The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities: Routes Less Travelled (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Keywords of mobility: A critical introduction
Keywords of mobility: Critical engagements, 2016
As a concept, mobility captures the common impression that one's lifeworld is in fl ux, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. While history tells the story of human mobility, the scholarly literature is replete with metaphors attempting to describe (perceived) altered spatial and temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and scapes; time-space compression, distantiation, or punctuation; the network society and its space of fl ows; the death of distance and the acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. The academic interest in mobility goes hand in hand with theoretical approaches that reject a "sedentarist metaphysics" (Malkki 1992) in favor of a "nomadic metaphysics" (Cresswell 2006) and empirical studies on the most diverse kinds of mobilities (Adey et al. 2013), questioning earlier taken-for-granted correspondences between peoples, places, and cultures. The way the term is being used, mobility entails, in its coinage, much more than mere physical motion (Marzloff 2005). Rather, it is seen as movement infused with both self-ascribed and attributed meanings (Frello 2008). Put differently, "mobility can do little on its own until it is materialized through people, objects, words, and other embodied forms" (Chu 2010, 15). Importantly, mobility means different things to different people in differing social circumstances (Adey 2010).
Movement, Mobilities, and Journeys
Springer eBooks, 2017
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
*This course fulfills the Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights requirements for a secondary field " History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history " ~ Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) The current global moment carries the mark of border-crossings and transgressions where not only people are on the move, but also ideas and images about them. The refugee, the migrant, and the terrorist – while itinerant figures of different orders – they all inspire particular narratives about what constitutes " human nature " and inhumane practices. This seminar course for both undergraduate and graduate students explores the multiple meanings of mobility and stasis by examining the (dis)placement and circulation of people and things along with the (folk)tales that accompany "being on the road." New roads through rainforests can bring improved economic conditions to rural areas; they can also bring disease and environmental destruction. So-called " uncontacted " tribes still inhabit in parts of the Amazon rainforest and Bedouin tribes continue to trouble Middle Eastern states. These nomadic populations present a challenge to state politicians, in theory because they represent a nomadic legacy and the possibility of insurrection, along with the belief that they cannot coexist with the modern, fixed, nation-state. If history is always written from the seated point of view, what does a mobile history or global outlook look like? How do our perspectives on movement inform notions (or realizations) of peace, war, progress, and development? And what does it mean to tell a tale in motion? From the side of the road and on the highway, who and what can move or stay-as well as who can tell the tale-has defined those people and things gain and maintain social value.
Mobility and agency: movement and people
2013
Processes resulting from and in turn (re-)shaping translocal connectivities and entanglements in economic, political and cultural contexts have significant impacts upon the social dynamics within and between the groups involved.1 Thus they also affect the everyday lives of people. While such processes undoubtedly have a long historical dimension, they have intensified since European colonial expansion and industrialisation and acquired new dimensions »globalisation« processes since the late decades of the 20th century.2 First steamers, railways, telegraph and telephone rapidly in creased the speed, quantity and quality of travel and communication; then a further shift accompanied the invention and mass production of aeroplanes, computers and mobile phones. Yet we must be cautious not to ascribe too mono-centric a position to overarching Western paradigms and narratives of (first) an expansive imperial agenda, i.e. seeking to extend one’s own markets and political terrains at the cos...
Anthropological takes on (im)mobility: Introduction
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2011
In this introduction, we outline the general conceptual framework that ties the various contributions to this special issue together. We argue for the importance of anthropology to “take on” mobility and discuss the advantages of the ethnographic approach in doing so. What is the analytical purchase of mobility as one of the root metaphors in contemporary anthropological theorizing? What are the (dis)advantages of looking at the current human condition through the lens of mobility? There is a great risk that the fast-growing field of mobility studies neglects different interpretations of what is going on, or that only patterns that fit the mobilities paradigm will be considered, or that only extremes of (hyper)mobility or (im)mobility will be given attention. The ethnographic sensibilities of fieldworkers who learn about mobility while studying other processes and issues, and who can situate movement in the multiple contexts between which people move, can both extend the utility of the mobilities approach, and insist on attention to other dynamics that might not be considered if the focus is first and last on (im)mobility as such. In this special issue, we do not want to discuss human mobility as a brute fact but rather analyze how mobilities, as sociocultural constructs, are experienced and imagined.