Geographies of Mobility

Recent Advances in Theory and Method

Mei-Po Kwan, Tim Schwanen, Mei-Po Kwan, Tim Schwanen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367133528
• eBook ISBN: 9781351969802
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book seeks to bring together different philosophical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the study of human mobility within the discipline of geography. With five thematic sections – conceptualizing and analyzing mobility, inequalities of mobility, politics of mobility, decentering mobility, and qualifying abstraction – and 27 substantive chapters by leading researchers in the field, it provides a comprehensive overview of the latest thinking about human mobility and related issues. The contributors discuss mobility issues as diverse as everyday mobilities of young people, migrants and refugees, and sex workers; the relationships between citizenship and mobility; and the potential and pitfalls of big data for understanding mobility. This, coupled with a broad international focus, means that Geographies of Mobility will not only encourage and enrich dialogue on a theme that is of major importance to varied geographic research communities, but will also be of great interest to students and researchers across the wider social sciences. This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Introduction

Geographies of Mobility

Mei-Po Kwan* and Tim Schwanen^†

*Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

^†School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

This introductory piece sets the context for the special issue and explains its rationale. It offers a series of reflections on the rise of the mobilities turn and its relations with preexisting research traditions, most notably transportation geography. Rather than placing different approaches in opposition and favoring one over others, we contend that all need to be seen as situated, partial, and also generative modes of abstraction. Each of these approaches makes mobility exist in specific and ultimately simplified and selective ways. In addition, we argue that geography as a pluralistic discipline will benefit from further conversations between modes of conceptualizing, theorizing, and examining mobility. We outline five lines along which such conversations can be structured: conceptualizations and analysis, inequality, politics, decentering and decolonization, and qualifying abstraction. The article concludes with discussion on three fruitful directions for future research on mobility.

Esta parte introductoria pone el contexto para el número especial y explica su razón de ser. Ofrece una serie de reflexiones sobre el ascenso del giro de las movilidades y sus relaciones con las tradiciones de investigación preexistentes, más notablemente con la geografía del transporte. Más que formular diferentes enfoques en oposición y favoreciendo a uno sobre los demás, planteamos que todos los enfoques deben verse como situados, parciales y también como modos generativos de abstracción. Cada uno de estos enfoques hacen que la movilidad exista de maneras específicas y, en últimas, simplificadas y selectivas. Argüimos, además, que como disciplina pluralista la geografía se beneficiará de conversaciones avanzadas entre los modos de conceptualizar, teorizar y examinar la movilidad. Presentamos un esquema de cinco líneas a lo largo de las cuales puedan estructurarse tales conversaciones: conceptualizaciones y análisis, desigualdad, política, disgregación y colonización, y abstracción calificada. El artículo concluye con la discusión de tres direcciones productivas de investigación futura sobre movilidad.

It is now ten years since Sheller and Urry’s (2006) seminal paper announced a new mobilities paradigm in the social sciences. Complementing and at times competing with established traditions of studying transport, daily travel, tourism, migration, and other forms of (im)mobility, research influenced by the ideas summarized by Sheller and Urry (2006) has taken flight in geography (for useful overviews, see Lorimer 2007; Cresswell 2011, 2012, 2014; Cresswell and Merriman 2011; Adey et al. 2014; Merriman 2015, forthcoming). The mobilities turn has had num-erous beneficial effects on the discipline, including widespread acceptance of its key tenet that mobility is endemic to life, society, and space rather than exceptional and the attention it has drawn to a greater range of mobilities than previously considered worthy of academic geographers’ attention. Perhaps its greatest achievement has been to elevate mobility to a class of core geographic concepts to which space, place, network, scale, and territory also belong. It is not surprising, therefore, that two of the contributions to this special issue (Cidell and Lechtenberg this issue; Miller and Ponto this issue) explicitly address the question of how mobility relates to those other core concepts.

Conceptualizing Mobility

Perhaps inevitably, the elevation of mobility to iconic status in academic geography’s panoply of core concepts has only diversified understandings and definitions of what has always been a fuzzy term. Were anybody to claim that mobility used to be a straightforward term prior to the mobilities turn, they could easily be proven wrong. A survey¹ of articles published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1911–2010) suggests that in the last four decades of the twentieth century, the term mobility was used predominantly to denote residential movements by human individuals and households. Even in that period, however, the term had multiple uses: It was used in relation to individuals’ daily and weekly trip-making (Wheeler 1972), the upward social mobility of individuals (Breese 1963), the ongoing movements of cattle and herders (Kollmorgen 1969), and even in Foucauldian fashion as a synonym for energy and force (Sack 1976). Nonetheless, it is before 1960 and from 2000 onward that meanings and referents—that is, the mobility of whom and what—are more diverse. Here we restrict attention to the pre-1960 period, as usage of the term at the start of the twenty-first century might well have been influenced by the early pulses of the mobilities turn.

In the first half-century of scholarship published in the Annals, the term mobility was used in relation to many different referents: from faunal life (Joerg 1914) and plants (Gleason 1922) to technology (Ginsburg 1957), armies (Frey 1941; Whittlesey 1945), cotton and other commodities (Platt 1927; Marschner 1944; Murphey 1954), oil and nuclear energy (Hoffman 1957), centers of dominance in economic areas (Sauer 1941), and indeed human individuals in subject positions as diverse as customers of shopping centers (Platt 1928) and the “North American Indian” (Dryer 1915, 122). The whole world is indeed on the move and has always been so; what has changed with globalization is the intensity of movement and the geographic scale over which many of those movements occur.

Moreover, in early Annals articles, mobility does not merely denote actual movement. The term has been used to denote potential movement or a capacity to become mobile, as in Smith’s (1943) discussion of nomad mobilities that folds together everyday mobility and migration or in Hall’s (1955) discussion of MacKinder’s conceptualization of the transition from horse and camel to railroad mobility in what is now known as Russia and central Asia. Meanwhile, Sauer (1941) seemed to equate mobility with a certain level of energy and dynamism, which is common in more contemporary interpretations, and Whittlesey offered what today would be recognized as a relational understanding: mobility as a capacity to move afforded by the interactions between vessel and ocean (Whittlesey 1945) and between horse or motorized vehicle and state of the road (Whittlesey 1956). Our point is, of course, not to argue that nothing has changed in recent decades in either the realities we study or the worldviews, conceptualizations, and methodologies with which we try to make sense of those realities. It is rather that there are resemblances and connectivities between recent and older thinking about mobility in geography that can easily go unrecognized. Indeed, the suggestion of a linear progression from simple to more sophisticated understandings of mobility in geography caused by the mobilities turn should be avoided.

At the same time, it is also clear that conceptualizations of mobility and immobility have become richer and more diverse over the past decade (e.g., Adey 2006; Cresswell 2006, 2010; Merriman 2007; Hanson 2010; Bissell and Fuller 2011; McCann 2011; Ziegler and Schwanen 2011; Söderström et al. 2013; Adey et al. 2014). Arguably the most influential has been Cresswell’s (2006, 2010) understanding of mobility as the fragile entanglement of physical movement, the socially shared meanings ascribed to such movement, and the experienced and embodied practice of movement. This conceptualization is also utilized by Eide, Turner, and Oswin and by Ritterbush in this special issue. It highlights effectively that mobility is more than a functional task imposed by the separation of objects—people, locations, services, and so forth—in space and time and that attempts to reduce mobility to merely the level of functionality amount to its depoliticization.

Cresswell’s conceptualization has nonetheless been criticized. Frello (2008) and Enders, Manderscheid, and Mincke (2016) rejected its tripartite nature with reference to Foucault’s (1972) archaeological method. They argued that the rules of discourse formation dictate first what can appear and be classified as movement and, second, who is in the position to legitimately claim understanding of movement. There is, then, no extra-discursive, empirical separation of movement from its other—rest, stillness, sojourn, mooring, stasis, and so on—and any such differentiation is a doing that enacts what it purports to describe (Law 2004). Mobility, on this reading, is an ever-changing object of knowledge that is coconstituted by practices involving geographers and other social scientists, alongside all sorts of other agents.

Mobilities and Transportation

Cresswell’s conceptualization can also be seen to reinforce a particular representation of transportation geography and transportation studies more widely. This representation separates rather than brings together research on mobilities and transportation within geography (for further discussion of this relation, see Shaw and Hesse 2010; Bissell, Adey, and Laurier 2011; Shaw and Sidaway 2011; Cidell and Prytherch 2015; Schwanen 2016). According to Cresswell (2010), transportation research has by and large failed to illuminate two of the three pillars under his conceptualization. In examining “how often [movement] happens, at what speeds, and where [as well as] who moves and how identity might make a difference,” transportation researchers “have not been so good at telling us about the representations and meanings of mobility either at the individual level or the societal level [or about] how mobility is actually embodied and practised” (Cresswell 2010, 19). Implied here is an opposition rather than a contrast (Stengers 2011): transportation versus mobilities research. It would also seem that transportation geography is not merely partial and situated—as any practice of academic knowledge production inevitably is (Haraway 1991)—but severely limited. Defending transportation geography is not our aim here,² but Cresswell’s account is problematic on two accounts. Not only is transportation geography internally heterogeneous and are parts of it closely connected to and coevolving with the mobilities turn (e.g., Kwan 2007; Schwanen and Kwan 2008; Goetz, Vowles, and Tierney 2009; Bissell, Adey, and Laurier 2011; Shaw and Docherty 2014; Cidell and Prytherch 2015; Wilsmeier and Monios 2015), but parts of the subdiscipline can also be seen to generate new understandings of mobility and not merely movement.

It is not simply the case that in conceptualizations like Cresswell’s movement is separated from discourse. At a more fundamental level, mobility is bifurcated between an objective, primary realm of brute fact—movement—and a further reality of secondary qualities and human “additions”—meaning, sensation, perception, feeling, and so forth (cf. Whitehead 1920; Stengers 2011). Where in the current era of big data, physicists pride themselves on cutting through the “biases” resulting from human additions and finally uncovering the “laws” dictating movement (e.g., González, Hidalgo, and Barabasi 2008; Simini et al. 2012), Cresswell and various other mobility scholars criticize transportation researchers for, to paraphrase Latour (2005), substituting the cold fact of movement for the rich meanings or embodiment of mobility. Their critique is a version of what, after McCormack (2012), can be called the default understanding of abstraction as “a malign process of generalization and simplification through which the complexity of the world is reduced at the expense of the experience of those who live in the concrete reality of this world [and that] reproduc[es] disembodied habits of knowing, techniques of alienation, and fail[s] to recognize corporeal difference” (717). But what if the lived and the abstract cannot be placed in dualistic opposition? What if the object–subject bifurcation of mobility into objective and subjective elements is suspended and resisted? What if movement, meaning, and practice are understood as truly entangled and mutually implicated in ways that language struggles to make graspable?

This alternative imagining allows us to think differently about various ways and traditions of researching mobility and to turn oppositions into contrasts. It suggests that those transportation geographers who appear to reduce mobility to movement and those mobilities scholars who seemingly privilege meaning or practice are in fact creating different abstractions—here more affirmatively understood as selections and simplifications—through their particular methodological practices. In so doing they allow mobility as an ontologically uncertain, complex, and emergent process to be articulated and exist in new and differentiated ways. Whereas research on the embodied experience and politics of skateboarding (Stratford this issue) or Latin@ (im)mobilities (Maldonado, Licona, and Hendricks this issue) brings out unique aspects of mobility, studies using Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking technology, regression modeling, and Monte Carlo simulation (Hu and Wang this issue; Naybor, Poon, and Casas this issue) articulate mobility in wholly different ways that are likely to elude other methodological practices. In principle, then, the specific practices of all communities of geographers studying mobility are generative rather reductive (Latour 2005). This most emphatically does not mean that “anything goes” (Feyerabend 1975), as all articulations should be plausible to peer groups in academia and increasingly beyond; they must be sufficiently robust, logically coherent, and inscribed into one or more traditions of research that they simultaneously prolong and change (Stengers 2000, 2005). Emphasizing the generative qualities of research makes clear that mobility is always more than, and in excess of, what a single study or a particular tradition of research can make understandable.

In many ways, different approaches to understanding and examining mobility are the consequence of differences in modes of abstraction. For Whitehead (1926), practices of abstraction were necessary and inevitable. He cast abstraction in a much more positive light than geographers tend to do nowadays because, as a mathematician turned philosopher, he understood that thought, research, and plausible articulations of mobility become impossible without selection and simplification; what matters is how abstraction is practiced (Stengers 2011; Schwanen 2015). Whether practices of abstraction are good or appropriate is difficult to tell because there is no external yardstick—logical positivism’s absolute truth—against which abstractions can be evaluated. Any evaluation is necessarily relational and dependent on the purpose of analysis, the researchers’ peer group(s), and wider dynamics in how academics and others understand the world.³ Hence, as feminist theorists have long since reminded us (Haraway 1991; Mouffe 1999; Longino 2002), any such evaluation is also shaped in profound ways by asymmetric and unevenly changing power relations.

Yet, the complexities of evaluating and comparing mod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Geographies of Mobility
• 2 Developing a Framework for the Spaces and Spatialities of Transportation and Mobilities
• 3 Mobility Among the Spatialities
• 4 Algorithmic Geographies: Big Data, Algorithmic Uncertainty, and the Production of Geographic Knowledge
• 5 Mobility Research in the Age of the Smartphone
• 6 Rosa Parks Redux: Racial Mobility Projects on the Journey to Work
• 7 Revisiting Gender, Race, and Commuting in New York
• 8 Mobility, Communication, and Place: Navigating the Landscapes of Suburban U.S. Teens
• 9 Latin@ Immobilities and Altermobilities Within the U.S. Deportability Regime
• 10 Connected Mobility in a Disconnected World: Contested Infrastructure in Postdisaster Contexts
• 11 Contesting Street Spaces in a Socialist City: Itinerant Vending-Scapes and the Everyday Politics of Mobility in Hanoi, Vietnam
• 12 Mobilizing a Spatial Politics of Street Skating: Thinking About the Geographies of Generosity
• 13 Locked in Place: Young People’s Immobilities and the Slovenian Erasure
• 14 Unintended Return: U.S. Deportations and the Fractious Politics of Mobility for Latinos
• 15 Circulations and the Entanglements of Citizenship Formation
• 16 The Geopolitics of Tourism: Mobilities, Territory, and Protest in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong
• 17 Micropolitics of Mobility: Public Transport Commuting and Everyday Encounters with Forces of Enablement and Constraint
• 18 Mobility Disadvantage and Livelihood Opportunities of Marginalized Widowed Women in Rural Uganda
• 19 Livelihoods as Relational Im/mobilities: Exploring the Everyday Practices of Young Female Sex Workers in Ethiopia
• 20 Mobilities at Gunpoint: The Geographies of (Im)mobility of Transgender Sex Workers in Colombia
• 21 Mobilities in Rural Africa: New Connections, New Challenges
• 22 The Way They Blow the Horn: Caribbean Dollar Cabs and Subaltern Mobilities
• 23 Fixing Mobility in the Neoliberal City: Cycling Policy and Practice in London as a Mode of Political Economic and Biopolitical Governance
• 24 Policies on the Move: The Transatlantic Travels of Tax Increment Financing
• 25 Temporal Trends of Intraurban Commuting in Baton Rouge, 1990–2010227
• 27 A Location-Centric Network Approach to Analyzing Epidemic Dynamics
• 28 Another Tale of Two Cities: Understanding Human Activity Space Using Actively Tracked Cellphone Location Data
• Index