interaction, and inhabiting tangible places remain a core aspect of student mobility experiences and aspirations.