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.     

Flows and Pauses in the Urban Logistics Landscape: The Municipal Regulation of Shipping Container Mobilities

Abstract

The mobilities turn has demonstrated the importance of the social, cultural and political implications of travel for a variety of modes, though largely focused on people and vehicles, not freight. The transport of goods by shipping container has become the predominant means of freight transport since the 1960s, shaping places from port cities to rural distribution centers. This paper uses two North American case studies to explore temporary immobilities or pauses in the flows of shipping containers, showing that the problems containers pose to the places they pass through are not a function of the objects themselves, but their state of mobility. Pauses are important as a category of mobility because of the consequences of regulations that attempt to eliminate or redirect them.

     

Infrastructures of immobility: enabling international distance education students in Africa to not move

ABSTRACT

There is now a large literature discussing how mobilities are part of contemporary everyday power geometries and is a resource to which people have unequal access. This body of work has, thus, valorised mobility as a desirable good. Why some people choose immobility and what has to be mobilised to enable this immobility has received much less attention. This paper draws on interviews with international distance education students in Namibia and Zimbabwe studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to explore the spatio-temporal underpinnings to why students choose to remain at home while studying abroad and how this is arranged. It outlines the infrastructures of reach that enable student immobility and how their incomplete nature means that students have to rely on extensive systems of mobilities of other people and objects to ensure that their study progresses without their own educational mobility. In doing so we move away from considering immobility as a result of limited access to mobility. Instead, we set out a new research agenda on why and how the infrastructures of immobilities are important in mobility research.     

Editorial: Mobilities,Immobilities and Moorings

We spend ever‐increasing periods of our lives travelling in cars, yet quite what it is we do while travelling, aside from driving the vehicle itself, is largely overlooked. Drawing on analyses of video records of a series of quite ordinary episodes of car travel, in this paper we begin to document what happens during car journeys. The material concentrates on situations where people are travelling together in order to examine how social units such as families or relationships such as colleagues or friends are re‐assembled and re‐organised in the small‐scale spaces that are car interiors. Particular attention is paid to the forms of conversation occurring during car journeys and the manner in which they are complicated by seating and visibility arrangements. Finally, the paper touches upon the unusual form of hospitality which emerges in car‐sharing.     

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.