Tracking (Im)mobilities at Sea: Ships,Boats and Surveillance Strategies

Abstract

This paper explores how national governments exercise regulatory power over spaces beyond their jurisdiction, when activities in those extra-territorial spaces have direct impacts within the boundaries of state concerned. Focusing explicitly on the control of shipping mobilities in the high seas and territorial sea zones, it is contended that apparatus of control, in particular, surveillance, are not only complex across spaces of alternate legal composition and between spaces of national and international law, but also across of the differing conditions and materialities of land, air and sea. Indeed, this paper argues that the immobilisation of the undesirable mobilities of ships and boats is inherently difficult at sea because of its very nature – its mobile legal boundaries, its liquidity compared to ‘landed’ fixity, and its scale and depth. Drawing on the case study of offshore radio pirates and the tender vessels which travelled ship to shore to supply them with necessary goods, it is reasoned that greater attention must be paid to mobilities at sea in view of forms of governance in this space. The sea is not like the land, or air, legally or materially, and mobilities cannot be governed, controlled and contained in the same ways therefore, as these connected spaces. Thinking seriously about the issues that arise when surveillance of mobilities is taken to sea, can help work towards better understandings for why security at sea proves so problematic and how those issues can be resolved, when the sea is the stage for contemporary geopolitical concerns in the twenty-first century.     

Nomads and mobile places: disentangling place,space and mobility

Though there is a danger that ‘place’ may become subsumed or ignored in research as attention now shifts to questions of ‘mobility,’ discussion of place has burgeoned throughout academia. Many texts declare that place is important, or proclaim the power of place. While place has been shown to be a fundamental part of human existence, what does this then mean for those who are characterized as not being interested in places? Examining nomadic Gypsies and Travelers in Britain, who are often constructed as placeless, highlights that this is not simply a representational concern, but has a tangible empirical affect, impinging on their everyday practices as well as influencing policies and laws that actively deny them their right to place. By exploring various definitions of place and how this impacts the understanding of mobilities, I demonstrate that the meaning ascribed to nomads is dependent upon a spatialized definition of place which is underpinned by the space-place binary. It is this aspect of the discourse that allows for nomads to be constructed as out-of-place wherever they are, and by recognizing this we can avoid framing placelessness as a natural characteristic of nomadism. Reconceptualizing place allows for more nuanced understandings of nomadism, as our identities are constructed in relation to both place and mobility, not just one or the other.     

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.     

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.     

The reproduction of reproduction: theorizing reproductive (im)mobilities

ABSTRACT

Through a reading of the articles gathered in this special issue, this commentary seeks to assess how critical research on reproductive processes, spatialities, temporalities, and assemblages can push mobilities theory towards rethinking the politics of (im)mobilities, which can also give us a new lens on the reproduction of reproduction. It begins with questions of scale, and the power relations involved in the heterogeneous mobile embodiments and bodily entanglements of reproduction, including mobilities involved in fertility, assisted conception, surrogacy, abortion, egg freezing, or traveling to give birth. It then draws on process theories and relational ontologies within mobilities theory to think about multiple kinds of becoming as crucial to temporal processes of reproduction, involving both molar and molecular politics. Lastly, it elucidates the kinopolitics of reproduction and broadens the field of critical mobility studies to better take into account the material assemblages and affective entanglements of reproductive politics.     

Private violence/private transport: the role of means of transport in women’s mobility to escape from domestic violence in England and Wales

ABSTRACT

This article highlights a gendered and forced mobility which has been under-recognised in the literature on mobility. It explores the hidden relocations of women (often with children) due to intimate partner abuse; presenting findings from mixed methods research on women’s journeys to escape domestic violence, including analysis of over 80 journey segments made by 20 women within England and Wales, and from abroad. Focusing on means of transport, the research found that under a third of journey segments were made by public transport, and these tended to be longer distances; that journeys by disabled women were more likely to be by private transport, and that journeys from rural areas were more likely to be with the assistance of others. Thematic analysis of interviews at different stages of women’s journeys is used to explore their experiences of different means of transport in terms of degrees of control and agency, in terms of losing or retaining personal possessions on the move; and in highlighting the role of others’ assistance in compounding or counteracting the implications of abuse. Women’s domestic violence journeys are thereby contextualised within wider mobilities research, uncovering the inequalities and implications of this hidden internal displacement in the UK.     

Rethinking Mobile Methods

Over the past, few years a broad range of scholars have been emphasising the vital importance of methodological innovation and diversification to mobilities research. Whilst welcoming this pluralisation of research methods, this paper encourages a note of caution amongst researchers who wholly embrace the call for mobile methods, which are frequently justified by an assumption that ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ methods have failed. I outline some of the explanations that are given for the development of ‘mobile methods’ – including their inevitable emergence from a ‘new mobilities paradigm’, the importance of innovation and political relevance for social science methods, and their importance for apprehending elusive practices – before identifying a number of problems with this work: namely the assumption that mobilities research is necessarily a branch of social science research, the production of over-animated mobile subjects and objects, the prioritising of certain kinds of research methods and practices, and the overreliance on certain kinds of technology. Particular attention is paid to the use of ‘non-representational theories’ and theories of practice in mobilities research, wherein academics frequently suggest that we must adopt certain performative, participative, or ethnographic techniques to enable researchers to be, see or move with research subjects, and to more effectively or accurately understand those practices and subjects. In the final section, I draw upon historical research on early driving practices to highlight the diverse methods and sources that can be useful for mobilities scholars seeking to apprehend particular practices, events, subjects and spaces.     

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.     

‘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.     

Moving Subjects,Stagnant Paradigms: Can the ‘Mobilities Paradigm’ Transcend Methodological Nationalism?

This article contends that an emerging ‘mobilities paradigm’ within the social sciences reproduces an analytical gaze that is predominantly fixated on the movement of people across national borders. This privileging of state borders and categories in many of the mobilities studies should alert us to the extent to which it brings novelty to our examination of human mobility in the world. By analysing the flow of migrant workers from rural China to Israel, this article demonstrates how new insights regarding the importance and meaning of crossing national borders can be generated by looking at mobilities through the eyes of those involved in them, allowing state categories and national borders to prefigure in the analysis to an extent and form that are relevant for migrants. The article depicts the mobility-ridden life of Tseng, who comes from a small village in Fujian province and who, after migrating internally in China several times, decides to go to Israel. Highlighting the importance of unequal capital accumulation in shaping human mobility, the article questions some taken-for-granted assumptions about the motivation and situation of those who exercise international mobility; it particularly upsets a prevalent association in migration studies between physical and socio-economic mobility.