Mobilities最新文献

Public imagination and academic scholarship present queer migrants as being uprooted due to their embodiment of non-normative sexual identities. Drawing from ethnographic research with a male sex worker-led organisation (SLO) in Nairobi, including 41 in-depth interviews with members, this paper explores this perceived uprootedness by highlighting Kenyan queer migrants’ multi-layered and multi-dimensional social experiences of home. Using the concept of ‘homing’, the paper explores the men’s lifelong efforts to feel at home, and the embeddedness of queer identities in this process. The SLO generates feelings of safety, acceptance and recognition and provides a ‘second home’ in the city. In the process of creating ties with chosen families in the city, the men still maintain close ties with family back in their villages, while economic opportunities induce back-and-forth mobilities. The men’s individual trajectories might fluctuate yet still fit within a more linear route in which they aspire to acquire land and properties in their ancestral homeland. The analysis of queer homing supports a reimagining of queer people’s mobilities that stresses their embeddedness in society and illustrates how it relates to the ‘queering’ of queer in the African context.

Shared mobility has the potential to contribute to the transition to a more sustainable mobility system. However, the environmental impacts and the extent of proliferation of the various shared mobility practices differ considerably. It is problematic that the most widespread practice—free-floating carsharing—shows the least environmental potential. Thus, the question arises as to why some shared mobility practices proliferate more readily than others. This paper studies this question from a practice theoretical perspective, focusing on how practices link or do not link with one another. It analyses how various shared mobility practices, as well as the practice of private car travel, connect to other practices via spatial-material and temporal links. The analysis explains why private car travel and, to a lesser degree, free-floating carsharing integrate relatively easily into everyday life, while other forms of shared mobility struggle to do so. This observation leads to the need for far-reaching interventions, both in the making of links of sustainable practices but also in the breaking of links of unsustainable practices. This paper scrutinizes this issue in an anticipatory and theory-based manner and offers suggestions on how to refine practice theoretical concepts regarding inter-practice connections.

The informal transport sector has various ambivalent characteristics and often a negative connotation since it commonly operates unauthorized and illicitly and is not part of the official transport sector. However, the informal sector provides a mix of legitimate transport offerings as well as important complementary services. The paper focuses on these ‘new mobilities’ and aims to understand informal transportation systems not only as a service coverage in specific areas lacking formal transit, but also as an activity that arises as a popular form of struggle and a covert and unorganized form of resistance against the political power embedded in dominant transportation systems. Through an empirical study conducted in the region of Urabá in Colombia the paper explores how the dominant agricultural industries in the region are causing huge challenges related to the overlap of transportation scales, congestion and risks of accidents in urban areas, affecting urban development, and how injustices of the existing public transport services and insufficient road infrastructures trigger the production of informal transportation. The paper mobilizes the theory of ‘everyday forms of resistance’, which draws attention to certain common behaviour and activities of subaltern groups as tactics to survive and undermine repressive domination. As such, this paper questions through its case study to what extent the informal transportation actions in Urabá are in a way challenging oppression and can be called an everyday form of resistance.

We propose that art practice as mobilities research offers alternative methods of more-than-human storytelling that expand simplistic narratives and illustrations of good and bad organisms. The article uses the authors’ artwork Para-Site-Seeing (2018–2019) to explore how art practice can tell multi-scalar narratives of multispecies mobilities that fold in rather than leave out the social, cultural, colonial and scientific aspects of a disease. We use a fictionalised parasite’s eye view to engage wide audiences in following the movement within multiple narratives of the disease. By situating Para-Site-Seeing in the context of the politics of care, and more-than-human art, we demonstrate the need for a more significant consideration of deadliness within the liveliness of biodiverse ecosystems.

Building on the intersection of lifestyle mobilities, changing environments and climates and practice theories, this paper explores how lifestyle mobilities are mobilised in response to the pervasive environmental and climatic stress in China. Grounded in an ethnographic study conducted in a lifestyle destination with lifestyle travellers moored across multiple domestic nature-based destinations, this paper finds that the motivations towards lifestyle mobility are rooted in how people relate their health and desired ways of life with the natural environment through tourism practices, everyday practices at original homes and destinations, and mobility practices. Consistent movements of human bodies, objects and skills enable lifestyle travellers to perceive and understand environmental pollution and adapt to different climates. Rather than focussing on identity construction or the sense of belonging, we provide a different way to conceptualise lifestyle mobilities by appreciating the sensitivity, reflexivity and adaptability that an emerging Chinese mobile population develops when living with environmental crises, climate change and changing climates across various indoor and outdoor spaces. This paper reflects on the potential of intersecting practice theories with mobilities paradigm and pollution perception studies and suggests policy intervention on lifestyle mobilities in a rapidly industrialising and highly mobile era.

Whilst the essential nature of built environment accessibility has been well established in transport research, attitudinal, behavioural, and communication barriers experienced by transport users remain largely overlooked. Subtle and insidious, repetitive negative attitudes, behaviour, and communication can force disabled passengers out of the most affordable transport option available. Applying the Disability Justice Framework and a Mobility Justice approach, this study investigated disabled passengers’ reported experience of bus driver attitudes, behaviours, and communication methods, and the impact of these encounters. A mixed methods cross-sectional survey and focus groups with disabled adults and support persons were conducted. An Advisory Working Group of transport accessibility advocates, all with lived experience, were engaged to oversee the study design. Participants reported that some bus drivers demonstrated ableist attitudes, discriminatory behaviour, and communication methods. Many passengers had reduced or stopped catching buses altogether due to these negative encounters, restricting their community mobility, which further impacted their quality of life. Participants’ recommendations for drivers, operators, and transport authorities were thematically integrated into one statement, reinforcing the power of attitudinal access—‘treat me like the person I am, who is valid; with a right to time, space and safety; listen to me, and prove you care’.

In this paper, we examine transborder commuters’ experiences (i.e. individuals who commute between U.S. and Mexican border cities frequently) during the Covid-19 pandemic, with keen attention to the links between racial capitalism and temporality. We address two interrelated issues: first, we unpack how the United States framed the pandemic through the metaphor of war and the production of the categories of ‘essential work(er)’ and ‘essential travel’ to ensure racial capitalism’s surplus labor and continuation. These categories function like a double-edged sword, tying racialized populations to racial capitalism’s temporality to exploit them while excluding privileged others. We argue that Covid-19’s temporality conflicts with racial capitalism’s temporality. While the former relies on the deceleration of everyday life, the latter depends on constant acceleration driven by profit-seeking. Using queer and feminist theoretical lenses, we then demonstrate how U.S. Covid-19 border restrictions at land ports of entry exacerbated transborder commuters’ cross-border travels and privileged some based on legal status. As a result, they used public Facebook groups to navigate and comprehend new commuting conditions, disidentifying with the United States’ official pandemic framing and producing their own. This shared experience catalyzed ‘digital transborder kinships’ or temporally-bound socialities rooted in relational care, advocacy, and knowledge production.

Many people living in poverty ride bicycles and many also participate in informal work such as recycling. A small number of studies have begun to explore homeless cyclists’ experiences with and perspectives on bicycles and recycling. In the current study, we seek to contribute to this emerging area of study, focusing in this case on the social support and informal and formal resources homeless and variably-housed cyclists use in Vancouver. Interviews, including go-along mobile methods, were conducted with five men living in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver who use bicycles. Findings show that the cyclists, especially recyclers, navigated an ‘underground economy’ of bike-related spaces that allowed them to make money, keep their bicycles in working condition, and cultivate social connections. In particular, a few highly valuable sources and spaces of support existed for participants within a landscape where barriers of many sorts were encountered regularly. These findings bring attention to the needs of and resources considered to be most valuable for some cyclists living in poverty, to the creativity and resilience of an often stigmatised group, and to ways that more inclusive cycling policy might support the efforts of a marginalised group to live a healthy life.

Migrant workers’ employment pathways are mainly analysed by observing their behaviour in receiving societies. In dialogue with critical studies of mobility, migration, and skill, we argue that the ‘transnational mixed embeddedness’ approach, used to analyse migrant businesses, should extend to include migrant workers. Based on multi-sited ethnography, we discuss the phenomenon of Chinese migrant workers in Italy who exploit the transnationally embedded opportunities to access training courses in China. We analyse the transnational workers’ agency in circumnavigating socially constructed notions of training and skill, and stress the transformative logic of the migrant trajectories as transnational mobility influences the trainees’ perspectives.

This article approaches the question of how experiences of mobility mediate subjectivities through a case study of middle-class Chinese women’s education mobilities. Drawing from longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with 56 young women who moved from China to Australia for university, the article focuses on two of their stories to illustrate how education mobility mediated their negotiation of available understandings of gendered personhood and competing life value regimes. It demonstrates that for these middle-class women, transnational education mobility may on the one hand reinforce identification with an ideal of enterprising selfhood that is prominent in both global and Chinese public cultures, or on the other hand, facilitate identification with a countervailing model of ‘bohemian’ mobility that has hitherto mainly been observed among more privileged subjects. It also analyses how mobility shaped the women’s negotiations of the linear feminine life scripts that are normative in post-socialist Chinese society versus more flexible, individualized models of gendered biography. The article thus illustrates the gendered aspects of Chinese women’s experiences of education mobility, and the subjective effects that flow from them.