Invisible mobilities: stigma,immobilities, and female sex workers’ mundane socio-legal negotiations of Dhaka’s urban space

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnography, this paper conceptualizes invisible mobilities by exploring the linkages between mobility, invisibility and hotel and residence based sex work in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Since both are illegal in Bangladesh, hotel and residence based sex workers (HRSWs) become targets of the different laws and sex work related social stigma. We show, in this paper, how invisible mobilities is used to strategize and counter-enact against the existing exploitative gendered socio-political-legal regimes and practices involved in sex work. Invisible mobilities refers to the way HRSWs move in order to hide their occupation from society and the law. Invisibility is at the core of all these connections: It enables HRSWs to continue sex work and avoid exclusion from family and members of their communities. While making themselves invisible permits them to continue their daily ways to earn a living, it also reinforces the same social stigma they are constantly trying to avoid. In doing so, this paper reveals the political economy of sex work in the city and provides a new theoretical window to understand the connections between gender, mobility and the city, constructing a bridge between mobility and sex work studies literature.     

Everything changes to stay the same: persistent global health inequalities amidst new therapeutic opportunities and mobilities for Filipino nurses

ABSTRACT

The global migration of Filipino nurses has received significant attention, yet little is known of these healthcare workers’ experiences and mobilities within the Philippines. I explore the experiences and narratives of Filipino nurses living in Manila, some of whom have no desires to migrate. I uncover the often novel forms of therapeutic mobilities undertaken by these nurses, focusing on call centre nursing and entrepreneurship as key alternative career pathways within the realms of ‘therapeutics’. Through interrogating the various mobilities undertaken by nurses – physical mobilities and migration, socioeconomic mobilities and occupational mobilities in the form of a career change – it becomes clear that international physical mobility is no longer key. Nevertheless, Filipino nurses continue to provide care in global contexts in novel ‘therapeutic’ industries and doing so allows them to increase their socioeconomic mobility.     

Commoditization of Lifestyle Migration: Japanese Retirees in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the relationship between mobilities created from individual choices and the market factors driving lifestyle migration. The transnational mobility of elderly Japanese throughout Asia is considered one of the emerging cases of international retirement migration in Asia, an overall relatively new phenomenon. Through examining the sociocultural aspects of lifestyle migration in the case of Japanese international retirement migration to Malaysia, this paper argues that lifestyle migration, as a form of consumption, results in self-realization that has a culturally specific meaning for Japanese retirees. By linking tourism and migration, this paper proposes that the mobilities market serves as a mediator of transnational human mobilities and argues that the commoditization of Japanese international retirement migration reflects on both the socioeconomic and sociocultural aspects of Japan as an aging society. Ethnographic data, alongside media discourse analysis, demonstrates how the expectation of self-realization is mediated through the promotion of Malaysia as a destination country of Japanese international retirement migration and their culturally specific understandings of retirement lifestyle.     

Waiting in motion: mapping postcolonial fiction,new mobilities,and migration through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT

While mobilities studies have often drawn on postcolonial theory, few studies draw on the unique contributions of postcolonial literature. This article charts new directions for mobilities studies and postcolonial literature through an analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 novel Exit West. The novel shows how the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ could be usefully extended by paying more attention to migration as an expression of the way that mobility and immobility exist in complex relation to one another, especially with regard to the affective and existential experiences of waiting that persist even after arrival. I suggest that contemporary fiction, such as Exit West, interacts with and shapes cultural imaginaries around mobilities and migrancy; Hamid’s use of irrealist and fantastic modes challenges readers to entertain normative claims about the world. In addition to outlining the potential contributions of postcolonial fiction to mobilities studies, I conclude with an overview of the new directions that mobilities studies offer for postcolonial studies as well.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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 Circular International Migration of New Zealanders: Enfolded Mobilities and Relational Places

Abstract

Migrants’ social relations are reconfigured in relation to how the localised and distanciated are recombined in context of how individuals are embedded in the enfolded mobilities of increasingly mobile social networks. The paper is organized around three main propositions. First, that social relations are structured across three main and intersecting domains – family, workplace and community. Second, that social relations and networks are shaped by, and shape, the relational nature of places. Third, that the relational nature of places, and the reconfiguration of localised and distanciated relationships should be analysed across the entire migration cycle. These ideas are explored through a study of the Big OE from New Zealand to the UK, based on in‐depth interviews with returned migrants.     

Mobility and data: cycling the utopian Internet of Things

ABSTRACT

This article explores how cycling is currently considered in European policy documents related to transport aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), what kind of representation of cycling can be imagined for utopian EC IoT policies documents, and how a combination of empirical policy analysis and a utopian approach could inform future policy and research. Debates around smart/intelligent/data mobilities and the IoT – including policy debates – tend to be dominated by motorized modes such as autonomous and networked cars. This article explores the implications of this for more sustainable and active modes such as cycling, both for current policies and for utopian thinking. It draws on literature concerned with utopian thinking, mobilities studies and critical data studies. The methodology combines a content analysis and a visual analysis of the EC policy documents with creating text and images for utopian future versions of these documents. The results show the heavy automotive focus of EC IoT policy documents and suggest an alternative bicycle-focussed IoT utopia. The conclusion facilitates a debate around utopian societies where smart cycling products, infrastructure, policy and funding facilitate sustainable, active and data-responsible mobility at scale. This challenges the current continuation of automobile cultures in smart mobility and IoT policy discourses, and the data and associated power asymmetries between cars and cycling that highlight the significance of this research.     

(Mobility) Fixing the Taiwanese bicycle industry: the production and economisation of cycling culture in pursuit of accumulation

ABSTRACT

There have been recent calls in mobilities literature for greater engagement with how mobility regimes are shaped and governed at different scales. In relation to cycling-related mobilities scholarship, there are very few accounts situating cycling within broader bio-political and political–economic processes. This paper seeks to address this absence, situating contemporary formations of cycling culture within processes of capital accumulation and economisation. The research is based upon a series of interviews with industry stakeholders, participant observations at cycle events and analysis of policy documents and news media in Taiwan from 2015–2017. We demonstrate that in the last 10–15 years there has been a drive to create cycling subjects in the Taiwanese cycle industry, mass events and through public bike sharing with the loosely strategised goal of projecting an image of a cycling culture that it is hoped will be advantageous to the domestic bicycle industry. We demonstrate how this emergent process of fixing works through economisation of social cycling practices, themselves reliant on processes of division, classification and subjectification. We also show how the cycling subjects and cultures thus formed constitute qualculative framings that facilitate ongoing commercial re-evaluation of Taiwanese Brand manufacturers by other actors within the industry.     

Asymmetrical therapeutic mobilities: masculine advantage in nurse migration from India

ABSTRACT

This paper examines masculinity, migration and the changing occupational status of nursing through the lens of therapeutic mobilities; health related mobilities of people (nurses) and products (credentials). Indian men have become increasingly interested in nursing as a career, and this interest is strongly associated with the profession’s international motility—its mobility potential. The research reported in this paper traces the migration trajectory across time (2008–2016) and over space (India to Canada) and reveals an overrepresentation of male nurses in international migration contexts (Canada), compared to the Indian context. Male nurses also disproportionally benefit from these mobilities in terms of their occupational success post-migration. Mobilities can be therapeutic for the status of nursing in India, which rises in line with the degree of international motility the profession offers, but gendered distinctions in the outcomes of the migration process illustrate the importance of highlighting uneven mobilities. International mobilities are also deeply implicated in ongoing transformations occurring in the ‘moorings’ of nursing educational, employment and regulatory structures in India.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Urban nomadism: everyday mobilities of waste recyclers in Beijing

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates everyday mobilities through an account of the waste industry in Beijing. It suggests the analysis of livelihood strategies of waste traders as a productive domain of enquiry to foster our understanding of the connection between labour and mobility. Existing literature on China pays little attention to the everyday mobilities of marginal urban actors. Yet these practices tell an insightful story about the political, economic, and ecological transformations of the country. Through their analysis, this paper develops the idea of ‘urban nomadism’ as a tool to analyse practices that rework oppressive circumstances dictated by capital and produce new dimensions of living.     

Potential Mobilities

Abstract

The objective of this article is to highlight the issue of potential mobilities, by first presenting some possible basic terminology, followed by a critical review of motility as potential mobility, and continuing with an attempt to put forward elements for potential mobilities at times of wide availabilities of mobility technologies. These elements include definitions and meanings for potential mobilities, a discussion of active and passive potential mobilities, and an examination of potential mobilities in light of practiced ones. These discussions permit to suggest a simple model for potential mobilities focusing on the accumulation of mobility needs, access and competences, all of which lead to an appropriation process. This process may bring about various modes of practiced mobilities which on their part may reshape future potential mobilities.     

Criticising the Solitary Mobile Subject: Researching Relational Mobilities and Reflecting on Mobile Methods

One of the key arguments of the mobilities paradigm is that people’s mobility practices are embedded in their spatial, cultural, political, economical, social and personal context. Yet, empirical mobility research tends to research these two sides of the social separately – either mobility practices and their subjective sense and experience or their discursive, spatial or structural foundation. Taking this desideratum as point of departure, I will make a proposal for researching the links between structures and practices of mobilities consisting of the application of multiple correspondence analysis. This proposal attempts, furthermore, to operationalise mobilities as relational practices, which reinforces that social networks rather than solitary subjects are the origin of mobility decisions. This methodological approach is demonstrated by a comparative data analysis of movement patterns in England and Switzerland. In the final part of the paper, I will reflect upon methods and quantification more generally – against the background of an understanding of mobilities research as being also critical and political.     

Learning to Stay? Mobile Modernity and the Sociology of Choice

Abstract

Linking physical and social mobilities to a modernity typified by increased foci on individualization, consumption, workplace flexibilization and the need for further (and further) education, this paper argues the need for mobility scholars to pay greater attention to the role played by educational institutions in family formation and the decisions associated with where to locate oneself in relation to these institutions. The research project under consideration took place in a remote Australian resource boomtown, an epicentre of global capital concentration and a concomitant mobile modernity. It focuses on educational decision-making that absorbs increasing amounts of energy among middle-class families in various parts of the globe, exploring the sociological implications of this and the links with physical and social mobilities.