Together and Apart: Affective Ambiences and Negotiation in Families’ Everyday Life and Mobility

Abstract

This article addresses the affective, emotional, and familial dimensions of urban everyday mobility. Drawing on theoretical inspiration from phenomenology, non-representational theory, and mobilities research on the relational mobilities of children and families, the paper explores the everyday mobility of 11 households with children in the multi-modal context of Copenhagen, Denmark. Following the conceptualization of everyday mobility practices as heterogeneous ‘negotiation in motion’, the empirical analysis investigates how the strong relational dynamics between household members are organized around affect, care, familial bonding, and the rhythms of everyday life, which shape spatial patterns of moving together and apart. A new qualitative method combining GPS tracking, mapping, and household interviews is explored to show how everyday patterns of relational mobility are filtered through spatial affordances, affective ambience, and the temporalities of the lifecourse to influence transport alternatives of route and modal choices.     

Law and Mobility: Ethnographical Accounts of the Regulation of the Segregated Cycle Facilities in Mexico City

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain the operation of and the reactions to the everyday regulation of the segregated cycling facilities in Mexico City. Specifically, through an ethnographic approach, this paper tries to illustrate how social practices, everyday legal interpretations, and police practices intersect so as to reinforce the preeminence of the automobile at the expense of other forms of mobility, such as cycling. This question is essential in the ongoing efforts to develop a more sustainable and inclusive world. Research findings suggest that, in contrast with an isolationist image typified by the recurring figure of the law as a static tool for encouraging a bike-friendly society, urban traffic regulation actually represents a complex aggregate of actors, practices, and institutions which are constantly in motion and in which alternative ways towards a more varied and sustainable world are recursively enforced or resisted.     

Everyday knowledge on the move: dynamic process and micro politics of the transfer of Guangchang wu

ABSTRACT

This article explores mobilities of everyday knowledge by analyzing the diffusion of northern aerobics, a particular form of Guangchang wu (plaza dance), from the Chinese mainland to Sanya, a coastal city in southern China. It understands mobile everyday knowledge as an ongoing process, and examines its dynamism by scrutinizing its complex and unstable routes, shaped by multiple agents and power relations. The transfer of northern aerobics undergoes continuous changes in its trajectories and is influenced by the discourse of professionalism, everyday leisure practices of Houniao, mainland migrants and local residents, and unequal interactions between the three groups of recreationists. The Houniao are mostly retirees from northern provinces, who undertake seasonal travel and pass winter in Sanya. Their regular and exclusive mobilities have greatly shaped the process of the transmission of leisure knowledge to Sanya and granted them privileged status in aerobic exercise. Nonetheless, mainland migrants, who have relocated in Sanya, begin to take on an increasing important role by changing the trajectories of knowledge diffusion. Through daily participation, local residents are also involved in reproducing the mobile leisure knowledge and negotiate a host identity. This article offers further insight into the dynamism and politics of knowledge diffusion in everyday life.     

Including people with intellectual disabilities in the mobilities turn: mobile interviews in Toronto,Canada

ABSTRACT

Geographic research about disability and mobility often foregrounds the built environment as a site of in/exclusion. People with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have been mostly absent from this scholarship. To respond to this gap, we draw from an in-depth set of ‘mobile interviews’ with people with IDs in Toronto, Canada. Using a thematic approach, this paper suggests that more-than-material relations matter to the everyday mobilities and immobilities of people with IDs in urban settings. We aim to centre the participants’ experiences and call for greater inclusion of people with IDs in critical-geographic studies of the disability-mobility nexus. We highlight participants’ regular, planned, and spontaneous mobilities; their attitudes towards their own movement, stillness, and ‘stuck-ness’; and their experiences of staring in public spaces. The contingencies of belonging/exclusion, choice/regimen, and fitting/mis-fitting – as well as the more-than-material, varied, and contextual nature of those tensions – are present in many of the participants’ (im)mobilities in and through the city.     

A user’s guide to Lisbon: mobilities,spatial apprenticeship and migrant urban integration*

This paper engages with the ‘mobility turn’ scholarship in order to provide tools for the study of migrants’ integration to urban space. The analysis of urban mobilities draws attention to the practical know-how that underlies mobility practices. I argue that migrants’ urban apprenticeship – that is, the ways migrants learn (to use) city spaces – shape their access to urban resources and their participation in urban life. Based on fieldwork conducted in Lisbon, Portugal, I explore how migrants’ urban knowledges play out in their everyday practices and resonate with broader concerns over migrant integration.     

The Movement Beyond (Lifestyle) Migration: Mobile Practices and the Constitution of a Better Way of Life

Abstract

This article revisits my ethnography of the British in rural France to question how mobility in post‐migration life was deemed intrinsic to the better way of life that they sought through their migration. Through the exploration of the migrants’ everyday lives, I reveal that the migrants’ mobile practices and their expectations of mobility contributed towards the perceived success of their new lives and were thus significant to the ongoing process getting to a better way of life. Beyond this example, the article also demonstrates how the findings of mobilities researchers may be mobilized in traditional anthropological fieldwork.     

‘Walking out’: the mobilities of love

ABSTRACT

In this article, I propose that mobility performs a crucial role in the production and sustenance of intimate relationships and focus, in particular, on courtship practices and their modern-day equivalents. I pursue this discussion through close readings of literary and autobiographical texts from the nineteenth century through to the millennium, and by means of a framework that triangulates the work of Tim Ingold, David Seamon and Henri Bergson. My focus here is on how the mobilities we practice during the everyday routines of courtship – i.e. the paths we make, the routes we take, the roads we travel, the journeys we repeat, the transport we use – come to characterise the relationship concerned and impact upon its progress. Both Ingold’s work on ‘lines’ and Seamon’s on ‘place-ballet’ are conceptually suggestive in this regard and speak to recent work in mobilities/cultural geography on the significance of patterns of movement in the praxis of relationships.     

Walking with technology: understanding mobility-technology assemblages

ABSTRACT

It is difficult to deny that technology – be it listening to music through headphones, engaging with smartphone apps or conversing through hands-free headsets – has become a ubiquitous part of everyday walking practices, influencing daily activities and shaping how these are operationalised. While digital technologies cannot replace conventional interactions with landscapes (e.g. the weather, clothing, street furniture, etc.), the intersections of people, places and technologies can converge in exciting and surprising ways to produce new forms of interrelating with(in) spaces. In this paper, I focus on the digital walking tour as a novel instrument through which to examine how mobility-technology assemblage assists with understanding how engagements with environments might produce various, contrasting assemblages of mobilities, bodies, affects, emotions and placemaking. I argue that participating within hybridised physical/digital spaces affects and is affected by different mobility practices. Through this paper, I propose that mobility-technology assemblage thinking provides new interventions into the ways in which people interact with technology, with each other and with(in) everyday spaces. Hence, while the person–technology interface may be considered a largely individual experience, I posit that the amalgamation of people, places and technologies can, in fact, greatly influence how pedestrian experiences are assembled, transmitted, received and interpreted.     

Embodying the Mobilities of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway

Abstract

This paper develops a critical understanding of one of the key railway journeys in India, namely, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR). Using the mobilities paradigm, this paper offers a cultural analysis of the ‘journey’ of the DHR: how it is instrumental in making travel experiences and how it is itself constituted through different embodied travel practices and performances. Different modes of travel involve contrasting experiences, performances and affordances. In this context, this paper explores the ‘hybrid geographies’ of the DHR as involving a complex relationality between the traveller and the mode of travel: how it incorporates different aspects of mobilities. What is significant is the relative slowness of the DHR and the ways in which it communicates a different sense of time, which also leads to a blurring between practices of walking and travelling on the train itself. The train itself is also conceptualised as playful, as it engages with the places it passes through. Drawing upon recent literature on landscape and visuality, the DHR is further explored in terms of its movement through and engagement with the landscapes of the Himalayas.     

Intertwined therapeutic mobilities: knowledge,plants, healers on the move between Laos and the U.S.

ABSTRACT

We investigate the notion of therapeutic mobilities through the case study of transnational health care practices and medicinal flows within the Hmong diaspora between Laos and the U.S. Drawing upon narratives of traditional healers, pickers, and plant sellers, as well as a collection of postal registers, we highlight how therapeutic mobilities follow the routes of migration and organize the practices of healing among Hmong in receiving countries, particularly in the U.S. Through the different and multidirectional aspects of therapeutic mobilities, we illustrate how transnational healing touches upon questions of cultural identity within the Hmong diaspora. Therapeutic mobilities not only involve border-crossing, they also strengthen existing bonds within the Hmong diaspora. Similarly, herbal treatments not only achieve a therapeutic function, they also represent a range of meanings and values for patients. We explore the fabric of therapeutic mobilities through the prism of translocality and medical pluralism.     

Parent–child mobility practices: revealing ‘cracks’ in the automobility system

ABSTRACT

Many commentators are concerned about automobility’s ill-effects and seek a shift away from auto dependence towards more sustainable transport. Little research, however, considers the ways that parent–child mobilities are linked to such a transition. Through the lens of social practice theory, this paper explores how parents travelling with young children preserve and challenge automobility as they enact auto dependency, multimodality and altermobility. The paper argues that it is vital to understand these practices for identifying ‘cracks’ in automobility and the possibility of more sustainable and equitable daily mobilities. The research is based on qualitative parent interviews undertaken in Vancouver (British Columbia).     

Baby on board: the impact of sling use on experiences of family mobility with babies and young children

ABSTRACT

Today many parents in the UK are choosing to carry their children in slings. Despite this, there has been no research on how babywearing might change families’ experiences of journey-making. Based on interviews with parents in the North of England, this paper uses literatures on affects and mobilities design to contribute to a growing range of studies on infant mobilities. In doing so, it extends our understanding of the importance of relationality in family mobility practices and highlights the importance of understanding the dynamism of mobility during early family life.     

Cultures of Commuting: The Mobile Negotiation of Space and Subjectivity on Delhi’s Metro

Abstract

As part of Delhi’s redevelopment, aimed at creating a ‘global city’, new public transport infrastructure is being built. The Metro, in particular, has become iconic of what city authorities and developers refer to as Delhi’s ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘world city’ status. Authorities have attempted to change commuting practices embedded in the culture of Delhi, a crowded, economically and culturally diverse city, in line with desired new behaviours including an emphasis on cleanliness, order and quiet. To explore these developments this paper presents findings from a qualitative study (conducted in 2009) analysing the urban mobility of a diverse group of young people. Their experiences of the Metro revealed interacting fields of power in the city, between passengers, and between passengers and those in control of the network. These relationships were situated within wider processes of urban reconstruction that intersect with global flows of capital, technology and ideologies of ‘modernity’ and development. The findings also highlighted the contestation of cosmopolitanism: its use to describe a desired urban imagination and its deployment as everyday competencies of negotiation and flexibility designed to manage change, unfamiliarity and inequality.     

A Chance to Catch a Breath: Using Mobile Video Ethnography in Cycling Research

Abstract

Under the rubric of transport much previous research on everyday mobility has focused on understanding the more representational and readily articulated aspects of everyday movement. By way of contrast, emergent theorisations of mobility suggest that an understanding of the less representational – those fleeting, ephemeral and often embodied and sensory aspects of movement – is vital if we are to fully understand why and how people move around. Accordingly, the ability of conventional methods to complement new research agendas, particularly those related to issues around the sensory, affect and embodied experience has been called in to question. This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on mobile methodologies by critically discussing a theoretical and methodological journey towards mobile video ethnography in the context of a project researching cycling in London, UK between 2004 and 2006. In doing so it highlights three ways in which mobile video ethnography can contribute to research in the new mobilities paradigm: video as a way of ‘feeling there’ when you can’t be there; video as a way of apprehending fleeting moments of mobile experience; and video as a tool to extend sensory vocabularies. It also critically discusses the limitations of video as a text and the importance of embodied experience, interpretation and audiencing to its success as part of a mobile methodology. Whilst emphasising the need for caution, the paper demonstrates the way in which mobile video ethnography can contribute to a new mobilities agenda by facilitating more situated understandings of daily corporeal mobility which highlight an alternative time‐space politics to those inscribed in road spaces.     

Examining the rhythms of ‘urban elements’ on walking and driving routes in the city

ABSTRACT

The article follows Kevin Lynch’s renowned formulation of ‘urban elements’ to examine the mobilities, experiences and materialities on ordinary routes in the city. Utilizing route narratives and participant-produced visual data, the article focuses on various identifiable micro-temporalities and mobility rhythms on repeated walking and driving routes, building on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘rhythmanalysis’. The article examines how a framework built around rhythm and urban elements can add to the analysis of contemporary urban sites from the perspectives of situated mobile contexts, noting sequences and polyrhythmia as central temporal characteristics in the body?environment relations.     

Embodying Flexibility: Experiencing Labour Flexibility through Urban Daily Mobility in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

This paper’s objective is to contribute towards understanding the relationship between mobility practices and labour flexibility. Focusing on the case of Santiago de Chile, it argues that an extremely flexible labour market, as in the Chilean case, affects the everyday lives of inhabitants which are compelled to ‘weave’ dispersed workplaces, articulate multiple-employments within a workday or use mobility time-space for tele-working. From an ethnographic perspective, we show how labour flexibility in Santiago de Chile is experienced and embodied through daily mobility practices. The article presents ethnographies in which flexibility changes mobility practices, giving rise to a specific time-space that becomes an intrinsic, yet seldom recognised dimension of the economic production process.     

Driven to Care: The Car,Automobility and Social Work

Abstract

Welfare practices are invariably represented in static and sedentary ways and their mobilities ignored. This paper corrects for this by examining the car and auto‐mobility in social work. The car is not just a means to reaching vulnerable children and other service users quickly, and a mobile office, but a space where significant casework goes on and deeply meaningful ‘therapeutic journeys’ happen. The car carries similar emotional meanings and possibilities for workers as a space within which to contain the anxieties and emotions they routinely confront in their work. Drawing on mobile social science and psychoanalytic theory, the paper shows how the power and meanings of auto‐mobility in ‘car therapy’ are products of the design of cars and the distinct rhythms and mobilities they produce in themselves. The car in social work is conceptualised as a ‘fluid container’ for the processing of personal troubles, emotion and key life changes. The theoretical implications of this argument for the social science of mobilities are drawn out.     

Co‐ordinating Passages: Understanding the Resources Needed for Everyday Mobility

Abstract

This article contributes to the ‘mobilities turn’ in social science by proposing new concepts and methods for analysing the ways in which people draw upon a range of resources to manage everyday mobility. We distinguish between the ‘projects’ people want to achieve and the ‘passages’ they need to go through in order to do so. We also distinguish between ‘pre‐travelling’ and ‘re‐ordering’. The analysis builds on insights from time‐geography, mobility studies and actor‐network‐theory to develop a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the dynamic and situated nature of travel in everyday life. The study combines qualitative and quantitative data from a study of hypermobile people in the Netherlands.     

The im/mobilities of ‘sometimes-migrating’ for abortion: Ireland to Great Britain

ABSTRACT

This paper furthers the concept of im/mobilities through an investigation of the reproductive mobilities of women migrating for abortion from Ireland (north and south) to Great Britain. Where more often the focus of reproductive mobilities concerns the movement of people and matter in order to reproduce, there is less (although some) attention to movement aligned with the prevention of reproduction. We consider the variegated im/mobilities of conception not brought to birth, in the frictional movement of people, things, ideologies and imaginations in staying with and moving beyond the dichotomy of mobility and immobility. We engage in transdisciplinary dialogue between mobilities and migration studies. Hence, underlying this exploration is the concept of the ‘sometimes-migrant’, used to challenge binary oppositions between mobility and immobility, broader conceptualisations of ‘migrants’ as ‘exceptional’, and more specifically the notion of travelling for abortion as ‘abortion-tourism’. We adopt the call to focus on different incarnations of the ‘sometimes-migrant’ in the form of women travelling temporarily across national borders of intermittent porosity in order to seek care that is not available in their own country. Intersections of migration and mobilities reveal the ways women are im/mobilised through geopolitical and cultural practices at local and global scales.     

Infrastructures of immobility: enabling international distance education students in Africa to not move

ABSTRACT

There is now a large literature discussing how mobilities are part of contemporary everyday power geometries and is a resource to which people have unequal access. This body of work has, thus, valorised mobility as a desirable good. Why some people choose immobility and what has to be mobilised to enable this immobility has received much less attention. This paper draws on interviews with international distance education students in Namibia and Zimbabwe studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to explore the spatio-temporal underpinnings to why students choose to remain at home while studying abroad and how this is arranged. It outlines the infrastructures of reach that enable student immobility and how their incomplete nature means that students have to rely on extensive systems of mobilities of other people and objects to ensure that their study progresses without their own educational mobility. In doing so we move away from considering immobility as a result of limited access to mobility. Instead, we set out a new research agenda on why and how the infrastructures of immobilities are important in mobility research.