Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Mobilities Research

Abstract

This article introduces a collection of methodological reflections on mobilities research, and additionally discusses the general status of methodology in the scholarship. Fast advancements on empirical and conceptual levels of mobilities studies have not been equivalently matched by efforts on the methodological front. While microsociological and phenomenological approaches are predominant in the scholarship, large‐scale studies on mobility tend not to systematically analyse research frameworks used in the process of knowledge production. The articles featured in this special section examine some of the methodological challenges and innovations arising within several topical strains of mobilities studies. This introductory article argues that multi‐scalar and critical methodologies are necessary for further expanding the analytical and interventional possibilities of a mobilities research agenda.     

Can't hold us back! Hip-hop and the racial motility of aboriginal bodies in urban spaces

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.     

Parent–child mobility practices: revealing ‘cracks’ in the automobility system

ABSTRACT

Many commentators are concerned about automobility’s ill-effects and seek a shift away from auto dependence towards more sustainable transport. Little research, however, considers the ways that parent–child mobilities are linked to such a transition. Through the lens of social practice theory, this paper explores how parents travelling with young children preserve and challenge automobility as they enact auto dependency, multimodality and altermobility. The paper argues that it is vital to understand these practices for identifying ‘cracks’ in automobility and the possibility of more sustainable and equitable daily mobilities. The research is based on qualitative parent interviews undertaken in Vancouver (British Columbia).     

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.     

Development and Gendered Mobilities: Narratives from the Women of Mardin,Turkey

Abstract

This paper addresses gendered mobilities in Mardin in the context of the implications of transport investments for the female labour market. I seek to illustrate that the relationship between infrastructure provision and gendered mobilities is entangled in a wider context which encompasses politics and cultural geographies. Drawing on theories of mobilities, I argue that a lack of understanding of the complementary and contradictory impacts of local context and physical infrastructure investments may undermine social and cultural conditions within communities, resulting in misguided development policies.     

People and Technologies as Resources in Times of Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper is concerned with people’s decision‐making and communication practices when moving around the world in uncertain situations. It examines how people acted when flights were grounded in Europe for one week in April 2010 as a result of the ash cloud from a volcano in Iceland. The paper focuses on the communication practices of a group of people travelling from Norway to Britain in a hired coach. Drawing on the approaches of literacy studies along with broader work on new technologies, it covers a range of issues including: how people integrate languages and technologies as global resources for local decision making; how they deploy networks of support in different ways; and how they evaluate knowledge in a rapidly changing situation of rumour and counter‐claim. The paper enriches understanding of people using technologies and acting within complex networks. It emphasises the need for literacy studies, and sociolinguistics more generally, to develop richer notions of networked interaction and mediated language use in a mobile world. And it highlights for mobilities research the importance of language issues in a multilingual world.     

Home on the waves: domesticity and discomfort aboard the overland route steamship, 1842–1862

ABSTRACT

This article develops insight into the historical connections between corporeality and mobility, focusing upon the mobilities made possible by the shipping line P&O’s steamship service to the East in the mid nineteenth century. Passenger narratives of journeys made by this service describe an idiosyncratic domesticity which evokes a distinctive attempt to discursively frame steamship mobility as a safe, comfortable, normalised experience of a journey which was often anything but. This blasé attitude emphasises the role of bourgeois material and social practices as a means for the historical agents of globalisation to come to terms with steamship travel, extrapolated through ideas of domesticity which mutate and develop through their relation to the sea and the flux of mobility. This process of normalisation centres in travel narratives upon a preoccupation with the notion of comfort. The historical constitution of comfort is articulated through the body’s constitution as a site of struggle, locating the human subject in the dichotomy of the ship interior as a stable materiality and the exterior as a problematic outside revealing that the mobility of steamships was predicated upon the violence not just of speed but the suffering of subaltern labour which reproduced the problematic social relations of empire.     

城市“生态治理”政策流动的一种新设计——以“宜昌试验政策”为例

如何提升城市"生态治理"政策流动的科学性,而不是简单地复制异域"示范性"政策?这不仅关乎中国城市生态环境的改善,而且是跳出既定政策设计思路"惯性"的变革。基于城市政策流动和德勒兹生成理论的框架,从平衡政策与自然生态关系、促进政策过程性和空间性优化、重塑了宜昌试验"生态治理"政策:以生态问题导向、强化公众参与、政治性弱化和降低典范意识为核心促进了主体的消解;利用系列设计、结构设计、弱势群体和弱势知识的交乘公式优化了生态守护政策、生态产业和资本化政策、生态科普政策;将试点经验作为政策推广的"根",以音乐模型保持两条水生态人文走廊自然与人文的律动,以海洋模型促进特色生态小镇空间的融合转化,以数学模型开发生态指标和经济指标的政府绩效评价体系和以美学模型拓展生态空间设计。     

Automobility and site ontological analysis

Many scholars of mobility employ the concepts of assemblage, practice and intensive force. This paper argues that site ontological analysis is a productive way to understand the ways these phenomenon work together. The importance of practice organization to such a differential ontology is emphasized. A case study of an automobile journey on the Pennsylvania Turnpike illustrates how a momentary stranding in the driving event modified the site’s practices, temporalities, subjectivities and intensivities.     

Liquid Social Work: Welfare Interventions as Mobile Practices

This paper re-examines the nature of social work from the perspectiveof movement and ‘mobilities’. It shows that socialwork is at all times ‘on the move’, yet theory andanalyses of policy and practice largely depict it as static,solid and sedentarist. The paper draws on the ‘new mobilitiesparadigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006), through which a concernwith flows and movements of people, objects, information, practices,speed and rhythm, with complexity, fluid images and liquid metaphors,is moving to the centre of social theory. An understanding ofthe ‘liquid’, mobile character of social work meansproducing accounts which are much closer to what its practicesare, how and where they are performed and experienced by serviceusers and professionals, and the opportunities and risks inherentto them. Three key domains of practice—the home visit,the car journey and the office/organization—are examinedin terms of the movements that go on in them. Viewed throughsystemic and complexity theories, it is shown that social workinterventions in late-modernity are best understood in termsof a flow of mobile practices between public and private worlds,organizations and the home, at the heart of which is the sensualbody of the practitioner on the move.