Mobilities

In New Mobilities: Smart Planning for Emerging Transportation Technologies, transportation expert Todd Litman examines 12 emerging transportation modes and services that are likely to significantly affect our lives: bike- and carsharing, micro-mobilities, ridehailing and micro-transit, public transit innovations, telework, autonomous and electric vehicles, air taxis, mobility prioritization, and logistics management. Public policies around New Mobilities can either help create heaven, a well-planned transportation system that uses new technologies intelligently, or hell, a poorly planned transportation system that is overwhelmed by conflicting and costly, unhealthy, and inequitable modes. His expert analysis will help planners, local policymakers, and concerned citizens to make informed choices about the New Mobility revolution.

Bringing together the leading authors currently working at the intersection of social science and transport science, this volume provides a companion to the well-established and extensive international Transport and Society series. Each chapter, and the volume as a whole, offers closer and richer consideration of the issues, practices and structures of multiple mobilities which shape the current world but which have typically been overlooked or minimised. What this approach seeks to do is not only draw attention to many new areas of research and investigation relating to mobile lives, but also to point to new theories and methods by which such lives have to be researched and examined. Such new theories and methods are relevant both to rethinking 'transport' studies as such but are also recasting 'societal' studies as 'transport' so that it comes out of the ghetto and enters mainstream social science.

As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.

The Italian nation-state has been defined by practices of mobility. Tourists have flowed in from the era of the Grand Tour to the present, and Italians flowed out in massive numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Italians made up the largest voluntary emigration in recorded world history. As a bridge from Africa to Europe, Italy has more recently been a destination of choice for immigrants whose tragic stories of shipwreck and confinement are often in the news. This first-of-its-kind edited volume offers a critical accounting of those histories and practices, shedding new light on modern Italy as a flashpoint for mobilities as they relate to nationalism, imperialism, globalization, and consumer, leisure, and labor practices. The book’s eight essays reveal how a country often appreciated for what seems immutable - its classical and Renaissance patrimony - has in fact been shaped by movement and transit.

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and experiencing the extreme challenges of urbanization. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of movement. Sheller shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement. She connects the body, street, city, nation, and planet in one overarching theory of the modern, perpetually shifting world. Concepts of mobility are examined on a local level in the circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and “the right to the city.” On the planetary level, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other elites are able to roam freely, while migrants and those most in need are abandoned and imprisoned at the borders. Mobility Justice is a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility in a world in which the mobility commons have been enclosed. It is a call for a new understanding of the politics of movement and a demand for justice for all.

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading.

Leading mobilities theorist Mimi Sheller offers an up-to-date, comprehensive analysis of the complex mobility disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath in this timely Advanced Introduction. It outlines the formation of the interdisciplinary field of mobility studies, arguing that mobilities theory is crucial to planning post-pandemic recovery, sustainable communities, and low-carbon transitions. From tourism to migration to urban infrastructure, to informal and reproductive mobilities, Sheller reveals how multiple im/mobilities are interconnected, as the novel coronavirus reminds us as it hitchhikes across the globe through its human hosts.

The emotional, social, and economic challenges faced by migrants and their families are interconnected through complex decisions related to mobility. Tangled Mobilities examines the different crisscrossing and intersecting mobilities in the lives of Asian migrants, their family members across Asia and Europe, and the social spaces connecting these regions. In exploring how the migratory process unfolds in different stages of migrants’ lives, the chapters in this collected volume broaden perspectives on mobility, offering insight into the way places, affects, and personhood are shaped by and connected to it.

This book offers a critical and comprehensive analysis of children’s mobilities by focusing on its interdependent, imagined and relational aspects. In doing so, it challenges existing literature, which, in mobilities studies, tends to overlook the mobilities of marginalised social groups; in social science more generally, tends to immobilize children’s studies; and in children’s mobility studies has mainly focused on the ‘independent’ and corporeal travel of children. The book situates children’s mobilities in wider contexts, offering an interdisciplinary and critical perspective throughout and drawing on scholarship at the confluence of childhood and mobilities and a range of research to offer new insights that inform the field of mobilities and studies of childhood. In this way, the book aims at widening the perspective on children’s mobility towards the inclusion of diverse age groups and of the manifold forms of mobilities that are part of children’s lives, from an interdependent and relational point of view.

Imagining mobility -- Chile : traveling to and from the end of the world -- Indonesia : Merantau and modernity -- Tanzania : the Maasai as icons of mobility -- Enacting mobility -- Education : leaving to learn -- Labor : capitalizing on movement -- Life's "pilgrimage" : travel, travail, transformation