Mobilities最新文献

This paper aims to develop a theoretical interpretation of how satellite navigation transforms drivers’ experience of automotive spaces. The use of satellite navigation has, so far, been predominantly studied from a cognitivist perspective based on the computer model of cognition and the theory of spatial disengagement. Experimental studies have concluded that over-reliance on digital navigation tools diminishes spatial orientation and spatial memory. According to the dominant interpretation, satellite navigation causes disengagement from space. After addressing these approaches, the paper introduces an embodied perspective of satellite navigation. This is accomplished by applying the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose notions, such as perception, body schema, motor habit, and virtual body, illuminate otherwise undertheorized dimensions of drivers’ spaces. By using digital tools for wayfinding, drivers’ body schema, virtual body, and perception of space are modified, thereby enabling an engagement with convoluted ‘mesh spaces.’ This new term is integral to the interpretation of drivers’ spaces, as well as being distinct from that of ‘hybrid space,’ although both aim to conceptualize spaces, including physical objects and their visual representations. Conclusions will be drawn against the broader context of the mediatization of everyday life.

Although rallies are essential to political communication campaigns, they have been little studied. Thus, this article presents an ethnographic observation of the Democratic campaign rallies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Two research questions structure the paper: How do material things—including human bodies—and their transportation structure the production and reproduction of rallies as political communication systems? What kind of political communication assemblages constructs the materiality of rallies? The text presents three conclusions. 1) A substantial part of the materiality of these rallies was composed of human bodies and many other things that were transported to a specific space to have copresent interactions with other bodies. 2) The production of these rallies required creating an infrastructural space built upon transporting a myriad of material objects to a specific place. These objects constituted the material bases for developing these rallies as a set of political communication practices. 3) These rallies can be conceptualised as mobile and itinerant assemblages for transportation and communication. These rallies were a means of transportation that moved the candidate’s body across a vast territory and a (political) media of communication designed to transcend the time and space in which these events were produced.

The rise of transnational and transcity education consumption suggests the increasingly important role of the capability to move in order to access quality schooling. Studies have examined the multidimensional inequalities underlying translocal education consumption. However, the role of mobility itself is not sufficiently understood. Two questions are rarely asked: (1) How is the capability to move acquired and practised to bring about translocal schooling consumption? and (2) How does the disparity in the capability to move restructure the established intergenerational capital transmission mechanism conceptualized by Bourdieu? This paper answers by theorizing a mobility-mediated, education-based intergenerational capital transmission mechanism. This framework is built upon a theoretical engagement among John Urry, Pierre Bourdieu, and Neil Smith. We substantiate this framework by examining a student migration regime in Sichuan, China. Attention is paid to the inclusion/exclusion of hypermobility-based schooling consumption regime. Empirical analysis is performed by the comparison of two social groups: (a) the middle-class households who employ mobility to chase after the footloose prime schooling resources and thus materialize their class reproduction strategy and (b) the immobile remainder who are stuck in a location deprived of quality schooling resources.

This paper investigates the life experiences of creative expats and the associated impact of, and on, the built environment of their host localities. Grounded on participants’ testimonies, we develop the concept of transient mentality as a potential mediating factor in-between such reciprocal relations. Employing an interview and survey-based research approach and drawing on grounded theory for data collection and analysis in Beijing, China, we found that the prevalence of a transient mentality among creative expats is influenced by the nature of their occupations, the fluidity of their social relationships, and the rapid transformations in the built environment. This transient mentality, in turn, affects the production of the cityscape through the consumption preferences of these expats. We argue that understanding such a transient mentality is crucial for urban planning and cultural policy, particularly in (emerging) global cities that work to brand themselves as international creative hubs.

In this study, we use a strengths-based approach to explore the ways that walking and cycling are practised and promoted in Māngere and Ōtara, two ethnically diverse, lower-income suburbs of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Using practice theory and positioning our research within a growing body of work on marginalised mobility cultures and the ‘human infrastructure’ of active transport, we find that family-centred, inclusive events; holistic promotion models; and strong volunteering and skills sharing networks are foundations of active mobility in South Auckland. Amongst the barriers to participation that were reported in our study, threats to safety stand out: They include road safety, concerns about personal security and stray dogs. Dealing with these threats requires advanced skills or ‘competences’ to sustain walking and cycling – particularly amongst women. We highlight the ways that infrastructural investment and community funding processes may help to overcome barriers and enable these communities to ‘roll together’.

This article investigates instances in which mobility justice is highlighted in post-disaster tourism in eastern Tohoku, Japan, a coastal area almost completely destroyed by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. After this unprecedented disaster, some of these towns have directed their recovery efforts toward the development of post-disaster tourism as a means to counteract outmigration and loss of jobs. By using the broader frame of mobility justice in tourism and geographies of affect, this article seeks to showcase how affective relations between people and post-disaster places, and between international tourists and locals, can foster a better understanding of the big and small injustices enacted at different scales in the area. In particular, this article focuses on the potential of ‘recognition justice’ to rebalance the scale between top-down policies and local needs. Post-disaster tourism performances utilize the mobility of information through global media, spreading survivors’ narratives, stories, and images. A politics of affect built around landmarks in the post-disaster landscape the tsunami has contributed to the creation of immobile nodes, which become locus of contestations and opportunities to leverage mobility justice and broader recognition justice for the local populations.

In attempting to understand and prevent fare evasion, existing research and policy have often categorised fare evaders based on passenger ‘types’ or profiles. However, such categorisations of ‘malicious’ or ‘virtuous’ behaviours rely on underlying moral claims which often go unexamined. In this paper, we study how different actors construct such moral claims as part of everyday interactions. We demonstrate that the everyday moralities of not or under-paying are diverse, locally occasioned, and emotionally charged. Drawing on social media and video data from Chile and the UK, we examine interactions between passengers, by-standers, transport workers, and transport operators. We highlight the diverse resources that actors draw upon to construct moral claims around fare evasion, including the mobilisation of alternative moral categories; attempts to produce exceptions to formal rules; and the foregrounding of moral emotions. The paper engages with an interdisciplinary body of work which reassesses existing policies and societal responses to fare evasion, while also contributing to a nascent literature on everyday morality and mobilities.

The relation between climate change and migration is subject to fast growing attention in scientific, policy, and public discourse. It is also subject to numerous representations and containment measures that carve out a new form of migration; one that includes visions of which populations deserve protection, should be stopped, or made mobile, and what areas are worth saving. This article interrogates these processes of bordering associated with climate mobilities research and policymaking, whilst also exploring how border-mobility relations and associated processes of bordering might be changed or rethought in a changing climate. Drawing on empirical examples from different world contexts—ranging from the Pacific to Southern Europe, we centre on the plural and contested ways in which borders in relation to climate mobilities manifest themselves in both geopolitical, conceptual, and cognitive terms, and in doing so build on, but also move beyond, literature examining the securitisation and exclusionary effect of borders vis-à-vis climate mobilities. We signal how a critical understanding of bordering further exposes classifications of so-called internal or international climate migration, of the un/deserving migrant, of the environmental un/privileged; and demonstrate how climate im/mobilities themselves feed into, resist, reshape, or even reimagine processes of (re)bordering.

This paper aims to contribute to digitally mediated mobilities literature by studying ordinary people’s differential mobilities within a contact tracing system called the ‘Electronic Entry Register’ formulated by the South Korean government during the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing the posthumanist perspective, this empirical study examines differential mobilities produced by the smartphone-holding citizens on the move, focusing on the agential capacities differentiated through their performances for digital mediations. Consequently, a sequence of field research comprising a walking interview, observation, and sit-in interview was conducted in Seoul during the pandemic. While most research participants acknowledged that they were profoundly affected by the mode of control imposed by the tracing system, many actively strove to strengthen their body-smartphone prosthetic-ness to technically enhance their mobilities, particularly by internalising some procedures into the smartphone. Their differential capacities in turn mutated their embodied speeds and the overall progression within the tracing system, which some others found difficult to catch up with. Subsequently, the researcher discusses the political significance of differentiated agential capacities at the sites of technological mediations and proposes the posthuman body as a useful unit of analysis for critical studies on digitally mediated mobilities.