Forum 4: the environmental privilege of borders in the anthropocene

ABSTRACT

Mobility can indicate a powerful or privileged relationship with one’s environment. The ability to exercise mobility or not (of oneself or others) is an exertion of power that demarcates where particular people belong and under what kind of environmental conditions. This essay focuses on the significance of borders in creating environmental privilege in the Anthropocene. Environmental privilege is accrued through the exercise of economic, political, and cultural power that enables the construction of exclusive environmental amenities such as clean air and water, open space, and safe neighborhoods. For years, environmental justice scholars have revealed the burdens and oppressive conditions associated with environmental inequality, but few studies consider the flipside of that reality. We argue that environmental privileges enjoyed by some rest upon the manipulation of the mobility of others – human and nonhuman. We believe border making will come under greater pressure as the effects of climate change increase, and the volume of resources required to maintain exclusive spaces intensifies. Continued mass migration will bring heightened anxieties about national identity and calls for greater border enforcement, despite the reality that borders – both literal and figurative – consistently fail to alleviate migratory pressures while exacerbating the effects of climate change and environmental injustice. Our research shows that greater ecological instability increases efforts to create privatized places as pristine spaces untouched by global turmoil, thereby reinforcing those social forces that produce environmental injustices in the first place.     

Consumption-led mobilized urbanism: socio-spatial separation in the second-home city of Sanya

Abstract

Tourism and recreational second-home development has increased rapidly in peripheral and lower tier cities of China in recent years. While tourism-led real estate development has been widely accepted as an effective investment opportunity, it can increase urban segregation and stratification. This pattern is seen in the resort city of Sanya on Hainan Island, China. Sanya’s recreational second homes vary in form and can be categorized into (1) elite-vacation second homes (short stay, private homes), (2) lifestyle-migration second homes (short stay, commercial homes), and (3) retirement-migration second homes (longer term, seasonal homes). Unlike the segregated cities formed by displaced labor migrants in many of China’s cities, seasonal recreational migrants are both economically better-off and are emerging as a dominant political force. The segregated residential spaces created by Sanya’s second-home development landscape further limits interaction and social network building between indigenous local residents and part-time recreational migrants. The perceived home space and feelings of place attachment towards Sanya is under drastic change, with locals feeling increasingly displaced. The new mosaic of consumption-led amenity cities in developing economies is one where traditional models of migration-based segregation are reversed. Wealthier second-home migrants have the capacity for more political power than local residents, as well as relying more on non-localized social networks and multi-nodal home spaces. Consumption-led mobility is an important determinant in building explanations of socio-spatial segregation and stratification in global cities that are undergoing dramatic development change.     

The political mobilities of reporting: tethering,slickness and asylum control

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the coerced mobilities associated with reporting, meaning the mandatory requirement to regularly check-in with authorities for the purpose of control. Drawing on recent calls for a politics of mobility and advances in carceral geographies, we attend to the forces, movements, speeds and affective materialities of reporting with a focus on deportable migrants and the UK Home Office. In doing so we develop two conceptual lenses through which to further understand the politics of mobility. First, we develop the concept of ‘slickness’ in the context of the process of becoming detained at a reporting event. We understand slickness as a property of bodies and objects that makes them easier to move. Second, we argue that reporting functions to ‘tether’ deportable migrants; thereby not only fixing them in place, but also forcing the expenditure of energy and the experience of punishment. The result is that reporting blurs the distinction between detention and ‘freedom’ by enacting the carceral in everyday spaces.     

Mind the Gap: The Tempo Rubato of Dwelling in Lineups

Abstract

Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute to our existing knowledge on lineups and the transitory places of everyday life writ large, this paper attempts investigates lineups at small island ferry terminals. Drawing upon fieldwork including travel to, on and from ferry boats, for a total of about 250 journeys over three years, and about 400 qualitative interviews, this mobile ethnography focuses on practices of ferry mobility in coastal British Columbia. Lineups are portrayed as complex orchestrations of rest and movement weaved through relational performances of mobility and relative immobility. As neither a place in the sedentarist nor nomadic sense, lineups defeat facile, dichotomous conceptualizations of spatialities and temporalities. Neither still nor flowing, neither public nor private, lineups are animated by idiosyncratic practices of dwelling whereby multiple and unique forms of livelihood are performed. Ferry lineups are ephemeral moorings: places where communities form and dissolve in temporary zones, as if suspended from the regular rhythms of the rest of the day and the week. On small islands lineups exist as stolen time‐spaces – an original concept that draws inspiration from the musical idea of tempo rubato and from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) treatment of tactics.     

Lifestyle Mobilities: The Crossroads of Travel,Leisure and Migration

Abstract

This article examines how the mobilities paradigm intersects with physically moving as an ongoing lifestyle choice. We conceptualise a lens of ‘lifestyle mobilities’ that challenges discrete notions of and allows for a wider grasp of the increasing fluidity between travel, leisure and migration. We demonstrate how contemporary lifestyle-led mobility patterns contribute to and illustrate a breakdown in conventional binary divides between work and leisure, and a destabilisation of concepts of ‘home’ and ‘away’. We unpack issues of identity construction, belonging and place attachment associated with sustained corporeal mobility, and conclude by suggesting avenues for the further study of lifestyle mobilities.     

The Role of Multiculturalism in the Discursive Rescaling of an Eastern European City

Abstract

Eastern European cities have been going through complex transformations in the wake of the revolutionary year 1989. Their restructuring has been marked by an abrupt transition from the centralized economy and totalitarianism of the communist period to the free market economy of new capitalism and democracy, under pressures for regionalization and globalization. The article looks at how City Hall texts (available in print and in digitalized form on the City Hall website) draw upon a historically rooted discourse of regional multiculturalism, constantly rearticulating it with EU neoliberal discourses of economic growth and competitiveness, participatory democracy, and interregional cooperation. The texts are thus seen as part of an ongoing strategy employed by the local authorities to rescale the city of Timi?oara, the capital of the Banat region (near the western border of the country), as an emerging multicultural regional centre and a pole of mobility. This process is taking place against the backdrop of the recontextualization of the region’s historic identity in academic texts produced by local (mostly) intellectuals, who are concerned with a reassessment of the concepts of ‘Central Europe’ and interculturalism in the postcommunist context.     

When runways move but people don’t: The O’Hare Modernization Program and the relative immobilities of air travel

Abstract

This paper draws on Urry’s four interconnected senses of mobility to argue that the O’Hare Modernization Project, carefully framed as moving runways rather than expanding O’Hare International Airport, has differentially affected the mobilities of people and land uses in addition to airport boundaries and noise, and that work on aeromobilities has not sufficiently considered spaces on the ground beyond airport borders. The relative immobility of the built environment around a major piece of infrastructure such as O’Hare has significant material consequences when the airport itself becomes mobile, reminding us of the politics inherent to the production of mobility systems and cities.     

Everyday Life Mobilities of Older Persons – A Case Study of Ageing in a Suburban Landscape in Sweden

Abstract

This paper describes the changing everyday life mobility of an older couple living in a suburb in Sweden. The methods used are longitudinal interviews and time-geographical diaries. The results show a pronounced dependence on car use. Representations of suburbia – as places of freedom, independence and mobility enabled by private cars – devolve into a harsh reality, i.e. disabling lock-in effects for people gradually losing locomotion, and experiencing diminishing mobility capital and social intercourse. From a time-geographical perspective, capability constraints unfold in the form of time-demanding basic needs and limited access to different modes of transport due to deteriorating health and location of residence. Increased neighbourhood barriers and authority constraints also imply restricted access to different spaces and reduced control over one’s life situation.     

Forum 2: the migrant climate: resilience,adaptation and the ontopolitics of mobility in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

While modernist or ‘top-down’, ‘command-and-control’ approaches to climate and migration worked at the surface or ontic level of the redistribution of entities in time and space, resilience approaches call for a different approach to mobility. These discourses construct mobilities that are more transformative; in fact, ones that question traditional liberal modernist notions of time and space and of entities with fixed essences. These mobilities do not concern moving entities in space but rethinking mobility in relation to space. Mobility then becomes more a matter of changing the understandings and practices relating to spaces and entities than of moving things from one place to another. Becoming ‘mobile’ thus would apply to the development of capabilities or ‘response-abilities’ to sense, adapt, recompose, repurpose and reimagine problems and possibilities; taking responses to crises beyond the static and binary conceptions of mobility and space.     

Entr’acte: Mobile Choreography and Sydney Rail Commuters

Abstract

The significance of the journey as a component of travel has been overlooked. The mobility turn has remedied this. There is now intense interest in mobility practices, in life on the move, and the cultures generated in vehicular environments. Though commuting is one of the most mundane, popular and ubiquitous forms of mobility, it is only beginning to receive the attention that is its due. In this paper, a mobile ethnography of commuting in Sydney is undertaken. It focuses particularly on the corporeality of commuting, on the territorialising and de-territorialising that occurs within crowded spaces of trains and on platforms during peak hours. It argues that passengers engage in complex ‘choreographies’ to avoid contact with one another.     

Disruptions of self,place and mobility: digital nomads in Chiang Mai,Thailand

ABSTRACT

This article considers the growing lifestyle trend of digital nomadism, whereby individuals leverage digital technology to combine work, leisure and hypermobile travel interests. Based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I examine the lifestyle and mobility pathways of digital nomads through two distinct yet coexisting notions of disruption. On one level disruption is viewed as a radical expression of flexibility, fluidity and newness, that evokes a sense of breaking free from a traditional past. At the same time, I consider disruption on more subtle terms, addressing ways in which historical formations pertaining to work and tourism feed into and unsettle understandings of self, place and mobility. In this article, I examine the role of a work-leisure distinction, colonial imaginaries of place and emerging norms of hypermobility in complicating attempts by digital nomads to establish a coherent sense of self, work and productivity in and across tourism destinations. These seemingly fluid lifestyle practices, I suggest, promote a continual preoccupation with boundaries, as digital nomads try to make sense of work, identity and newness amid an in/visible and intersecting constellation of mobility pathways involving Western backpackers, Chinese tourists, resident foreigners, visiting family and friends, and other nomads.     

Mobility,Space and Power: On the Multiplicities of Seeing Mobility

Abstract

Mobility as a key modern phenomenon can be seen in multiple ways and this article raises the question of how mobility becomes visible and real through diverse ways of seeing mobility. Mobility’s different aspects appear and take place in particular spatial settings under the workings of diverse forms of power, and recognizing this informs us about the making of spatialised mobility. It is shown how mobility intermingles with perceptions, experiences and desires of the modern self. Such workings of power relate, among other things, to framing and imagining, practising and experiencing mobility. Capturing ways of seeing mobility thus widens our language for engaging with questions of mobility and its political and social reality and possible futures.     

Gambling Drivers: Regulating Cultural Technologies,Subjects, Spaces and Practices of Mobility

Abstract

In this article, we analyse intersections between gambling and driving as everyday cultural practices of mobility. Building on Nikolas Rose’s argument that subjects in post‐industrial democratic societies are governed through appeals to ‘freedom’ rather than through overt forms of coercion or organised campaigns of state propaganda, we explore the different ways that producers, regulators and consumer advocates involved in gambling and driving appeal to our ‘powers of freedom’. We demonstrate that promotional and regulatory discourses of driving and gambling rely on a concept of freedom as self‐regulation. And we argue that the cultivation of social responsiveness is needed to address some of the problems created by individualising practices, spaces and technologies of mobility currently offered by automobiles and poker machines.     

Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene, and their relationship to Pacific Islands climate activism. In a context where Indigenous peoples and perspectives are poorly represented in global climate politics, it is important to understand how Pacific people represent their own interests and imagine their own futures as pressures to move due to climate change take hold. We examine political action outside of formal governance spaces and processes, in order to understand how Indigenous people are challenging state-centric approaches to climate change adaptation. We do so by studying the works of Pacific activists and artists who engage with climate change. We find that *banua – an expansive concept, inclusive of people and their place, attentive to both mobility and immobility, and distributed across the Pacific Islands region – is essential for the existential security of Pacific people and central to contemporary climate activism. We find that Pacific activists/artists are challenging the status quo by invoking *banua. In doing so, they are politicising (im)mobility. These mobilisations are coalescing into an Oceanic cosmopolitanism that confronts two mutually reinforcing features of contemporary global climate politics: the subordination of Indigenous peoples, perspectives and worldviews; and the marginalisation of (im)mobility concerns within the global climate agenda.     

When People Stay and Things Make Their Way: Airports,Mobilities and Materialities of a Transnational Landscape

Abstract

This article explores different meanings of mobility and place by examining the interweaving of people, things and airports in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two airports – of departure and arrival of this migratory route – I look at the practices of sending and receiving objects by migrants in Lisbon and their kin in Bissau. The transnational yet grounded setting helps to provide a better understanding of the complexity associated with different forms of mobility – including corporeal, imagined and desired – and their key role in socially and relationally constructing a lived airport space, as well as wider social landscapes. Bringing in evidence from a less-explored setting – a small airport in a West African country – will particularly challenge some of the assumptions that tend to associate mobility with ‘modernity’ and fixity with ‘tradition’. It will show how people in Guinea-Bissau are, as much as migrants abroad, dynamically involved in global practices of movement – materialised in trading and reciprocating objects between two continents – through local performances of mobility that do not necessarily involve corporeal travel across borders.     

Metamorphosis Afloat: Pirate Ships,Politics and Process,c.1680–1730

Abstract

This paper follows some late-seventeenth and early eighteenth century pirate ships, focusing upon the moments when these most enigmatic and elusive of ocean-going vessels were appropriated and inhabited by mutinous mariners who literally risked their necks to take charge of them. This paper builds upon recent work in mobilities and oceanic studies which is developing more materialist perspectives as a means for better understanding the seas and ships as lived, dynamic spaces. By exploring some of the ways that pirate ships were crafted and modified, and then occupied, at the turn of the eighteenth century, this paper contributes new perspectives on the formation of piratical spaces and identities, and in the process, the role of mobilities and spatialities in creating spaces afloat. The paper argues for a greater acknowledgement of the role of process in the making of space and mobility at sea as a means of better understanding the complex geographies of the pirate ship and the experiences of those who sailed aboard them.     

Mobility Regimes in Practice: Later-life Westerners and Visa Runs in South-East Asia

Abstract

Studies of Western migrants in South-East Asia emphasise the importance of privilege, work and location within national boundaries in the construction of contemporary subjectivities. This article examines the role and relevance of cross-border mobility through the eyes of older, Western ‘visa runners’ with limited financial resources. Drawing on migrant experience of dwelling in and moving through Penang, Malaysia, I address the ways in which the mobility regimes of immigration frameworks and visa regulations become a formative aspect or otherwise of social practice and belonging. In focusing on the personal and social experience of visa running, this article transcends a methodological nationalist focus on identities and subjectivities within national spaces and highlights the variable role of people, places and life history in the forming of multi-layered attachments across national spaces in South-East Asia.     

Place and Lifestyle Migration: The Discursive Construction of ‘Glocal’ Place-Identity

Abstract

International lifestyle migration is a rapidly growing worldwide phenomenon. Within Europe, increasingly large numbers of northern Europeans are moving south in search of what they perceive as a better quality of life. The typical representation of this form of migration suggests that it is consumption-led, tourism-related and leisure-based; it is to be located within late modern, global, elitist, borderless and highly mobile social practices. The question arises as to the role of local place in this type of migration process and in the construction of individual and collective social identities. Using data from advertising texts produced by a residential-tourism resort and from indepth interviews with British residents in the Golden Triangle area of the Algarve, Portugal, this article explores the relationships between discourse, identity, g/local place and lifestyle migration.     

The Reconstruction of a Social Network Abroad. An Analysis of the Interaction Patterns of Erasmus Students

Abstract

Most studies of interaction patterns of international students focus on ‘degree mobility’ and flows from ‘non-Western’ towards ‘Western’ countries. Nevertheless, in Europe, the shorter alternative of ‘credit mobility’ is more prevalent. However, empirical evidence on social network formation within this specific group of international students remains limited. Therefore, in this article, we study the formation of interaction patterns of students who study for a delineated period in another European country, based on a research project conducted in Austria, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Poland and the UK. The results show that specific interaction patterns can be explained from a flow perspective. Moreover, our study shows that students’ networks abroad are already formed before actual departure. In addition, we provide empirical evidence that institutional as well as group practices encourage or impede interaction between exchange and local students. Two transversal dimensions are especially relevant in the explanation of how groups are formed abroad: language proficiency and shared social spaces.