The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities

Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, Mimi Sheller, Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, Mimi Sheller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317934127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

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 accessible way whilst giving detailed grounding in the evolution of past debates on mobilities. It illustrates disciplinary trends and pathways, from migration studies and transport history to communications research, featuring methodological innovations and developments and conceptual histories - from feminist theory to tourist studies. It explores the dominant figures of mobility, from children to soldiers and the mobility impaired; the disparate materialities of mobility such as flows of water and waste to the vectors of viruses; key infrastructures such as logistics systems to the informal services of megacity slums, and the important mobility events around which our world turns; from going on vacation to the commute, to the catastrophic disruption of mobility systems.

The text is forward-thinking, projecting the future of mobilities as they might be lived, transformed and studied, and possibly, brought to an end. International in focus, the book transcends disciplinary and national boundaries to explore mobilities as they are understood from different perspectives, different fields, countries and standpoints.

This is an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in mobility across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.

Section V Introduction: Subjects

One of the critical tasks of mobilities research is to differentiate life on the move. Many have pointed out that in earlier work on spaces of flow, the implicit mobile subject that inhabits these mobile milieus is often a white, male, able bodied, western ego (see Crang, 2002). The experience of this caricatured illusory composite clearly does real violence by occluding the diverse plurality of subjects through which mobilities become enacted. Much mobilities research has since been concerned precisely with this multiplicity of experience, and is powerfully illustrated through volumes on gendered mobilities (Uteng and Cresswell, 2008) and mobilities and inequality (Ohnmacht et al., 2009) for example, which seek to attend to this plurality. This work also reminds us that the task is not just one of differentiating mobilities, but also of tracing something of their relational constitution. Through the idea of a powergeometry, Doreen Massey (1993) famously reminds us that the mobility of some people is contingent on the relative immobility of others. Pivoting around this crucial observation, the chapters in this section work hard to foreground the relational constitution of a variety of specific mobile figures. But each of these chapters also reveals the challenges involved in developing typologies that might be suggestive of ‘generic’ figures. In contrast, the chapters in this section demonstrate research that helps to articulate singular, thoroughly socially and geopolitically contextual lifeworlds. In doing so, they draw into view particular configurations of temporalities, capacities, proximities, knowledges and distributions, each of which provides the structure of this introduction.

Spotlighting the importance of temporalities, much work in mobilities research underscores the importance of duration by historicizing mobilities. This is refracted in multiple ways in this section not just in terms of the personal, biographical histories that constitute individuals and collectives on the move, but also the more extensive histories of the practices and spaces that mobile subjects are bound up with. The temporalities that this section spotlights are multiple and diverse. As Scott McCabe’s chapter shows, some of the temporal arcs implicated in being a tourist might be short but repetitive, as in an annual family holiday, whereas Rachel Woodward and K. Neil Jenkings’s chapter shows that being a soldier involves much more drawn-out durations of movement and stasis. Pointing to rather different temporal logics, Kim Sawchuk spotlights some of the more sudden cuts and thresholds that might immobilize people in the context of impairment through accident or illness. Alternatively, Juliana Mansvelt examines some of the more incremental mobility transformations that are particularly characteristic of older age. The cross-cutting relations between these different temporal logics are also illustrated by the pedagogical processes of learning to be mobile in particular ways. In the context of the soldier, Woodward and Jenkings underscore the gradual development of corporeal capacities through specific training exercises. Alternatively, Mansvelt demonstrates how attenuated corporeal mobilities in later life require experimenting with new ways of getting the daily chores done. Many of the chapters in this section express some of the different extents to which subjects are constituted in part by the temporalities of particular mobility systems. Tim Dant’s chapter gestures to the coercive flexibility that the car affords, whereas Woodward and Jenkings’s pinpoints the more rigid, timetabled character of military tours.

The differential capacities of mobile subjects is a key thread that weaves through each of the chapters in this section. This might be about the knotty relationship between mobility and social inclusion. For example, echoing some of the qualities of Elliott and Urry’s (2010) ‘globals’, James Faulconbridge’s chapter on executive mobility points to how aeromobility providers in particular have come to facilitate easy and streamlined passage that helps these subjects sustain powerful networks, whereas Roger Keil’s chapter on infrastructure provision in relation to urban homelessness and TB illustrates how different access to material and economic resources and services can serve to radically immobilize underprivileged urban inhabitants. Alternatively, resonating with debates on ‘network capital’, it might be about the capacity to mobilize others, as demonstrated by Mansvelt in terms of homemaking practices of elders. The chapters together work hard to spotlight some of the broader political transformations that generate some hugely powerful capacities, such as the powers of the executive that Faulconbridge describes, which have developed in relation to new economic discourses and practices. Other chapters, such as Mansvelt’s on elder mobility, point to the more ‘micropolitical’ powers that mobile bodies enact where the differential capacities of bodies on the move are much more fleeting and contextual, borne of situated encounters with other people and things. Indeed, J.-D. Dewsbury’s chapter gives us one of the primary exemplars of subversion — a line of flight — through the ‘inoperative mobility’ of loitering that disrupts or withdraws from societal, cultural, economic and contextual rules, norms or expectations.

While many of the chapters here emphasize the hugely significant topologies of race, class and gender at play in mobile lives — splinterings that are particularly evident in Roger Keil’s chapter on disease — at the same time, Sawchuk’s chapter on the relationship of impairment to the urban form reminds us that mobile subjects cannot be reduced to aggregate markers of identity. Sometimes mobility relates to the maintenance of particular capacities, as illustrated in Woodward and Jenkings’s chapter on the soldier. On the other hand, McCabe’s chapter hints at how tourism might involve a series of much more fragile — even suspended — capacities. Discussion of new technologies, such as that in Tim Dant’s chapter on the driver and passenger, demonstrates how new automobile technologies can simultaneously augment some capacities whilst depleting others.

Many of the chapters in this section describe some of the changing landscapes of proximity that systems of mobility generate. Faulconbridge’s chapter, for example, describes how the corporate mobility of executives takes place in order to sustain particular business relationships which require face to face meetings. In a rather less productivist milieu, Mansvelt’s chapter describes how the significance of face to face encounters is one of the imperatives that threads the lives of elders, providing vital connections to the world beyond the home. Furthermore, for Clare Holdsworth, the proximities engendered by family car travel can become important sites of negotiation. Faulconbridge also points to the parallel rise of virtual mobilities, in particular the mobile phone and internet, which have reshaped how proximity is enacted and experienced: something that Mansvelt reminds us is as important for elders as it is for businesspeople. Yet proximity is an ambivalent quality. Keil’s chapter on homelessness and TB, for example, reminds us that a powerful politics of risk plays out through the fear of particular forms of contact. Here proximity is all about exposure to the more fickle mobilities of disease that intensify the threat of infection and contagion. In a very different context, McCabe’s chapter alerts us to how certain forms of tourism might be contingent on removal from the proximity of others. Indeed Faulconbridge reminds us of the variegated nature of proximity through the figure of the executive, for whom ‘entubulated’ (Bissell and Fuller, 2011) passage is an infrastructural effect that permits proximity to other business types but is contingent on insulation from other people on the move. Such variegated proximity clearly invites us to examine the various visibilities and invisibilities that these mobile subjects enact. Whilst the mobility of the executive and soldier might be rather stealthy and fly under the radar for many, in contrast, it is the hyper visibility of the tourist that often becomes the cause of socio-cultural antagonism, leading many to self-consciously dis-identify with such a subjectivity, as McCabe suggests.

The mobile subjects that are the focus of this section are all in part constituted by the knowledges that they develop and enact. Knowledges might be generated through particularly scripted regimes of training and exercise, as Woodward and Jenkings show in their discussion on the soldier. Or they might be much more improvisatory and experimental, as Holdsworth discusses in relation to the child. Some of the chapters are particularly attuned to the embodied, sensate knowledges relating to physically moving about — for example, for a mobility-impaired person, as Sawchuk alludes to. Similarly, Mansvelt’s chapter works hard to draw attention to the sometimes painful but often intense sensate landscapes that are threaded through everyday practices such as shopping for elders, where pains and anxieties are ways of knowing the world, sculpting perception and moulding attention. The desirability of some pleasurable sensations might be what sustains certain mobilities, as Faulconbridge describes in relation to the executive, and McCabe in relation to the tourist. Some chapters draw attention to the more self-consciously reflexive knowledges that are tethered to the development of specific mobile identities. Faulconbridge’s executive is suggestive not just of a mode of being mobile, but more broadly an entire lifestyle. McCabe, on the other hand, describes how certain forms of tourism involve individuals engaging in a kind of reflexive self-styling to distance themselves from other forms of (mass) tourism, itself based on specific ways of knowing and performing. This is where attitudes and dispositions developed through practices become significant. Knowledges of mobile subjects are also significant for many of these chapters. The data doubles that permit easy passage for Faulconbridge’s executive figure contrast with the techniques of surveillance that help to constrain Keil’s diseased figures. Furthermore, Woodward and Jenkings’s patrolling solider enacts a very different mode of searching and finding to that implicated in McCabe’s tourist.

Finally, each of these chapters invites us to ask some crucial political questions concerning distributions of agency for mobile subjects. Overturning assumptions that agency resides only with human subjects, many of the chapters in this section carve out a much more distributed understanding of agency, which involves examining the human–non-human assemblages that compose mobility systems, or the volatile emergence of will and action as seen in Dewsbury’s writing on the loiterer. All this is particularly striking in Dant’s chapter on the driver and passenger, which sidesteps easy assertions of the driver being the figure in control and the passenger being relatively powerless. Dant demonstrates how mobile subjects are not bound by fleshy bodies but are much more distributed through knowledges, automations and prostheses that devolve agency to other parts of the car system. Furthermore, Sawchuk’s chapter on impairment emphasizes the importance of thinking about bodies and spaces as being brought into being simultaneously. But it is in Dewsbury’s chapter where we see one of the most ardent critiques of agency and subjectivity in current mobilities research. Dewsbury aims to subvert the assumption of a singular, purposeful mobile subject whose will, he argues, is not so simply their own but an expression of the drives and forces that are both interior and exterior to the mobile body.

Dant’s development of a more nuanced conceptualization of intentionality is also discernible in Mansvelt’s chapter on the elder and Holdsworth’s chapter on the child, where each of these mobile subjects is often meshed into complex webs of allegiance, obligation and duty that sidestep any easy distinctions between voluntarism and coercion. Whilst distributive agencies can pinpoint modes of governance and control, they also permit certain freedoms — something that Dant develops through the notion of ‘mobility capital’. Yet, at the same time, Holdsworth’s chapter on the child and Mansvelt’s chapter on the elder both spotlight how independent mobility has come to be an imperative of much planning and policy work in these areas. Other chapters emphasize how distributions need to be understood in terms of mobility collectives. Woodward and Jenkings’s chapter clearly spotlights how moving together is not just about moving together with other troops, but with families too. As McCabe reminds us, the attractions and repulsions of moving together are also, of course, a key trope of writing on the tourist.

References

• Bissell, D. and Fuller, G. (eds) (2011) ‘Stillness unbound’, in D. Bissell and G. Fuller (eds) Stillness in a Mobile World, London: Routledge.
• Crang, M. (2002) ‘Between places: producing hubs, flows, and networks’, Environment and Planning A, 34: 569–574.
• Elliott, A. and Urry, J. (2010) Mobile Lives, London...