Reproductive vibes: therapeutic atmospheres and the reproductive force of tourism mobilities

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a conceptual framework of therapeutic atmospheres, I explore the question of how a tourist destination reverberated with reproductive potentiality or a ‘reproductive vibe.’ I draw on ethnographic fieldwork attentive to the ‘charged atmosphere of everyday life’, to consider how reproductive possibilities unfolded in the Costa Rican Caribbean for some tourist women. Moving away from the autonomous, liberal, mobile subject as only ever a rational agent in reproductive decision-making, this article introduces new actors into the analytical and empirical framework of reproductive mobilities and cross-border reproductive care. I look at destination branding entangled with therapeutic ‘life affirming’ possibilities that emanated from local spaces and relations with the environment. In doing so, I trouble the irrational/rationality binary that dominates notions of reproductive decision-making to consider the role of affect, feelings, and bodies in reproductive subjectivities.     

Reproductive mobilities

ABSTRACT

This special issue brings reproduction into a critical mobilities framework. We extend scholarship in cross-border reproductive care and medical mobilities into new theoretical and empirical directions. Reproductive mobilities articulates the mutual constitution of reproduction and mobilities. Human (and nonhuman) movement not only shapes reproduction but produces reproductive imaginaries, desires, futures, trajectories, as well as the subjectivities and ‘becoming-ness’ of diverse reproductive subjects. Through the lens of reproduction, we examine how contemporary mobilities—and immobilities—intersect with gendered, racialized, sexually expressive, nation-inscribed, fertile, infertile, young, aging, pregnant, surrogate, and/or otherwise non/reproductive bodies and persons. Can human reproduction be analyzed without noticing all things mobile and immobile that converge to construct reproductive (and non-reproductive) desires and practices? Can mobility and immobility be considered without thought to how worlds and worlding comes about? Mobility facilitates reproduction, and new possibilities for reproduction; reproduction is mobile at scales from the molecular to the transnational. This effort to bring the fields of reproduction and mobilities into dialogue does not introduce a new sub-field but rather creates the opening for a trajectory of empirical work and theoretical ideas that invigorates mobilities with newfound attention on the matter and becoming-ness of reproduction.     

Mobilities and Utopias: a critical reorientation

ABSTRACT

What does utopian thinking have to offer students and scholars of mobility? Could ‘mobile utopias’ assist us in envisioning futures – including those of mobility – differently? Do utopias provide a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between mobile societies and lives and the environments against which these are formed? By providing different ways of reading and arguing within different theoretical frameworks and doing so in relation to the contexts their contributions engage, the articles included in this special issue explore the limits of what the mobile utopias of the future might be, their social and spatial dimensions, and their totalizing, fragmentary, or, personal definitions. As a whole, the issue contributes to the intellectual project of how to turn utopia into a method, as Levitas, Jameson, Harvey, and others have long encouraged us to do. With a few exceptions, utopias have not received the attention they deserve from mobilities scholars. Our aim in putting together this special issue is to redress this balance and invite further reflection on what utopian thinking might offer current debates in mobilities scholarship. This Introduction draws connections across approaches, foci, methods, geographies, and sources, including those deployed in the issue’s six articles, in the interest of excavating possible hopeful orientations through critique. Central to this is the recognition of the significance of critiquing the images of mobility which circulate widely (think of drones) and of the necessity to listen attentively to voices overlooked by mobility futures which stand far removed from the reactions and feelings of people in their everyday worlds. Ours is an invitation both to pay close attention to what utopian thinking does – rather than what utopia is – and to help us carve out a new intellectual space where to reflect on the how, when and where mobilities and utopias meet, now, but also in the past, and in the future.     

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.     

Discourses of Mobility: Institutions,Everyday Lives and Embodiment

This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.     

Care moves people: complex systems and futures signals supporting production and reflection of individual mobile utopias

ABSTRACT

Futures of mobility are a pressing concern for cities addressing sustainability and climate change challenges. As cities renew their mobility systems and launch efforts to meet these targets, new sensitive qualitative methodologies are needed. This article discusses a focused mobility diary experiment that was conducted in May 2017 in Turku, Finland and its subarea, with a small set of participants. The goal of this study was to gain insights into potential developments in the city’s mobility systems and practices. This article utilises a multidisciplinary complex systems approach describing how we used the concepts of futures signals and mobile utopias as tools when analysing some prefigurative patterns in individual mobility practices. A key outcome of this methodological experimentation was the interconnections made between two research traditions and a notion of the various ways care underlies, effects, and contours the mobility practices of people–in other words, people are moved by care. This article demonstrates how with the concepts of futures signals, and mobilised utopias, we can reach the important aspirational and prefigurative practices and motivations of people, which permit us to interpret potential futures in particular urban settings characterised by daily life activities.     

Mobile Forms of Belonging

Abstract

Mobility is often portrayed as the antithesis of belonging. In this article, we challenge this perspective investigating how mobility and motility influence belonging in everyday life. We develop a perspective on belonging consisting of the dimensions of mobility, people and place and conditioned by the underlying dimensions of time, resources and structures of meaning. Applying this to interview material from a case study in Aalborg, we propose a tentative typology of mobile forms of belonging. It is discussed how different rhythms, conditions of mobility and variations in mobility resources result in different scales of belonging and modes of ‘centering’.     

Embedded and Re-purposed Technologies: Human Mobility Practices in Maasailand

This article analyses how cultural patterns and social organization shape the meaning-making of human mobility and technology, and vice versa. We extend the definition of mobile technologies from engineered devices with portable quality to tools supporting peoples’ customary mobile practices. Specifically, we analyse the embodiment of contemporary mobile technologies into Maasai culture. Mobile practices have socio-cultural, economic and political meanings. The very fabric of the culture through which mobile practices are negotiated here is cattle. In focus are the mobilities shaping Maasailand. We argue that, rather than causing radical cultural change, novel mobile technologies are embedded, rationalized and re-purposed. Furthermore, a local-to-global cooperation on indigenous rights is facilitated.     

Exploring Mobility in Public Environments among People with Cognitive Functional Limitations—Challenges and Implications for Planning

Abstract

Mobility in public environments is an important part of people’s everyday life. However, living with functional limitations often means limited mobility. To plan for public environments that enable mobility for everybody, knowledge about various user groups’ mobility is important. Up until now, knowledge concerning the mobility of people with cognitive functional limitations has been scarce. The aim of this paper is to explore, from experts’ perspectives, mobility in public environments among people with cognitive functional limitations (target group). The findings of focus group interviews with experts showed that the target group had to keep external and internal challenges at a manageable level in order to maintain mobility. The target group’s mobility is interpreted as depending on both the individuals’ cognitive capacity in relation to environmental demands as well as the motility of the members of the target group, i.e. how they form their opinions about their possibilities for mobility. Both those aspects are important for planners to consider in order keep the target group mobile.     

Anticipation,Materiality, Event: The Icelandic Ash Cloud Disruption and the Security of Mobility

Abstract

In this article we explore how the aerial mobilities disrupted by the Icelandic ash cloud were remarkably contingent upon a series of systems and technologies of anticipation and speculation that sit within wider nested logics of future‐oriented or ‘anticipatory’ governance. Drawing together flexible and distributed forms of (self)‐governance such as insurance and coordination, alongside other technologies and logics of anticipation, we explore how the event’s disruption began to be organised. Suggesting that the ash cloud opens out the importance of material mobilities as they are conceived, known and managed, the paper poses further questions for how the mobilities of the future will unfold.     

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.     

The ‘digital glimpse’ as imagining home

This paper proposes the concept of the ‘digital glimpse’, which develops the existing framing of imaginative travel. Here it articulates the experiences of mobile workers digitally connecting into family life and everyday rituals when physically absent with work. The recent embedding of digital communication technologies into personal relationships and family life is reconfiguring how absence is experienced and practiced by workers on the move, and through this, new digital paradigms for life on-the-move are emerging. This paper explores how such social relationships are maintained at-a-distance through digital technology – using evidence from qualitative interviews with mobile workers and their families. Digital technology now enables expressive forms of ‘virtual travel’, including video calling, picture sharing, and instant messaging. This has implications for the ways in which families can manage the social and relational pressures of being apart. Experiences of imaginative travel created through novel media can enrich the experience and give a greater sense of connection for both those who are at home and those who are away. While technology is limited in its ability to replicate a sense of co-presence, ‘digital glimpses’ are an emergent set of sociotechnical practices that can reduce the negative impact of absence on family relationships.     

Family Practices,Holiday and the Everyday

Holidays are central to the rhythm of everyday family practices and consumption, and are often depicted, within both academic literature and consumer marketing, as a defining moment in contemporary family life. To date, academic accounts of the experiences of travel and tourism have been mostly developed outside of the realm of everyday family practices and intimate relations. In this paper, therefore, we advance an interpretation of family holidays as a constituent of everyday family practices. To do this, we bring together three distinct yet interrelated conceptual frameworks: those of family practices, holiday and the everyday. Presenting and analysing data collected from ethnographic research with six families and exploring the themes of anticipation and utopian family practices, we identify how the notion of family holidays can be used a conduit for realising not only relationality between family members but also as a means of easing out the tensions and aspirations of everyday family life, a way to perfect the everyday and also to make it more palatable.     

Anticipating digital futures: ruins,entanglements and the possibilities of shared technology making

ABSTRACT

Contrary to the corporate production of digital cities, shared technology making explores ways of innovation that are open to all, informed by diverse knowledges, and led by citizens. However, this exploration faces corporate translation of ethical and societal values for capital accumulation and concerns around the right to participate. Building on Tsing’s concept of ‘ruins’, this paper considers the anticipation of digital futures while the neoliberal ruination of shared technology making is in full swing. The paper examines the entanglements in hackathon rationalities and practices and demonstrates that the possibilities of shared technology making emerge from disrupting technocratic visions and repurposing corporate innovation resources and techniques. Drawing on the analysis, the paper argues that these entanglements are crucial to digital futures. They disclose in concrete ways how neoliberal co-optation can be disturbed and transformed. Equally importantly, they urge continuous explorations to assemble diverse practices and values for building momentum towards sustained processes of shaping desirable futures.     

Unrecognised Cosmopolitans: Mobility and Openness Among Globally Engaged Family Farmers

In contemporary cosmopolitanism research, cities are iconic places where cosmopolitan exchanges and actors find their ‘natural’ milieu. Farmers not only are remarkably absent from this literature but have been depicted as operating with a highly localist and agrarian world view and being strongly connected to the land and the farm through history, biography and family tradition. In this paper, we present findings from a three-year study of entrepreneurial family farmers who are globally engaged and undertake extensive mobility as part of their farm business practices. The paper shows how they readily display some of the key hallmarks of contemporary cosmopolitanism: they are highly mobile and frequently engage in the routineness of international travel; they understand the strategic significance of cultural sensitivities and competencies; and they gain pleasure from engaging with difference. Yet, we suggest that these expressions of cosmopolitanism are also contradictory and, at times, may be understood as either ‘instrumental’, ‘banal’ or ‘engaged’. The paper illustrates how ordinary and everyday cosmopolitan repertoires and sentiments can arise outside the usual settings and among actors not readily acknowledged in the cosmopolitanism literature.     

The Diffusion of IT in the Historical Context of Innovations from Developed Countries

The well-known s-shaped diffusion of technology curve generally works well in developed countries. But how does it perform in the very different context of developing countries? Across a wide range of new technologies imported from the developed countries it works poorly. In most cases the penetration rate fails to reach 25% of the population. The reason for this as I see it has to do with the concentration of innovations in the rich countries and the devotion of R&D to rich rather than poor country problems. I redrew the s-shaped curve to reflect these facts. At the other extreme, however, are technologies such as the mobile phone, which have reached a penetration rate in some developing countries that is higher than in certain developed countries. The underlying reason for this unusual experience is thought to be leapfrogging, the conditions for which are especially favourable in the case of mobile phones. Therefore there is a need to redraw the curve that explains the diffusion of most new technologies in developing countries.     

Gender,marriage, and the dynamic of (im)mobility in the mid-Western hills of Nepal

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between gender, marriage, and (im)mobility in rural hilly areas of mid-Western Nepal, showing how (1) the mobility of men is predicated on the ‘immobility’ of women, with marriage being key to the gendered dynamic of (im)mobility, (2) how the construction of hegemonic masculinity, exemplified by a figure of a successful international migrant, is inseparable from an ideal of femininity vested in the figure of a virtuous domesticated housewife. Examining different scales of mobility, the paper cautions against posing a rigid dichotomy between ‘mobile men’ and ‘immobile’ women, illustrating that the ‘left behind’ wives experience an impressive degree of everyday mobility in contrast to their internationally mobile husbands.     

Locative Mobile Social Networks: Mapping Communication and Location in Urban Spaces

Abstract

This study conceptualizes the new spatial logic created by the social use of location aware mobile technologies, analyzing how mobile communities are formed by the mapping of social networks in urban spaces. It explores two main areas with the goal of understanding how locative mobile social networks (LMSNs) challenge the traditional logic of networks. First, it conceptualizes LMSNs by comparing them to (1) traditional transportation and communication networks, and (2) mobile social networks (MSNs). Second, the paper discusses potential social implications of LMSNs, such as privacy, surveillance, and social exclusion.     

Moving,Making and Atmosphere: Routines of Home as Sites for Mundane Improvisation

In this article, we examine how everyday atmospheres of home are made, maintained and improvised through habitual routines of movement, and the implications of this for co-design for energy demand reduction. Drawing on our ethnography of how people experienced and constituted a sensory aesthetic of home, we analyse the example of lighting use in night-time routines. We propose seeing these routines as sites of the possible, where everyday making might be engaged for co-design. Thus suggesting refocusing ethnographic design research beyond what people do in their homes, towards how they move through and make the atmospheres of their homes.     

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.