Mobilities最新文献

Intensive parenting has become a key term for analysing the pressures and priorities of contemporary western parenting culture. For mobility studies it provides a discursive framework for understanding why children’s leisure has shifted from free play and mobility towards various adult-led organised activities and why parents deem it necessary to control children’s leisure journeys in an unprecedented manner. Most of the research on parenting and mobility has explained these trends with urban risks and safeguarding, but this paper highlights how parents also control, manage and enable children’s mobility to resource and enrich them with various dispositions. We use children’s mobility experiments and parents’ interviews to explain two contrasting representations of children’s mobility—intensive car-parenting and childhood velonomy—in a local community in Finland. The paper sheds new light on how community and place shape parents’ notions of parenting, childhood and mobility.

This paper contributes to the robust dialogue in animal geographies by adding a focus on mobilities. Trans-paw-tation establishes a framework for understanding animal mobilities by drawing on a range of epistemological and methodological approaches, all of which aim to better understand animals and their role in the world. It goes on to propose three approaches to trans-paw-tation and the theoretical possibilities of thinking across animal geographies and mobilities: first, by reflecting on the movement of animals and animals’ movements in both the historic and contemporary city; second by examining animal policies and the ways in which animals are included and excluded from urban mobilities; and third, by considering the metaphorical and symbolic associations between animals and mobilities. These deliberations are based in South African cities where both animal and transport geographies have been exploited as a mechanism for discrimination and control, and in the postapartheid context, offer opportunities for social and spatial integration. In so doing, this paper moves beyond anthropocentric approaches to mobilities by bringing animal geographies into conversation with African and urban studies and by offering a methodological contribution towards understanding trans-paw-tation.

Who we are and how we ask questions shape qualitative researchers’ material and influence the understanding and intelligibility we attach to different mobility experiences. Our normativity and social positions have implications for the representation of people and places. In this way, methodological decisions are interlinked with the production and reproduction of mobility injustice and epistemic injustice. With its starting point in reflexive methodology, this article critically examines qualitative mobility research based on a research project in its final phases and exemplifies how mobility injustice is easily produced and reproduced in the research process. By way of confronting this tendency, we demonstrate that the interview guide is a powerful tool for supporting reflexivity at all stages of the research process, identifying new perspectives, and promoting reflexive mobilities research that recognises epistemic justice. However, the strategy is not infallible as it is impossible for mobilities researchers to identify all blind spots in their own culture, research field and language. A rich research community and adequate time for researchers to circle around and outside their core field are also crucial for supporting reflexivity and for reflexive mobilities research to thrive.

In this article, we interrogate the utility of conceptualising the ‘first and last mile’ (FLM) as a ‘challenge’ to be addressed through automated and integrated mobility services. We critically engage with the concept through a design anthropological approach which takes two steps so as: to complicate literatures that construct the FLM as a place where automated, service-based and micro-mobility innovations will engender sustainable modal choices above individual automobility; and to demonstrate how people’s situated mobility competencies and values, shape social and material realities and future imaginaries of everyday mobilities. To do so, we draw on ethnographic research into everyday mobility practices, meanings and imaginaries in a suburban neighbourhood in Sweden. We show how locally situated mobilities both challenge the spatial and temporal underpinnings of the first and last mile concept, and resist universalist technology-driven automation narratives. We argue that instead of attempting to bridge gaps in seemingly linear journeys through automated systems, there is a need to account for the practices, tensions and desires embedded in everyday mobilities.

Young people in cities in the Horn of Africa engage with diasporic mobility through social media on a daily basis. Apparent opportunities on these platforms both reflect and shape ideas about life in the diaspora, potential migration, and social mobility. These connections also bring risks of scamming, extortion and misinformation that contribute to the involuntary immobility of those who wish to move for economic or educational opportunities. Drawing from ‘screen-shot elicitation’ group interviews with young men in Hargeisa (Somaliland) and digital ethnographic investigation of social media content gathered before, during and after these sessions, this article argues that transnational flows of mobility-related information need to be studied from the perspective of people within contexts commonly understood as ‘sources’ of south-north migration, but beyond policy-orientated questions about the impact of ICTs on rates of migration. Emphasising the highly ambivalent role played by social media in shaping aspirations and experiences of youth (im)mobility, this approach brings into view a wider range of socially significant online practices. These include the transnational assemblage of elaborate digital scamming techniques, as well as multiple other types of mobility-focused user-generated content that circulate in transnational Somali social (media) networks.

This paper examines new forms of study-abroad expertise on social media and their role in mediating Indian student mobility to Germany. Firstly, it explores how mutual-support Facebook and WhatsApp groups—used by prospective international students in India to support each other through the process of applying to German universities—have contributed to the emergence of new forms of education consultancy, offered by Indian students or graduates of German universities, whom I call ‘Student Guides’. In addition, it shows how some Indians studying in Germany have started ‘Study in Germany’ YouTube channels, aimed at aspirant student migrants, and have become important ‘study-abroad influencers’. The paper analyses how these new forms of study-abroad expertise offer prospective international students social and cultural capital important for successful student migration, apart from shaping their imaginative geographies of Germany, and embedding them in cultures of mobility. Furthermore, the paper highlights how these new forms of study-abroad expertise intersect with, and critique, a more ‘traditional’ study-abroad expert: the professional education consultant. The paper draws on a digital ethnography of ‘Study in Germany’ Facebook and WhatsApp groups and YouTube channels, as well as interviews with the YouTubers, Student Guides, and Indian students in Germany.

Mobility experiences are becoming intrinsically linked with digital and data experiences. Being mobile increasingly involves the production, storage, processing and sharing of data (consciously or not), from car sensor data for diagnostics and insurance apps for driving, to ticketing apps for public transport, urban micromobility share schemes, Google maps, fitness and wellbeing apps, Internet of Things sensors, AI in migration “management“, or air pollution data. The ‘datafication’ of mobility raises new questions with regards to justice. What kinds of inequalities emerge at the intersection of mobilities and datafication? Whose mobility gets included and excluded through data collection and sharing, why and how? How are mobilities enabled and restricted through data? How are access and ownership to mobility and data changing? What about the mobility of data in relation to justice? This article links scholarship on mobility justice and data justice to develop a mobility data justice framework. It closes with a discussion of critical issues for mobility data justice and develops an agenda for future research in this area. The lens of social justice helps to understand the multiple ways power and (in) equalities are transformed or amplified at the intersection of mobility and data.

Electric car sharing is highlighted as a needed solution for reducing air pollution and the emission of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, its dissemination in many places is too slow and the market is still not profitable. This calls for research about whether electric car sharing corresponds to users’ conditions and concerns. This article applies the domestication theory examining insights gained from in-depth interviews with participants joining a car-sharing trial in a low-income, suburban area with rental apartments. The aim is to understand the initial adoption of electric car sharing, focusing on the challenges facing users. The findings reveal three interrelated processes and various challenges to be considered: making the technology understandable and useful, integrating car sharing in everyday practices, and negotiations and communications about the proper way to share a car. Besides the environmental advantages of sharing, the social benefits and how it might enrich everyday life should be stressed.