Mobilities最新文献

Many universities are transforming campuses by responding to globally significant, locally specific, economic, political, and social imperatives. Some are implementing urban and regional transformations in higher education delivery to increase student access and diversity. Their success can depend upon infrastructures provided by other parties. Public transport is an example. Transit accessibility and equity affect quality of life, livelihoods, life course, and liveability in cities. Growing numbers of international studies consider factors shaping student travel to and from university campuses by public transport; fewer address local socio-spatial experiences of travel. Informed by debates about differential accessibility of suburban and city campuses, we examined student experiences at an Australian regional university undergoing transformation. We report on a study assessing multiple trips to and from two campuses to five destinations. Rich insights were drawn from experiences of antisocial behaviour, vulnerability, and sub-optimal service provision and reveal why some students think public transport is a mode of last resort. Universities and their stakeholders need to know more about student experiences of mobility. Such knowledge could inform tailored transport interventions and universities’ willingness to encourage public transport providers to view their services as infrastructures of care.

Over the last few years, electrically assisted cycling, e-biking, has increased substantially worldwide. Replacing car driving for individual journeys, especially commuting, is highlighted as important to mitigate climate change, improve public health, and reduce congestion and other unwanted consequences connected to the car. Car driving, however, is still the overwhelmingly dominant mode of personal transport globally and the ‘system of automobility’ permeates the whole of society. Flexibility and autonomy are considered the main reasons for the car’s dominance (Urry 2004). By analysing interviews and diaries kept by e-bikers, collected in semi-urban and urban settings in Sweden, this article aims to contribute to knowledge about emerging micromobility practices such as e-biking in relation to a transport system where flexibility is the norm. The results show that e-biking encompasses elements that give the practice potential to both recruit and retain practitioners. By successfully combining elements of conventional cycling and car driving, it offers reliability, convenience, and flexibility. E-biking facilitates transforming a dull commute into leisure as the rider can enjoy the sensuous and reflective aspects of the journey. At the same time, through that squeezing of time, it does not challenge prevailing structures but rather maintains the time-space of automobility.

While transport and mobility studies have focused on diverse challenges related to improving the quality of public transport (PT) for its passengers, they have hardly examined the well-being and livelihoods of PT workers. To address this gap, we explore the work spaces and times of bus drivers employed in PT in Gothenburg and Stockholm (Sweden), where PT operations are procured from private companies to ensure service quality and financial efficiency. Drawing upon studies on capitalist temporalities of work, we observe that the bus drivers are obliged to perform fatiguing work tasks under constant time pressure, which generates daily conflicts between bodily, personal, and work rhythms. The drivers’ time wealth is severely constrained, as they have limited capacity to control their own time and experience a near-constant work-life imbalance. Our findings indicate that such hindrances are not simply a product of work rhythms marked by the rigidity of the PT timetable. Rather, they emerge from the operational and financial logic of procurement that contradicts the well-being and livelihoods of PT workers. We conclude with a plea to place workers as essential actors for future reflections on inequalities and injustices related to transport and mobility.

In 2016, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that human error is involved in 94–96% of all motor vehicle crashes. Also in 2016, Bonnefon et al. predicted that autonomous vehicles could eliminate 90% of traffic collisions due to their elimination of human error. However, questions of safety, accessibility, and social equity have arisen after the first pedestrian death by an autonomous vehicle in its testing phase occurred in Tempe, AZ, in 2018. This project analyzes how social equity issues shape the discussion, creation, and implementation of governmental policies and regulations surrounding driverless automobiles in Tempe, using policy and text analysis as well as semi-structured interviews of government officials or residents of Tempe. Informed by the concept of the right to the city and critical legal studies, this research suggests that public policy around autonomous vehicles does create new and expand existing spaces for inequality in Tempe. This is exacerbated by increased awareness of inequality within Arizona’s autonomous vehicle regulation scheme and its entire transportation system after the first pedestrian death by autonomous vehicle.

Cities face major challenges when it comes to sustainability and mobility. Transport’s contribution to climate change is well-established, and people need to move in the most sustainable way to reach the 2030 emissions targets set by the Paris Agreement. One possible pathway towards more sustainable mobility practices is electromobility. The electrification of micro-mobility is happening rapidly, and one of the most popular is the e-bike. For years, electric bikes were relegated to niche status, but they are now experiencing explosive growth in sales in many countries. In this article, we draw on an experiment with new users of e-bikes to study the integration of e-bikes into existing mobility practices and to explore their sustainability potential. Through the lens of domestication theory, we zoom in on the relations that formed between users, technology, and environments in the course of the experiment. Our analysis highlights how emotional and sensory experiences play crucial roles in the adaption of new mobility technologies. Based on our findings, we argue that to reach the sustainability potential of e-bikes, a set of support mechanisms must be developed according to a holistic and relational understanding of mobility that also takes emotions and sensory experiences into consideration.

Transnational ageing processes are usually studied by focusing on the various cross-border practices and mobilities of different categories of ageing migrants. This paper introduces a retirement mobilities approach as an analytical framework that draws on both transnational studies and the new mobilities paradigm to widen the theoretical and empirical debates. It argues that both migrant and non-migrant populations, as well as human and non-human cross-border circulations, have to be taken into account when studying transnational ageing. Based on a mixed-methods study combining original data from a quantitative survey conducted in Switzerland with residents 55+ and semi-structured interviews held in Spain and Switzerland with older adults receiving a Swiss pension, we demonstrate the heuristic value of this approach. Indeed, empirical findings indicate that older adults with and without a migration background represent an internationally mobile population with similar mobility aspirations and transnational lifestyles. However, the motivations driving these two groups’ transnational mobility differ significantly. Moreover, transnational circulations of financial resources, and in particular retirement pensions, are interlinked with mobility in old age. To conclude, a retirement mobilities approach sets a new research agenda, inviting scholars to examine transnational ageing beyond the ageing-migration nexus.

Assisted human reproduction has been deterritorialised into reproductive connectivity networks capable of adapting to contradictory laws, technological development and the mobility of people, reproductive substances, knowledge and capital. We reflect on the reproductive market and the dynamic capacity of cross-border reproductive care (CBRC), thanks to oocyte vitrification for egg donation, and on the legislative gaps that favour these flows. The purpose of the present study is to show the reproductive flows of oocytes from Europe to Brazil, which seem to have erratic route changes, leaving Spain and passing through other European countries, where they are stored, before arriving in Brazil. We carried out a qualitative study, based on documentary analysis of Brazilian Ministry of Health records on oocyte importation, the EU Coding Platform (System for Tissues and Cells), 10 in-depth interviews with key informants and legislative analysis on reproductive technologies in Spain, Brazil, Slovakia and Italy. This flow of oocytes underscores the flexibility and adaptability of transnational reproductive care.

This article advances the epistemological potential that exists at the nexus of queer theory and mobilities research. It aims to queer mobility by rejecting the idea of the destination and embracing the virtuality of movement instead. In doing so, it draws on the queer symbolism of the closet and the cruise to highlight the heteronormative framing that has come to define and constrain the new mobilities paradigm. Arguing that anybody has the capacity to be ‘queer’, it calls for a redefinition of the subject and an exploration of the world-making possibilities that emerge when the virtuality of movement is foregrounded.

Leaving for the city or going abroad to study, to later return and contribute to the development of the village. This notion is what we propose here as the rhetoric of return, a polysemic concept that is central to the narrative of development and education in Nepal. The migratory trajectory of Mingma, a young Sherpa who grew up in Sikkim (India), questions this notion based on her experience of returning to Gaun (Nepal), her family’s village. Her story allows us to understand the negotiations that stem from her ideals of development, her role as a teacher and her relationship with the villagers. The most important findings reveal the close link between mobility and knowledge regimes in Nepal and demonstrate the relevance of gender in the mobility-development nexus and its contradictions.

The mobile lifestyle of digital nomads mingles remote work, international travel, and multi-local living in ways that both submit to and resist state-based mobility regimes. In this article, we examine this apparent paradox by asking how digital nomads move both with the state and against it. Employing the metaphor of ‘friction’, the analytical lens of ‘governmobility’ and ethnographic fieldwork with digital nomads, the article illustrates how nomads leverage state-imposed constraints into creative forms of ‘border artistry’ that allow them to achieve their lifestyle goals in the shadow of the state. At the same time, however, the article suggests that states are also border artists, an argument developed through an analysis of governments’ recently established special visa programs. The findings suggest that mobility regimes do not merely determine who can or cannot move, enter, or stay, but rather exercise a kind of governmobility that encourages mobile individuals to discipline themselves according to desirable qualities such as self-sufficiency, consumer citizenship, and depoliticised mobility. In this sense, mobility regimes emerge as the mutual interface between digital nomads’ individual strategies to stay on the move and states’ institutional strategies to codify and commodify their legal status.