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.     

Art and materiality in the global refugee crisis: Ai Weiwei’s artworks and the emerging aesthetics of mobilities

ABSTRACT

Prominent artists and activists have documented, collected and appropriated discarded materials of refugee journeys, such as life jackets, rafts and clothing, transforming them into largescale artworks. Material belongings play an important role in migration experiences. However, materials are often used as representational measures of rights to movement, mode of travel and refugee status. This article explores how the mobilisation and transformation of materials into artworks raises questions on the material agencies operating within global representations of refugee mobilities. Discussing recent artworks of Ai Weiwei, I explore the emerging material aesthetics that open alternative dialogues on migration flows and mobilities futures.     

North American surrogate reproductive mobilities incited by cross-border reproductive care

ABSTRACT

The transnational mobility of intended parents traveling abroad for reproductive technologies has been heavily accounted for and theorized. On the other hand, scholars have emphasized the immobility of surrogates in places like India, Nepal and Cambodia. In order to extend an examination of how reproductive travel informs mobility, this paper will turn a critical eye toward North American surrogates’ reproductive mobilities that are incited by their participation in cross-border reproductive care. Surrogates in the United States are strikingly different from the images presented of surrogates in India. In fact, when the North American surrogates cycle for international intended parents, in some aspects they become less and more mobile. This paper will focus on multiple types of reproductive mobilities that are involved in the global fertility industry when international intended parents travel to North America for assisted reproduction.     

Comparing Rail Passengers’ Travel Time Use in Great Britain Between 2004 and 2010

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a unique insight into aspects of stability and change regarding the travel time use of rail passengers in Great Britain between 2004 and 2010. Empirical evidence is presented on how rail passengers spend their time, how worthwhile they consider their time use to be, the extent of advance planning of their time use and how equipped for time use they are in terms of the items they have to hand when they travel. The results reveal a consistent dominance of reading for leisure, window gazing/people watching and working/studying as favoured travel time activities. Over the six-year period, the availability and use of mobile technologies has increased. Listening to music in particular has doubled in its incidence suggesting an increasing capacity for travellers to personalise the public space of the railway carriage. Most notably the analysis reveals a substantial increase in the proportion of travellers overall making very worthwhile use of their time.     

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.     

Mapping the Super‐Whale: Towards a Mobile Ethnography of Situated Globalities

Abstract

In empirical discussion on global connections, frequent allusions are made to Michael Burawoy’s ‘global’ and George Marcus’ ‘multi‐sited’ ethnographies. While both have inspired transnational fieldwork, neither methodological approach has sufficiently analysed the local‐global dichotomy embedded at their core. Drawing on actor‐network theory (ANT), this article suggests an alternative framework for mobile ethnography, better suited to a social world conceived in network‐relational terms. Employing metaphors of mobility, scale‐making, and cartography, an empirically driven approach to situated and plural ‘globalities’ is outlined. These claims are developed drawing on the author’s inquiries into Japanese whaling practices, showing how ‘ethno‐socio‐cartography’ can contribute to the mapping of global‐scale micro‐cosmoses.     

Multiple mobilities in Mexico’s fertility industry

ABSTRACT

How can we conceptualize travel in search of fertility treatment? While current research on transnational reproduction mostly conceptualizes mobility as horizontal movement from A to B, this article shows how horizontal mobilities converge, contradict, and are interdependent with other forms of mobility; namely vertical mobilities in terms of social upward and downward mobility, representational mobilities in form of imaginative geographies, and the actual embodied experiences of mobility. Based on ethnographic research on the reproductive tourism industry in Mexico, the article explores the multiplicity of mobilities that constitute transnational reproduction. The article evaluates how the concept of multiple mobilities contributes to the study of medical tourism from a critical mobilities’ perspective.     

Consequences of Overnight Work Travel for Personal Social Relations: Problems,Promises, and Further Repercussions

Abstract

The article uses survey data from Sweden to examine social consequences of the mobile society. Key questions tackled include the implications of overnight work travel for the travellers’ ability to cultivate locally based and long‐distance friendships and the potential of travel to provide a source of new acquaintances. Data analysis indicates that widening social networks and increasing opportunities to achieve co‐presence with long‐distance friends, as brought by mobility, represent significant consequences of overnight work travel from an individual’s standpoint. This experience was salient even among those respondents who travelled no more than occasionally, while only the most frequent travellers perceived their travel as something impeding with their chances of sustaining local social ties. While the benefits deriving from travel thus seem incontestable, it may therefore not be possible either to entirely discard the prevalent notion of mobile lifestyles as a factor undermining social cohesion and promoting isolation and loneliness.     

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.     

Lesbians and Gay Men’s Vacation Motivations,Perceptions, and Constraints: A Study of Cruise Vacation Choice

ABSTRACT

This study explores the push-pull vacation motivations of gay male and lesbian consumers and examines how these underpin their perceptions and purchase constraints of a mainstream and LGBT¹ cruise. Findings highlight a complex vacation market. Although lesbians and gay men share many of the same travel motivations as their heterosexual counterparts, the study reveals sexuality is a significant variable in their perception of cruise vacations, which further influences purchase constraints and destination choice. Gay men have more favorable perceptions than lesbians of both mainstream and LGBT cruises. The article recommends further inquiry into the multifaceted nature of motivations, perception, and constraints within the LGBT market in relation to cruise vacations.     

Meeting in the Global Workplace: Air Travel,Telepresence and the Body

Abstract

In the highly connected and globalised corporate workplace, face-to-face communication is persisting and expanding, despite significant advances and investments in telecommunication. Drawing on interviews with 34 employees from an Australian company trying to reduce air travel associated with business meetings, this paper reveals how telepresence facilitates distinctly different practices of meeting and collaborating to those enabled by face-to-face encounters. The analysis draws attention to the essential role of the body in the practices of virtual and in-person business meetings. During in-person meetings the body’s physical presence conveys meanings of respect and value, provides sensorial competency and gestures, and enables physical mobility as it carries people between and within different material environments. The paper concludes by identifying some possibilities for telepresence meetings to replicate and replace in-person meetings as a normal and effective way of collaborating in the global workplace.     

Driving,Communicating and Working: Understanding the Work-related Communication Behaviours of Business Travellers on Work-related Car Journeys

Abstract

Despite an increasing number of workers requiring to travel extensively in carrying out their work, there are significant gaps in knowledge related to how business travellers make use of journey time. This paper addresses this gap in knowledge by examining the journey-time behaviours of business people travelling by car on work-related journeys. One of the central focuses of the paper is on the extent to which business travellers use mobile communication technologies and the extent to which they experience a pressure to remain in ‘perpetual contact’ with colleagues and clients while travelling.     

Eyjafjallajökull 4′33″: A Stillness in Three Parts

Abstract

This paper uses the work and musical theory of the composer John Cage as a point of departure for considering the disruption caused by the ash cloud originating at the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Mobility has been defined as a constellation of movement, representation and practice; this definition is used to structure an analysis of what Eyjafjallajökull meant for the pace of air travel, how it unsettles common‐place cultural understandings of air travel, and what it could mean for the practice of aeromobility in the future. The literature on stillness is engaged to inform a discussion of air travel, with the airport as its exemplar space, and its potential to act as a focal point for debate on the nature of contemporary citizenship.     

Defying,producing, and overlooking stereotypes? The complexities of mobilizing “grandmotherhood” as political strategy

ABSTRACT

This article explores the Canadian Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign, a mobilization of older women responding to the effects of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, this article looks at how and to what effect “grandmotherhood,” as discourse, was mobilized and deployed, in fluid and fractured ways, in order to increase members’ credibility as global social justice actors and build their solidarity with African women. These mobilizations functioned to uphold essentialist notions of what being a grandmother means, while also challenging stereotypes of older women as frail and disengaged.     

Inspired by Eruptions? Eyjafjallajökull and Icelandic Tourism

Abstract

The paper deals with the complex meaning of risk for tourism mobilities. The impact of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption on tourism in Iceland is outlined, as well as the response of Icelandic tourist authorities. A survey in June and July 2010 among international tourists in the country revealed that for many the eruption had added considerable depth to their travel experiences. The sense of risk affects the relation between mobile travellers and their destination. The paper also analyses how events such as the eruption can facilitate new paths towards being sensitive to the natural world.     

The work-sociology of academic aeromobility at remote institutions

ABSTRACT

Theoretically framed by the concepts of networks, co-presence and proximity, we explore the interplay of corporeal and virtual academic mobilities in the context of ‘remote institutions’ to advance the work-sociology of aeromobility at a time of climate crisis. Empirical insights are drawn from 31 in-depth interviews conducted with academic staff at the University of Otago (New Zealand), to explore the complex personal and professional decisions that underpin academic mobility practices, and shed light on why levels of academic aeromobility have not diminished with the growing capacity for virtual substitution. Our findings inform discussion of the concepts of ‘necessary’ travel and virtual travel as a substitute for non-participation. We conclude with reflections on the scope for social (practice) and institutional (policy) reform, and avenues of future research.     

Emotional Eruptions,Volcanic Activity and Global Mobilities – A Field Account from a European in the US During the Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull

Abstract

The eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano in April 2010 set off a number of environmental, economic and cultural effects obstructing thousands of people in the midst of their global mobility flows. It halted, as well, the exchange of goods and commodities and exposed the vulnerability of the global aeromobility system. In this paper an account is given of how the event was experienced by a European academic attending a number of North American conferences at precisely the time of the eruption. The paper is an attempt to describe how people reacted emotionally as well as rationally, attempting to find strategies for coping with the consequences of the eruption.     

Information and Communication Technology and International Business Travel: Mobility Allies?

Abstract

Like forecasts about the paperless office, technological solutions to the problem of international business travel continue to be deferred. As with the increased use of office paper, international business travel is defying predictions of its decline. There is growing evidence to suggest that business sectors which seem ideally placed to substitute information and communication technology (ICT) for travel, are actually generating more physical travel than other sectors. This paper develops a case study of the Irish software industry to exemplify why international travel is not diminishing in importance how and the ICT and business travel relationship is changing in this sector. The paper presents research findings that suggest that a cycle of substitution, generation and modification relationships have occurred as mobility interdependencies have developed.     

Slowing Down Mobilities: Passengering on an Inter-war Ocean Liner

Abstract

This article contributes to recent work on the figure of the passenger and ‘passengering’ in mobilities research. It does so by considering the experiences of one passenger over two journeys on an ocean liner undertaken in 1930. The article ‘follows’ the passenger over the course of the two journeys in order to open up the processuality of passengering. The article makes two core contributions. First, it demonstrates the need to lend attention to the specific socialities and materialities of mobile modalities that work on and form the passenger. It is shown how specific assemblages come together at sea to create atmospheres that shape the experiences of long-distance travel over water. Second, by following the passenger over the course of journeying, it demonstrates the emergence of the passenger in relation to shifting affective atmospheres, not as a static figure but one of becoming passenger, as a shifting set of subjectivities, and, in turn, shows the value of ‘following’ a journey within mobilities research.