Sociality and transnational social space in the making of medical tourism: local actors and Indonesian patients in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

We investigate international medical travel between Indonesia and Malaysia through the conceptual lens of sociality, transnational social space and therapeutic mobilities. Drawing upon narratives of local persons, medical traveller-patients, accompanying family members, hospital staff and medical travel facilitators, we illustrate how multifaceted linkages and processes generate and sustain the flow of patients across the border. In these narratives, we see multiple mobilities articulate and cross-cut in the building of transnational connections. This paper stretches the concept of transnational social space to apply to medical travel and contributes to the literature framing of international medical travel as a complex and multifaceted arena.     

Therapeutic mobilities

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue expands mobilities research through the idea of therapeutic mobilities, which consist of multiple movements of health-related things and beings, including, though not limited to, nurses, doctors, patients, narratives, information, gifts and pharmaceuticals. The therapeutic emerges from the encounters of mobile human and non-human, animate and inanimate subjects with places and environments and the individual components they are made of. We argue that an interaction of mobilities and health research offers essential benefits: First, it contributes to knowledge production in a field of tremendous social relevance, i.e. transnational health care. Second, it encourages researchers to think about and through functionally limited, ill, injured, mentally disturbed, unwell and hurting bodies. Third, it engages with the transformative character of mobilities at various scales. And fourth, it brings together different kinds of mobilities. The papers in this Special Issue contribute to three themes key for the therapeutic in mobilities: a) transformations (and stabilizations) of selves, bodies and positionalities, b) uneven im/mobilities and therapeutic inequalities and c) multiple and contingent im/mobilities. Therapeutic mobilities comprise practices and processes that are multi-layered and mutable; sometimes bizarre, sometimes ironic, often drastically uneven; sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful – and sometimes all of this at the same time.     

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.     

(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.     

Stripping for the State

This article examines whole body imaging technologies in contemporary airport security contexts. Situating these technologies more broadly within histories of aviation and theories of mobility, we examine how discourses of technological efficiency and freedom of movement work to obscure the ever-expanding surveillance practices of the state. While whole body imaging technologies are marketed as objective and neutral, we investigate how they draw upon, and reinscribe, existing social inequalities. Using Angela Davis' theory of the strip search as a form of state-sponsored sexual assault, we assess contemporary uses of whole body scanners by the state and allied corporate interests not only as alleged privacy violations, but also as potential acts of violence by the state on marginalized subjects. By demonstrating the disproportionate impact of whole body imaging technologies on particular communities, including the intersections of transgendered travelers, travelers with disabilities, and racialized and religious communities, we show that whole body imaging technologies continue and expand upon the tradition of stratified mobilities that has always been a component of air travel. We also argue that the alleged non-invasiveness and efficiency of the “virtual strip search” marks a troubling trend in which the state consolidates power through increasingly concealed surveillance practices.     

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.     

Moto-mobilities: Geographies of the Motorcycle and Motorcyclists

Abstract

This paper draws upon and seeks to extend accounts of systems of automobility through an examination of geographies of the motorcycle and motorcyclist – or what we term ‘moto-mobilities’. We utilize the figure of the motorcycle to raise the importance of analysing alternative mobilities: to consider how they appeal to different travelling dispositions and emotions; how they have been represented; and how they have been produced, marketed and consumed. The paper first reflects upon the experiences and embodiment of the motorcycle-rider; second, evaluates representations of moto-mobility; and finally attends to the materiality of mobility via an examination of the economy of motorcycle qualities.     

Carers Cruising Cumbria and Meals on the Mile: The Drive of Migrants in Fieldwork and Fiction

Abstract

This article focuses on first-generation migrant workers in the service sector of England’s North West and their mobile subjectivities. It combines the research on cars and driving with the mobilities agenda on transnational migrants. In this essay, we draw from both fiction and fieldwork to explore the mobile experiences of migrants who work within the region’s ‘service diaspora’. Two inter-related stories unfold about cars, care and curry. Both groups, one in a city-region, and the other rurally based, are defined heavily by their mobile labour. By placing literary and oral accounts together, disparate locations and situations suddenly appear connected as never before and driving becomes embedded in migrant worlds in both real and imaginary ways.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

‘Emotional authoritarianism’: state,education and the mobile working-class subjects

ABSTRACT

Examining emotions within the studies of mobilities, recent literature has highlighted that migration is an inherently uncertain process shaped by hopes and dreams, as well as feelings of fear and anxiety. More than an individual pursuit for economic advancement or cultural assimilation, we find that migration is also a political project that incessantly creates valuable working-class subjects; a project that often starts in vocational training school, a site generating multiple forms of mobility between learning and workspaces. In the context of China, this article explores the emotional reproduction of working-class subjects through schooling and internship experiences, students’ sense of belonging to the nation-state, their aspirations and fears for the future. Developing the concept of ‘emotional authoritarianism’, it examines the ways in which working-class students were influenced by state-engineered nationalistic sentiments, and how it became a conflictual process of subject-making. Emotional governance is a peculiar political strategy that shapes the emotions of working-class students who are expected to serve the growth of the national economy and transnational capitalism. We discover that mixed emotions or ‘emotions in conflict’ are fundamental to the class reproduction of migrant agents, torn among different bodies and desires in ‘learning to labour’.     

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.     

‘Home is Never Fully Achieved … Even When We Are In it’: Migration,Belonging and Social Exclusion within Punjabi Transnational Mobility

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon transnational research in the UK and India, primarily over 150 semi-structured interviews in Newcastle, UK and Doaba, Punjab, as well as the ‘mobilities turn’ within contemporary social science, this paper examines the pursuit of ‘home’ within a diasporic British Indian Punjabi community. It is argued that this transnational pursuit of home is significantly shaped by the dynamic social context of South Asia, in particular processes of social inclusion and exclusion therein. Thus, returning Punjabi migrant attempts to distinguish themselves from the resident population through conspicuous consumption, and simultaneous attempts from Punjabi residents to exclude Non-Resident Indians from ‘real’ Indian status, lead to a continual reprocessing of home across different sites of mobility, as well as demonstrating the ‘never fully achieved’ nature of home.     

‘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.     

Searching for therapies,seeking for hope: transnational cancer care in Asia

ABSTRACT

This paper is about transnational cancer care in Asia. People with terminal diseases such as cancer increasingly escape devastating prognosis of their local regimes of clinical diagnostic truth by traveling to destinations where medicine is more advanced, yet affordable for them, and hence offers a broader scope for hope. The paper suggests that transnational cancer care provides an instructive case of the enormous geographical disparities in the availability of therapies and how this, combined with economies of hope and the marketization of health care, affects patients and their family caregivers. The primary contribution of the paper is the introduction of the concept of relational subjectivities to the health mobilities literature. The findings presented proof that the concept provides a fruitful analytical lens, yielding not only fresh empirical insights but prompting re-conceptualizations of medical travel itself as hopeful, yet risky transnational acts of family care.     

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.     

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.     

Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms

This paper analyses the role of practices and representations of mobility in supporting particular kinds of gender orders. While scholarship has shown the various ways women are materially and symbolically ‘fixed’ in place, less attention has been paid to how discourses and practices of mobility interface with systems of gender differentiation more broadly. This work is based on a robust empirical base of 55 interviews, 90 h of participant observation and an analysis of museum displays in Kalgoorile, Western Australia, an iconic frontier mining town selected for this investigation as a site of strongly bifurcated gender discourses. Analysing our field data through the lens of feminist theory which problematizes gender binaries, we argue that while some narrations of gender mobilities serve to reinforce gender binaries, lived practices of movement can also destabilise (idealised) notions of gendered movement. This paper extends conceptual work by advancing understanding about the role of mobility within systems of gender differentiation, showing how lived practices of mobility are just as likely to challenge idealised patterns of gendered movement as they are to reinforce these patterns.     

Resilience,Moorings and International Student Mobilities – Exploring Biographical Narratives of Social Science Students in the UK

Whilst research into the changing landscape of the UK Higher Education (HE) has produced a burgeoning literature on ‘internationalisation’ and ‘transnational student mobility’ over the past few years, still fairly little is known about international students’ experiences on their way to and through the UK higher and further education. Frequently approaching inter- and transnational education as ‘neutral’ by-products of neoliberal globalisation, elitism and power flows, much HE policy and scholarly debate tend to operate with simplistic classifications of ‘international students’ and therefore fail to account for the multifaceted nature of students’ aspirations, mobilities and life experiences. Drawing on the notion of ‘resilience’ and insights from the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, this paper envisages alternative student mobilities which run parallel or counter to the dominant flows of power, financial and human capital commonly associated with an emerging global knowledge economy. Engaging with ‘resilient’ biographies of social science students studying at three UK HE institutions, the paper challenges narrow student classification regimes and calls for a critical re-evaluation of the relationship between international student mobility and other contemporary forms of migration, displacement and diaspora.