‘Don’t Stop Me Now’: Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Bourne Saga

This article explores the search for identity of the main character of the Jason Bourne movies in the light of contemporary critical theories on mobility and cosmopolitanism. This theoretical framework is combined with close textual analysis of the films in order to explore the visual and narrative mechanisms that the three Bourne movies starring Matt Damon use in order to, first, capture the protagonist’s lost sense of self and, second, construct a new cosmopolitan hero for the mainstream. As I argue, Bourne’s unrelentless journey across borders encapsulates some of the paradoxes of our highly mobile times, while also calling attention to certain shortcomings and inadequacies of the ‘national paradigm’, to make sense of an individual’s existence within contemporary societies.     

Mobility and sociality in proximity-sensitive digital urban ecologies: ‘Timid encounters’ and ‘seam-sensitive walks’

This paper is a case study of the use of a proximity-sensitive game played on mobile gaming terminals, in Japan and in France, Dragon Quest 9, and of distinctive forms of mobility and urban encounters which emerge around it. We show how players, when assembled together, walk the ‘connected walk,’ that is they adopt a particular gait, slower than the usual walking pace, with repeated pauses which appears as a tentative and exploratory kind of mobility oriented towards the random occurrence of proximity-based screen-mediated events, and therefore both adjusted to and constitutive of the proximity-sensitive hybrid ecology as a serendipitous place, to be experienced as such. With respect to urban encounters, we have identified a characteristic tension, relevant to locative media in general, in which concerns with potential identification and recognition ‘in the game’ contrasts with the interaction order of urban traffic encounters, characterized by ‘civil inattention.’ This gives rise to the phenomenon of ‘timid encounters,’ in which players strive to experience game encounters with other players a few meters away, while trying to elude visual or verbal recognition.     

‘Let’s Have Some Music’: Sound,Gender and Car Mobility

This paper draws on a visceral approach to explore the role of sound/music for people who drive cars. We examine the ways in which gendered subjectivities emerge from the pleasures associated with listening to sound/music during short car trips. The first part of the paper reviews the recent literature on ‘feelings for cars’. We highlight why gender is often absent from the literature before offering a conceptual lens drawing on geographical feminist thinking to consider sound/music, feelings, gender and mobility. We draw on driving ethnographies to explore the role of sound/music in how gender is assembled with the flow of connections between bodies, spaces and affects/emotions. Considering the contextual pleasures of listening to sound/music on these trips and emergent gender subjectivities we provide a more nuanced interpretation of why people choose to drive cars. To conclude, we point to the implications for applied research for new context-specific transport and climate change policy.     

Mobility of ‘the defeated’: internal migration and social advancement in a post-civil war society

The article examines the relationship between the movement across space and social mobility by analyzing the conditions for internal migration in Spain during the years of the Franco regime. Specifically it reflects on the ways in which migration from the countryside into self-constructed shantytowns in the greater Madrid area was perceived by migrants themselves, and on the strategies that enabled migration to be carried through. By focusing on the challenges that internal migration posed to the spatial practices and mobility regimes of the dictatorship, the article also explores the relationship between spatial movement, social mobility and political repression within the context of a nationalist dictatorship.     

Stopping the ‘War on the Car’: Neoliberalism,Fordism, and the Politics of Automobility in Toronto

Abstract

This article interrogates the politics of automobility in Toronto under the regime of mayor Rob Ford, who came to power in 2010 promising to ‘stop the war on the car.’ The election of Ford, and the thrust of his subsequent agenda, came as a surprise to many in the city, due to Toronto’s reputation as a cosmopolitan diverse transit-friendly global city. The Toronto case study allows for the analysis of the relationships between Fordism, automobility, and the politics and rationalities of neoliberalism. Instead of seeing neoliberalism as something external or imposed, its contested politics are rooted in diverging social and economic interests directly derived from Fordism and the system of automobility, with opposing political-economic factions both drawing on different elements of neoliberalism. Authoritarian populist neoliberal regimes like the Ford administration in Toronto, and the roll-back austerity they promote, are not antithetical to automobile Fordism, but on the contrary represent an attempt to protect and reinvigorate it in the face of the forces of de-industrialization and financialization. As such they receive their support from social groups irrevocably invested in the continuation, and irrationalities, of the Fordist system of automobility. This has implications for how the politics of neoliberalism might unfold in the future.     

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.     

More than Mobile: Migration and Mobility Impacts from the ‘Technologies of Change’ for Aboriginal Communities in the Remote Northern Territory of Australia

Changes in the patterns of quotidian physical mobility of the population are at the very centre of transformations in contemporary urban life. The city of Santiago, Chile is no exception to this trend. But these changes do not affect the whole population in the same way. This paper is based on a case study of a low‐income population group and how their situation of social exclusion interferes with their patterns of everyday mobility. In order to do so we describe in‐depth their everyday mobility in two central interrelated aspects: where and how these individuals travel during workdays and weekends. We conclude that in contemporary Santiago the low degrees of motility of low income population constitute one of the main ways in which contemporary social exclusion is enacted in everyday practice.     

Constraints,Satisfaction and Residential Mobility: Speare’s Model Reconsidered

Our study has shown that the stress threshold model, as formulated by Speare, only works partially. Consistent with Speare's model, we have found that subjective satisfaction is a strong predictor of thoughts about moving. Thoughts about moving is a good predictor of actual mobility. There are, however, three major problems with the model: stress as measured by satisfaction is not a particularly good predictor of actual mobility, although it does have some indirect influence through thoughts about moving; the "structural" variables have a strong independent impact on the mobility process beyond satisfaction; the satisfaction variables have little influence in mediating the effects of structural variables on mobility thoughts and behavior. The question of why our results differ from Speare's cannot be definitively answered here. We believe that our research has certain virtues in its direct measurement of satisfaction with home and community and also its much larger sample of movers. Speare's sample may have the virtue of being more representative of a large urban population since it was drawn from all segments of Rhode Island. Yet, while our sample is selective of areas within Seattle, we believe it provides a good representation of a wide variety of residential environments. Overall, our results are more consistent with the other studies which have addressed these issues (Bach and Smith, 1977; Lee, 1978; Michelson, 1977; Newman and Duncan, 1979), although the methods and approaches are not identical. Some of these studies were reviewed in the first part of the paper. We believe that understanding of the attitudinal predictors of changing residence is roughly at the same stage as research in the early post-World War II period on the attitudinal correlates of fertility behavior among American women. Research such as the Princeton study (Westoff et al., 1961; 1963) demonstrated that a variety of social attitudes about home, family, work and childbearing correlated poorly with levels of fertility. In contrast, such variables as objective religious affiliation, educational attainment, and race were clear correlates of fertility behavior. We still do not fully understand why these structural variables are important but we know that they are key predictors of behavior.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Navigating disabling spaces: challenging ontological norms and the spatialization of difference through ‘Embodied Practices of Mobility’

This article draws from diary and interview data to look at the strategic ways in which disabled people use mobile devices to navigate their social and spatial world. The data reveal that space is not passively perceived, but rather actively challenged and reconfigured. The concept of ‘embodied practices of mobility’ is introduced to account for the ways in which disabled people negotiate access and inclusion. By using mobile devices to access information, connect with others and engage in advocacy, participants are contesting spaces that are arranged according to preconceived ontological norms and asserting their embodied presence.     

Negotiating the ground: ‘mobilizing’ a divided field site in the ‘post-conflict’ city

ABSTRACT

While an exploration of mobility patterns in ‘post-conflict’ societies has much to tell us about how division is produced through ordinary activities, less work has considered the practical application of a mobilities ‘lens’ during fieldwork in such contexts. Negotiating the ground in highly polarized contexts presents a unique array of challenges, but also offers opportunities to make use of mobile methodologies. This paper discusses the advantages of GPS-based technologies and walking interviews to a recent activity-space segregation study in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and reflects on methodological issues posed by the ‘post-conflict’ field site.     

Green Pu’er City and the Cloud Tea

正If being asked which is the largest city of Yunnan,nine out of ten people would give the wrong answer-just as some people would reply that Toronto is the capital of Canada,Sydney is the capital of Australia and Guilin is the capital of Gaungxi.In fact,the largest city of Yunnan is Pu’er,not Kunming.Many people are familiar with Pu’er because of Pu’er Tea.They believe the place"Pu’er"is named after the tea.But the     

‘The Right to Enter Every Other State’ – The Supreme Court and African American Mobility in the United States

Abstract

In 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated in the Dred Scott case that if one African American was free to move unhindered throughout the United States, then all African Americans, enslaved or otherwise, would have ‘the right to enter every other State’. Such a situation, he argued, was untenable. The Supreme Court thus suggested that if U.S. citizenship included a de facto right to mobility, then African Americans could not be considered citizens. Although not formally written into the U.S. Constitution, numerous Supreme Court rulings since 1857 have underpinned the right to mobility in the United States. Yet the ability to be mobile in the United States has been fundamentally intertwined with the construction of racial identities. It was the white settlers that were free to move westward, the mobile nomadic lifestyles of the peoples they encountered being understood as primitive and inferior. Native peoples subsequently became immobilized on reservations. Similarly, African Americans in the era of slavery were immobilized on plantations and movement away from plantation space was illicit, codified as illegal, and required the hidden networks of the Underground Railroad. An African American moving through white American spaces faced often deadly consequences. African Americans should, in the parlance of the times, ‘know their place’ and not have the ambition, or the right, to move freely around the USA. To explore these contentions, I draw on four landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that elaborate on the mobility, or curtailment thereof, of African Americans in the United States.     

The ‘What’, ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Employee Well-Being: A New Model

This paper examines the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of employee well-being. Beginning with the ‘what’ of well-being, the construct of mental health was explored with the aim of building a model of employee well-being. It was proposed that employee well-being consists of three core components: (1) subjective well-being; (2) workplace well-being and (3) psychological well-being. Following this, the ‘why’ of employee well-being was investigated; that is, why employee well-being should be an important matter for organisations. It was argued that employee well-being is an important precursor to organisational well-being, as indicated by its links to employee turnover and performance. The next section was concerned with the ‘how’ of employee well-being; that is, how well-being can be reliably enhanced. Drawing on two models of strengths and a practice model of psychological assessment, it was asserted that strength-based development can reliably enhance employee well-being. A solid framework for understanding and measuring employee well-being is offered in the hope that it will foster a more integrated approach to assessing and optimising employee well-being.

Workplace Well-being, Gender and Age: Examining the ‘Double Jeopardy’ Effect

This study examines the effects of age and gender on work-related subjective well-being, looking at job-related affective well-being and job satisfaction. Specifically, it investigates whether older women, who may be doubly disadvantaged in being old and being women, are victims of a “double jeopardy” effect. Self-reported survey-data were obtained from 446 adults employed full-time. The results of this study suggest that age seems to matter more than gender in the workplace, and that aging is associated with lower job-related well-being and higher job satisfaction. Although older women reported slightly lower job-related affective well-being than men, the decrease of subjective well-being with age impacts on both genders.     

‘Bringing the unclothed immigrant into the World’: Population policies and gender in twentieth-century Australia

This paper considers several policy responses to declining birth rates in Australia over the twentieth century, revealing key continuities in the ‘administration of population’. Early in the century pronatalist policies to enhance fertility predominated. In spite of evidence in the 1890s, 1920s and 1940s that economics shaped family sizes and that women’s lives included paid work, little acknowledgment of this occurred outside wartime. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigration largely replaced pronatalism as a desired means of building population numbers. Century’s end brought new concerns about fertility decline, an ageing population, immigration and increased asylum seeking. These concerns revitalized the call for a population policy and raised unresolved questions for women. This expression comes from Mr Ozanne, speaker in the Commonwealth House of Representatives debate on the Maternity Allowance Bill, 1912, Australia, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3412. He spoke of ‘women doing their duty to Australia by bringing the unclothed immigrant into the world’.     

Economic Stress and the Great Recession in Ireland: Polarization,Individualization or ‘Middle Class Squeeze’?

Following an unprecedented boom, since 2008 Ireland has experienced a severe economic and labour market crisis. Considerable debate persists as to where the heaviest burden of the recession has fallen. Conventional measures of relative income poverty and inequality have a limited capacity to capture the impact of the recession in terms of social exclusion. This is exacerbated by a dramatic increase in the scale of debt problems including significant negative equity issues. Our analysis provides no evidence for individualization or class polarization of risk. Instead, while economic stress level is highly stratified in class terms in both boom and bust periods, the changing impact of class is highly contingent on life course stage. An income based classification showed that the affluent income class saw its advantage relative to the income poor class decline at the earliest stage of the life-course and remain stable across the rest of the life course. At the other end of the hierarchy, the income poor class experienced a relative improvement in their situation in the earlier life-course phase and no significant change at the later stages. For the remaining income classes, life-course stage was even more important. At the earliest stage the precarious class experienced some improvement in its situation while the outcomes for the middle classes remain unchanged. In the mid-life course the precarious and lower middle classes experienced disproportionate increases in their stress levels while at the later stage it is the combined middle classes that lost out. Additional effects over time relating to social class are restricted to the deteriorating situation of the petit bourgeoisie at the middle stage of the life-course. The pattern is clearly a good deal more complex than that suggested by conventional notions of ‘middle class squeeze’ and points to the distinctive challenges relating to welfare and taxation policy faced by governments in the Great Recession.     

Travel and the ‘Freedom of Movement’: Racialised Encounters and Experiences Amongst Ethnic Minority Tourists in the EU

This paper presents a conceptual‐based discussion dealing with social and geo‐political concerns associated with the tourism experiences and travel encounters of ethnic minority citizens living in member‐states of the European Union (EU). Although EU legislation emphasises that its citizens have freedom of movement throughout member‐states, the prevalence of racialised situations transpiring within, across and beyond EU borders suggests that this commitment is socio‐politically ambiguous. The popular hysteria that has developed towards increased immigration from non‐EU countries extends to those minorities who have legal status of entry, residency and/or citizenship – as they too are visibly different from Europe's white majorities. The paper thus reflects on ways in which the 11 September 2001 attacks in America have had a detrimental impact on people's tourism and travel experiences, particularly in instances where individuals have been treated with high levels of suspicion from institutional bodies and ethnic (white) majorities. The work firmly emphasises that racial prejudice, institutional racism and xeno‐racist practices restrict ethnic minority citizens from appreciating cosmopolitan‐based tourism experiences and engaging in congenial exchanges with other European cultures and societies. One of the main contentions asserts that racialised movements limit ethnic minority citizens from achieving full rights to social and (multi)cultural forms of citizenship. The conclusion suggests ways in which researchers ought to respond to the study of tourism and racism within the EU.     

The Politics of Scaling,Timing and Embodying: Rethinking the ‘New Europe’

This paper explores ways in which we can fruitfully analyse and theorize ‘New Europe’ through migration, in so far as migration is an integral part of the way the world is imagined, and as such impacts on how individuals, communities, nations or multi/international formations such as the European Union imagine themselves and their (co)inhabitants. The article discusses three theoretical strands that relate to the forces of spatiality (scaling), temporality (timing and histories) and corporeality (embodying and ‘the European people’). These must be read as interwoven and impacting on each other in varying ways that are not linear, coherent or permanent. By bridging critical migration studies with mobilities studies, this essay calls for a reconsideration of the fluidity, accessibility and desirability of the assumed mobile world, while it also thinks about migration in relation to the ways in which ‘mobility’ has been variously established as a universal ‘right’.