Mobile Methods

Monika Büscher, John Urry, Katian Witchger, Monika Büscher, John Urry, Katian Witchger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415492416
• eBook ISBN: 9781134007103
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

In the twenty-first century, more than ever, everything and everybody seems to be on the move. Global flows of people, goods, food, money, information, services and media images are forming an intensely mobile background to everyday life. Social scientists, too, are on the move, seeking new analytical purchase on these important aspects of the social world by trying to move with, and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic.

Mobile Methods addresses the challenges and opportunities of researching mobile phenomena. Drawing on extensive interdisciplinary discussion, the book brings together a collection of cutting-edge methodological innovations and original research reports to examine some important implications of the mobilities turn for the processes of 'research', and the realm of the empirical. Through analysis that addresses questions such as 'how are social relationships and social institutions made in and through mobility?', and 'how do people experience mobility in twenty-first century world cities?', the authors mobilize sociological analysis, bringing new insights and opening up new opportunities for engagement with contemporary challenges.

This book is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of disciplines including Human Geography, Social Policy, Sociology and Research Methods.

1
Introduction

Mobile methods¹

Monika Büscher, John Urry and Katian Witchger

‘Hold still, don’t move.’

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984: 31)

Comings and goings

Law and Urry argue that existing methods of research in and around the social sciences deal poorly

with the fleeting – that which is here today and gone tomorrow, only to reappear again the day after tomorrow. They deal poorly with the distributed – that is to be found here and there but not in between – or that which slips and slides between one place and another. They deal poorly with the multiple – that which takes different shapes in different places. They deal poorly with the non-causal, the chaotic, the complex. And such methods have difficulty dealing with the sensory – that which is subject to vision, sound, taste, smell; with the emotional – time–space compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage, pleasure, desire, or the spiritual; and the kinaesthetic – the pleasures and pains which follow the movement and displacement of people, objects, information and ideas.

(2004: 403–4)

The temptation is to hold down and dissect these phenomena to study them – but this would destroy them. In this book we address some problems and opportunities of doing research which respond to these challenges by trying to move with, and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic. It is especially through engaging with what we and others term the mobilities turn that purchase can be gained on these important aspects of the social world.

The book seeks to enable and to reinforce new forms of social science inquiry, explanation and engagement. It not only remedies the academic neglect of various movements, of people, objects, information and ideas. It also gathers new empirical sensitivities, analytical orientations and methods to examine social phenomena that are especially important in the contemporary world with many living ‘mobile lives’ or at least being affected by the mobile lives of others (Elliott and Urry 2010). This chapter reviews various ‘mobile methods’ for studying (im)mobilities which the authors of the subsequent chapters design, develop and deploy. We discuss some of the new entities that these methods come to enact and explore important implications for the relationships between the empirical world, theory, critique and engagement. But we end with a cautionary tale: that the development here of productive methods has an urgency in that there are other social forces also developing powerful mobile computer-based methods and these may win out in part because of their interconnections with forms and forces of monitoring and surveillance.

Through investigations of movement, blocked movement, potential movement and immobility, dwelling and place-making, social scientists are showing how various kinds of ‘moves’ make social and material realities. Attention to the fluid, fleeting, yet powerful performativity of various everyday (im)mobilities transforms conceptions of social science inquiry, explanation and critique. We take it that there is no research and no social science without theory, but at the same time we argue that the mobilities turn folds analysis into the empirical in ways that open up different ways of understanding the relationship between theory, observation and engagement. It engenders new kinds of researchable entities, a new or rediscovered realm of the empirical and new avenues for critique.

Especially significant in the development of this new paradigm were the varied writings of Simmel developed in the heyday of the railway journey and the letter and postcard (see Gillen and Hall, in Chapter 2 of this volume, on the huge growth in postal services in late-nineteenth-century Britain). Simmel, especially, analyses the fragmentation and diversity of modern life and shows how motion, the diversity of stimuli and the visual appropriation of place are centrally important features of new modern urban experience. Moreover, because of the effect of money, with its colourlessness and indifference, and its twin, the modern city, a new precision becomes necessary in social life. Agreements and arrangements need to demonstrate unambiguousness in timing and location. Life in the mobile onrushing city presupposes punctuality and this is reflected in the ‘universal diffusion of pocket watches’ (Simmel 1997: 177). The watch a century ago was as symbolic of the ‘modern’ as the ubiquitous mobile phone is today (see some contemporary uses of mobile phones in Chapters 8–11 below). Simmel argues that the ‘relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos’ (Simmel 1997: 177; Urry 2007: ch. 2).

Some of Simmel’s ideas were developed within the Chicago School which in the first half of the twentieth century provided a range of post-Simmelian mobility studies especially concerned with the itinerant (mobile) lives of hoboes, gangs, prostitutes and migrants, with what would now be characterised as the ‘underclass’ (see, for example, Park 1970). However, this development was cut short in its tracks as many structural or static theories took over, including structural functionalism, positivist analysis of ‘variables’, structural Marxism and so on. Meanwhile, the study of mobilities was turned into the professional examination of ‘transport’ and to a lesser extent of ‘tourism’, which were taken to be specific domains to be researched far away from the provocative promptings of Simmel’s essays on metropolitan life.

But over the past decade or so, influential new initiatives such as those examined in this book have begun to reappropriate Simmel’s work, directly or more indirectly. This has developed through research within various domains, symbolic interactionism, cultural studies, science and technology studies, ethnomethodology, material culture, cultural geography, (participatory) design and others, as reflected in various books and journals, including Mobilities. This work is developing what may become a distinct mobilities paradigm. We delineate some of the premises, promises and risks of these developments. But we do not try to reconcile the conflicts between the theoretical orientations we see contributing to such a paradigm. Some differences are irreconcilable and there are incompatibilities that challenge as well as shape mobilities research. Nevertheless, there is a powerful transformative and ‘therapeutic’ potential for social science in the interferences generated where these studies meet and gather emergent empirical sensitivities, analytical orientations, methods and instruments to examine crucial social and material phenomena.

This analysis of mobilities and especially of multiple and intersecting mobility systems, where each is in an adaptive and evolving relationship with each other, is an example of ‘post-human’ analysis (Hayles 1999). However, arguing that there is a substantive shift from the human to the post-human presupposes that there was a previous era where the world was ‘human’ and principally constituted through disembodied and dematerialised cognition. This Enlightenment view presumes what Ingold terms a primacy of head over heels, mind over body, humans separate from and productive of society and culture, and a neglect of the mobile practices of walking (2004). A mobilities turn is part of the critique of such a humanism that posits a disembodied cogito and especially human subjects able to think and act independently of their material worlds (Latour 1993). This book is based around the claim that the powers of ‘humans’ are co-constituted with/by various material agencies of clothing, tools, objects, paths, footwear, buildings, machines, paper and so on. And thus we have never been simply ‘human’, nor simply ‘social’.

Following Marx we might indeed claim that there are not only the relations of life but also the forces of life, encountering, clashing with, realising, enlisting or suppressing the creative power of the material world. Life and matter come to matter and are made meaningful as people, objects, information and ideas move and are (im)mobilised (see Barad 2007). People, objects, information and ideas may be:

• held in place (prisoner, clamped car, poster, rhetoric figure);

• fixed in place (agoraphobic, building, a sense of place);

• temporarily stationary (visitor, car in garage, graffiti, a presentation);

• portable (baby, laptop, souvenir);

• part of a mobile body (foetus, iPod, ID card, designer label);

• prosthetic (disability assistant, contact lenses, name badge, gender);

• constitutive of a mobility system (Highway Code, timetable, speed);

• consisting of code (cyborg, BlackBerry, digital document, computer virus).

This classification brings out huge variations in how relations and forces of life are encountered, realised, enlisted or suppressed, but in all cases humans are nothing without many different objects and meanings organised into systems. The systems come first and serve to augment the otherwise very limited powers of individual human subjects. Those subjects are brought together and serve to develop extraordinary powers only because of the systems they build and which implicate them, and especially because of those systems that move them, or objects, ideas and information.

In the following, we explicate the mobilities paradigm and then connect it with a review of emergent ‘mobile methods’ for studying (im)mobilities that make social and material realities. We discuss important implications of the mobilities paradigm for research and delineate new ways of understanding the relationship between theory, observation and engagement. We contextualise the various pieces of research presented in the chapters in this book, where the authors make various efforts to ‘run’ with the mobilities paradigm. They do so in order to bring to light previously hidden elements of the social world. And in so running they come to experience various novel kinds of phenomena and seek to allow themselves and their readers to be moved by them.

The mobilities paradigm

Overall we can say that the mobilities paradigm is not just substantively different in remedying the academic neglect of various movements, of people, objects, information and ideas (see Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007). It is also transformative of social science, generating an alternative theoretical and methodological landscape. It enables the ‘social world’ to be theorised as a wide array of economic, social and political practices, infrastructures and ideologies that all involve, entail or curtail various kinds of movement of people, or ideas, or information or objects. And this paradigm brings to the fore and enacts theories, methods and exemplars of research that so far have been mostly out of sight.

The term ‘mobilities’ refers not just to movement but to this broader project of establishing a ‘movement-driven’ social science in which movement, potential movement and blocked movement, as well as voluntary/temporary immobilities, practices of dwelling and ‘nomadic’ place-making are all viewed as constitutive of economic, social and political relations.

Such a paradigm is crucial, because historically the social sciences have mostly analysed ongoing geographically propinquitous communities based on more or less face-to-face social interactions with those present. Much social science presumes a ‘metaphysics of presence’, proposing that it is the immediate presence of others that is the ‘real’ basis of social existence. This metaphysics generates analyses that focus upon patterns of more or less direct co-present social interactions.

But many connections with people and social groupings are not propinquitous, and this is of cou...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Any mermaids?
• 3 On becoming ‘la sombra/the shadow’
• 4 Choreographies of leisure mobilities
• 5 Mobilities of welfare
• 6 Connectivity, collaboration, search
• 7 Travel Remedy Kit
• 8 Mobile, experimental, public
• 9 Reassembling fragmented geographies
• 10 Studying mobile video telephony
• 11 Mobile positioning
• Index