Mobilities

Mobilities is a contemporary paradigm in the social sciences that explores the movement of people, ideas and things, as well as the broader social implications of those movements.

A mobility "turn" (or transformation) in the social sciences began in the 1990s in response to the increasing realization of the historic and contemporary importance of movement on individuals and society. This turn has been driven by generally increased levels of mobility and new forms of mobility where bodies combine with information and different patterns of mobility. The mobilities paradigm incorporates new ways of theorizing about how these mobilities lie "at the center of constellations of power, the creation of identities and the microgeographies of everyday life." (Cresswell, 2011, 551)

The mobility turn arose as a response to the way in which the social sciences had traditionally been static, seeing movement as a black box and ignoring or trivializing "the importance of the systematic movements of people for work and family life, for leisure and pleasure, and for politics and protest" (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 208). Mobilities emerged as a critique of contradictory orientations toward both sedentarism and deterritorialisation in social science. People had often been seen as static entities tied to specific places, or as nomadic and placeless in a frenetic and globalized existence. Mobilities looks at movements and the forces that drive, constrain and are produced by those movements.

Several typologies have been formulated to clarify the wide variety of mobilities. Most notably, John Urry divides mobilities into five types: mobility of objects, corporeal mobility, imaginative mobility, virtual mobility and communicative mobility. Later, Leopoldina Fortunati and Sakari Taipale proposed an alternative typology taking the individual and the human body as a point of reference. They differentiate between ‘macro-mobilities’ (consistent physical displacements), ‘micro-mobilities’ (small-scale displacements), ‘media mobility’ (mobility added to the traditionally fixed forms of media) and ‘disembodied mobility’ (the transformation in the social order). The categories are typically considered interrelated, and therefore they are not exclusive.

While mobilities is commonly associated with sociology, contributions to the mobilities literature have come from scholars in anthropology, cultural studies, economics, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, and tourism and transport studies. (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 207)

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