Mobilities最新文献

This paper sets out to investigate the forced and voluntary (im)mobility of Syrians who recently moved to Europe and are in the transition from asylum to settlement. We conceptualise ‘settlement’ for this group as a dynamic process and trace different forms of mobility in this phase, which is more commonly defined as static and associated with ‘having arrived’. We take a broad perspective on mobility, including social, mental and physical aspects of moving and being stuck and include refugees’ own experiences and everyday coping strategies in order to understand how the interaction with mobility regimes takes place and is experienced after settlement. We do this by analysing qualitative interviews conducted in two similar but nevertheless different reception and settlement contexts. The Netherlands and Norway are both highly regulated welfare states providing support to newcomers although, importantly, also restricting their agency and mobility, resulting in spatial and social exclusion. By zooming in on research participants’ acts of everyday coping mechanisms and different domains of integration in the two contexts, we identify similarities and differences in strategies for challenging official and everyday definitions of where and what to be after fleeing to Europe.

Creative practices have made a standing contribution to mobilities research. We write this article as a collective of 25 scholars and practitioners to make a provocation: to further position creative mobilities research as a fundamental contribution and component in this field. The article explores how creative forms of research—whether in the form of artworks, exhibitions, performances, collaborations, and more—has been a foundational part of shaping the new mobilities paradigm, and continues to influence its methodological, epistemological, and ontological concerns. We tour through the interwoven history of art and mobilities research, outlining five central contributions that creativity brings. Through short vignettes of each author’s creative practice, we discuss how creativity has been key to the evolution and emergence of how mobilities research has expanded to global audiences of scholars, practitioners, and communities. The article concludes by highlighting the potency of the arts for lively and transdisciplinary pathways for future mobilities research in the uncertainties that lay ahead.

The Covid-19 pandemic has spotlighted the relationship between mobilities and gender-based violence (GBV). The national lockdowns across the world have im/mobilised people, creating extraordinary social proximities that have been associated with a ‘shadow pandemic’ of violence. Before the pandemic, GBV was often im/mobilised in academic and policy thinking in that it was located in unconnected static sites. This article is based on a transdisciplinary project that seeks to produce understandings of GBV in the Covid-19 pandemic, using the heuristic lens of im/mobilities. The project aims to do so through the creation and analysis of personal stories detailing experiences of GBV across the UK. These stories are in the form of existing first-hand accounts on campaign websites, magazines and newspapers. Through them this article investigates how im/mobilities precipitate gendered violence, both felt and experienced, and examines how embodied experiences become situated in mobile spaces—inside, outside and online—in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. In doing so, it evolves the concept of im/mobilities.

The recent political and economic crisis in Venezuela has given rise to an increase in Venezuelan migrants and refugees to Brazil. Situated in the northern state of Roraima, bordering Venezuela, this research explores the military-humanitarian response coordinated by the Brazilian government. Investigating the underpinning logic of such a humanitarian approach highlights the ways in which vulnerable mobile groups are offered support, while at the same time, are tightly governed for the protection of state security. I argue that Brazil’s military-humanitarian approach to mobility governance reflects a logic of debility that works to control migrants. This logic emerges through subtle forms of violence and consequently reinforces migrant vulnerabilities, keeping them in a cyclical loop of exclusion. This paper addresses the militarisation of the response across the urban streetscape of the city of Boa Vista, including humanitarian spaces of care, to investigate processes of securitisation and hygienisation. By doing so, this paper contributes to timely discussions on military-humanitarianism and draws attention to South-South mobilities and the salient geographies of Brazil and Latin America more broadly.

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.

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.

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.

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’.