Mobility - SAGE Publications

1 Mobility Mimi Sheller Drexel University abstract This article offers an overview of the field of mobilities research, tracing its theoretical antecedents and contrasting it to theories of globalization, nomadism and flow. Mobilities theory places an unprecedented emphasis on (im) Mobility , moorings, dwelling and stillness as much as movement, speed, or liquidity. The article then outlines key themes and research areas within the field, including Mobility systems, Mobility capital and movement-space; and lastly presents innovations in mobile methodologies and directions for future research. keywords (im) Mobility u infrastructure u mobile methods u motility u remediation Over the past decade a new approach to the study of begins to occur in new ways across a wide range of mobilities has been emerging across the social sci- mobile devices and smart' environments, there is a ences, involving research on the combined move- new convergence between physical movement of peo- ments of people, objects and information in all of ple, vehicles and things; information production, stor- their complex relational dynamics.

2 It emphasizes the age and retrieval; wireless distributed computing and relation of such mobilities to associated immobilities communications; and surveillance and tracking tech- or moorings, including their ethical dimension; and it nologies. These sociotechnical transformations raise encompasses both the embodied practice of move- new substantive issues for the social sciences, while ment and the representations, ideologies and mean- also being suggestive of new theoretical and method- ings attached to both movement and stillness. ological approaches. Mobilities research combines social and spatial theory Mobilities research overlaps with some aspects of in new ways, and in so doing has provided a transfor- globalization studies, communications research, mative nexus for bridging micro-interactional research migration and border studies, tourism studies, cultur- on the phenomenology of embodiment, the cultural al geography, transport geography and the anthropol- turn and hermeneutics, postcolonial and critical theo- ogy of circulation, but it also differs in its scope, foci ry, macro-structural approaches to the state and polit- and methodologies from each of these.

3 In the socio- ical-economy, and elements of science and technology logical literature the term Mobility ' is usually equated studies (STS) and new media studies. with the idea of social Mobility ', referring to an indi- Although Mobility is historically significant, and vidual's categorical movement up or down the scale of hence not unique to contemporary times, the world is socioeconomic classes. But there is also a case for arguably moving differently and in more dynamic, advancing sociological understandings of spatial complex and trackable ways than ever before, while movement, cultural circulation and informational facing new challenges of forced Mobility and uneven mediation (topics respectively emphasized in human Mobility , environmental limits and climate change geography, anthropology and media studies).

4 Unlike and the movement of unpredictable risks. Many parts the rich tradition of sociological study of social mobil- of the world seem to stand on the cusp of major trans- ity (which will not be addressed here), the new trans- formations in existing sociotechnical systems of disciplinary field of mobilities research encompasses Mobility and communication, despite the apparent research on the spatial Mobility of humans, non- lock-in' of certain historical structures such as the sys- humans and objects; the circulation of information, tem of automobility (Dennis and Urry, 2009; Dudley images and capital; as well as the study of the physical et al., 2011; Urry, 2007). As mobile connectivity means for movement such as infrastructures, vehicles 2011 The Author(s).

5 2011 ISA (Editorial Arrangement of ). Mimi Sheller, 2011, Mobility ', , DOI: 1. Sheller Mobility and software systems that enable travel and commu- 2007). Yet they do not entirely agree with such nication to take place. Thus it brings together some epochal' claim-making (Savage, 2009), nor with of the more purely social' concerns of sociology currently popular images of a flat world of global (inequality, power, hierarchies) with the spatial' con- connectivity or a smooth world of global Empire'. cerns of geography (territory, borders, scale) and the (Hardt and Negri, 2000). As Sheller and Urry cultural' concerns of anthropology and media stud- (2006b: 210) put it: we do not insist on a new ies (discourses, representations, schemas), while grand narrative of the global condition as one of inflecting each with a relational ontology of the co- Mobility , fluidity or liquidity.

6 The new mobilities constitution of subjects, spaces and meanings. paradigm suggests a set of questions, theories, and Furthermore, mobilities theory also builds on a methodologies rather than a totalising description of range of philosophical perspectives to more radically the contemporary world.' It delineates the context in rethink the relation between bodies, movement and which both sedentary and nomadic accounts of the space. It draws on phenomenology to reconsider social world operate, and it questions how that con- embodied practices and the production of being-in- text is itself mobilized, or performed, through ongo- motion as a relational affordance between the senses, ing sociotechnical and cultural practices. objects and kinesthetic accomplishments.

7 It draws These initial critiques of sedentary metaphors on Foucauldian genealogies and governmentalities to and state territorial forms of power evoked what address the meanings of (im) Mobility , discourses and some argue was a non-reflexive embrace of deterrito- visual representations of speed and slowness, and the rialization, nomadism and rhizomatic transgression production of normalized mobile subjects. And it ( in the influential work of Gilles Deleuze and draws on postcolonial theory and theories of politi- Felix Guattari [1983], or Paul Virilio on dromology cal economy to rethink the performative politics of [1997]). This kind of nomadic theory' rests on a racial difference, secured borders and the governance romantic reading of Mobility ', and certain ways of of migration, sea-space and air-space.

8 This article seeing [arise] as a result of this privileging of cosmo- first traces the theoretical antecedents to the study of politan Mobility ' (Kaplan, 1996; and see Sheller, mobilities, showing how it goes beyond existing 2011 on cosmopolitanism and mobilities). For approaches to globalization, nomadism and flow; mobilities researchers today it is not a question of then it outlines some of the key themes and research privileging flows, speed, or a cosmopolitan or areas within the field, in particular the concepts of nomadic subjectivity, but rather of tracking the Mobility systems, Mobility capital and performed power of discourses, practices and infrastructures of movement-space; and finally it addresses the emer- Mobility in creating the effects of both movement gence of mobile methodologies and future directions and stasis.

9 Mobilities are of course the sine qua non for research. of globalization; without extensive systems of mobil- ity and globalist, or neoliberal, claims for opening markets and states to external flows social process- Beyond globalization, nomadism and es could not take place at a global scale nor be imag- flow ined as such. Yet mobilities research is neither a claim that all the world is mobile now, nor a forgetting that The current mobilities turn should not be confused the colonial world economy has long entailed exten- with the use of metaphors of flow and liquidity in sive global mobilities of slaves, of commodi- social theory, which have for some time captured the ties, of print and images and of capital (Sheller, attention of social theorists concerned with emergent 2003, 2004b) and, crucially, continues to entail social processes in a world perceived to be increasing- many forms of immobility, both voluntary and ly globally interconnected.

10 Manuel Castells (1996), forced. Critical mobilities research instead interro- for example, famously theorized the space of flows' gates who and what is demobilized and remobilized as distinct from the space of places'. Zygmunt across many different scales, and in what situations Bauman suggested that there are reasons to consider Mobility or immobility might be desired options, fluidity or liquidity as fitting metaphors when we coerced, or paradoxically interconnected (Adey, wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways 2010). novel, phase in the history of modernity' (Bauman, The claim to a new mobilities paradigm, then, is 2000: 2). Mobilities theorists share their critique of not simply an assertion of the novelty of Mobility in traditional sociological imagery of the social world as the world today (although the speed, intensity and an array of separate societies', bounded entities or technical channeling of various flows is arguably sedentary containers of geographical propinquity greater than ever before).