Mobilities and Human Rights (original) (raw)
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Intersecting Mobilities: Beyond the Autonomy of Movement and Power of Place
Borderlands, 2022
It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all sorts are on the move, and that the politics around mobility and its regulation and meaning are critical to contemporary political and social life. Human migration has been globally intensive for well over a century; industrial economic production, consumption, and trade move goods around the world; transportation infrastructure moves all sorts of cargo around, human and nonhuman; regular and irregular ecological processes and changes are creating new patterns of nonhuman movement; variants of viruses race around the world; even geological elements are far from static. This special issue tackles the challenge of thinking about mobility, not only in its individual instances where it is treated in self-enclosed containers, and not only in its usual contrast to place, ground, sedentarism, and static forms of being; but rather, in the terms of the generative forces created when multiple mobilities come together and cross paths, for better and for ill-in short, intersecting mobilities.
The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities
The 21st century seems to be on the move, perhaps even more so than the last. With cheap travel, and more than two billion cars projected worldwide for 2030. And yet, all this mobility is happening incredibly unevenly, at different paces and intensities, with varying impacts and consequences to the extent that life on the move might be actually quite difficult to sustain environmentally, socially and ethically. As a result 'mobility' has become a keyword of the social sciences; delineating a new domain of concepts, approaches, methodologies and techniques which seek to understand the character and quality of these trends. This Handbook explores and critically evaluates the debates, approaches, controversies and methodologies, inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. It brings together leading specialists from range of backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessib...
The New Mobilities Paradigm and Social Theory
Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory, 2021
There has long been an underlying assumption in social theory that the interactions constituting and influencing peoples’ lives are shaped by their stagnant relationships to place. Sociologists, for instance, have conventionally studied societies as definable collectives of people knowable by their geographical position and political geographers and international relations scholars have examined the world as constituted by sovereign states governing bounded territories. This chapter explores a shift within scholarship that questions these traditional spatial assumptions and argues that theoretical frameworks based solely on analyses of spatially delimited relations obscure a vast array of social interactions and behaviours that are constituted by their movement. This critique led to the development of the new mobilities paradigm, a theoretical framework designed to investigate the role played by movement in influencing and constituting social and cultural relations. The key components of this paradigm are summarised and some of the main criticisms that have been levelled at it will be addressed. Finally, the new mobilities paradigm will be employed to examine how one of the traditional targets of mobilities theory, state sovereignty, is itself constituted through a series of governmental and territorial mobilities.
"Mobility Justice’’: a new means to examine and influence the politics of mobility
Applied Mobilities, 2019
This essay examines two recent texts that embrace and extend the kinopolitical lens of the new mobilities paradigm by creating a framework for assessing the fairness of (im)mobilities: Mimi Sheller’s 2018 monograph, Mobility Justice, and Nancy Cook and David Butz’s 2019 edited collection, Mobilities, Mobility Justice and Social justice. Both books build upon theoretical accounts of rights to space and transport by promoting a holistic valuation of (im)mobilities through the development of the concept of ‘mobility justice’. This concept combines the theoretical repertoires of the new mobilities paradigm and political philosophies of justice. In doing so ‘mobility justice’ employs a mobile ontology, which is essential to examining the constitutive processes of (im)mobilities, together with a sensitivity to the fairness of movements in terms of rights, freedoms, capabilities, distribution and domination. The concept of ‘mobility justice’ is employed through the books in a diverse range of contexts. This is particularly the case for Mobilities, Mobility Justice and Social justice, in which authors examine local political battles in terms of how fair the on-the-ground (im)mobilities are. In contrast, Sheller’s book seeks to define the ethical elements of ‘mobility justice’, in order to develop a moral and theoretical framework that can not only be used to further knowledge of real world mobilities, but also to promote more equitable mobile environments. This research and theoretical development is timely because it identifies the multi-scalar nature of mobility injustice, and subsequently connects local battles for specific mobility rights to global movements for ‘mobility justice’.
How would we move differently in a just world? Drawing on the work of social movements organizing around different forms and scales of mobility justice, this essay offers some speculative reflections on mobility justice as a political horizon, while calling for an approach to mobility studies that takes seriously the ways in which affect and feelings move bodies. Vukov intervenes on the gap that tends to exist between the emergent field of mobilities research and mobility-oriented social movements. In doing so, Vukov explores and experiments with a number of strange moves in the hopes of contributing to current broad-ranging efforts to dislodge ruling logics of mobility control that increasingly target bodies in motion. By introducing 'strange moves' as an analytic for the study of mobilities and immobilities, this closing chapter highlights the ways that unexpected alliances can advance a broader, more collective approach to mobility justice.
The Mobilities Paradox, a critical analysis
Korstanje M. 2018. The mobilities paradox a criticla analysis. Cheltenham UK, Edward Elgar. The theory of mobilities has gained great recognition and traction over recent decades, illustrating not only the influence of mobilities in daily life but also the rise and expansion of globalization worldwide. But what if this sense of mobilities is in fact an ideological bubble that provides the illusion of freedom whilst limiting our mobility or even keeping us immobile? This book reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the mobilities paradigm and in doing so constructs a bridge between Marxism and Cultural theory.
Mobilising (Global) Democracy: A Political Reading of Mobility between Universal Rights and the Mob
Millennium-journal of International Studies, 2009
This article argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the role of democracy within globalised structures of power. Relegated to a socio-economic background that prompts new engagements with democracy, mobility has been neglected as a condition of possibility and as a form of political democratic practice. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s sociology of money, we show that prac- tices of mobility become democratic moments in relation to structures of power that are constituted across the territorial circumscription of national states. Understood as a particular form of sociality, mobil- ity can work upon structures of power through universal rights and the politics of the ‘mob’. In this sense, practices of mobility are also democratic inscriptions of equality.
Mobility is a keyword of late modernity that suggests an increasingly unrestrained and interconnected world of individual opportunities. However, as privileges enable some to live in a seemingly borderless world, others remain excluded and marginalized. Boundaries are created, modified and consolidated, particularly in times of hypermobility. Evidently, mobility is closely tied to immobility. This volume features ethnographic research that challenges the concept of mobility with regard to social inequalities and global hierarchies.
Mobility, Power and the Emerging New Mobilities Regimes
Modern everyday lives, economies and cultural practices are strongly shaped, structured but also limited by complex regimes of mobility and flow. On different scales -from the body to the global -multiple regulatory regimes are governing the ways how individuals, collectives and nation states are managing social relations over distance. Complex power settings of principles, norms and rules structure the ways how individuals stay in contact with other people, places, organizations, institutions and so forth 1 . These "mobilities regimes" [Witzgall, Vogl, Kesselring 2013] are highly ambivalent phenomena: on the one side they decrease social inequalities by making mobility accessible and available for more and more people. But on the other side those who are set immobile or who don't have access to relevant technologies and infrastructures -or even don't have the necessary skills to manage complex mobilitiesare often socially excluded. In this sense mobility regimes can also work as facilitators of disintegration and incoherence. They can foster mobility and strengthen equality through better chances for social participation. But mobilities regimes can also intenx 1 This understanding of regimes is based on the definition provided by Nohlen, Schultze, Schüttemeyer and takes into account the changing socio-political conditions which are shaping mobility policies in nation states, cities and regions which can be described in terms of networks and governance processes . Further ahead a working definition based on Nohlen et al. is presented but it also needs to be considered that regime theory is a fairly young disciple and a seminal definition of regimes is still missing . Therefore the definition of mobilities regimes that will be presented later has to be considered as work in progress.