Mobile labour: an introduction

Abstract

Mobility has been in the academic spotlight at least since the 1980s, in the wake of globalisation studies (Salazar 2013), together with post-modern trends, which called for a theoretical breach in an academic scene dominated by perspectives on structures, territory and stasis (examples of this breach can be found in Clifford 1997; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; de Certeau 1984; Virilio 1986). In this context, ‘the nomad – whether traveller, refugee, runaway’ became ‘the symbolic identity of our age’, as suggested by Kendal, Woodward and Skrbis (2009, 85). At the turn of the millennium, the world was portrayed as revolving around movement and migration, transnationalism and hybridism, networks and cosmopolitanism, liquidity and fluidity, nomads and runaways (Salazar 2020). Metaphorized as proximity and togetherness, along with cultural exchange, hybridism, networks, connectedness and cosmopolitanism, mobility was perceived by many as positive and as reducer of inequality gaps. Just as social mobility was systematically translated to its upwards trajectory towards the erasure of social, economic, and cultural inequality, physical mobility was conceived along the same lines, having the potential to challenge the ‘old’ boundaries of nationalism, ethnicity, race and even gender. In a word, mobility was equated to the promise of a more cosmopolitan, ethical, better world. The contradictions hidden under such optimism emerged to plain sight in the early 21 century: 9/11 and the wars that followed it, the looming threats of climate change, financial crises and related structural adjustments, imposed austerity and generalised impoverishment, the multiplication of massive displacements by warfare and by political-economic conjunctions, the intensification of border violence, and more. Mobility turned out to be a useful concept to highlight the disruptions, turbulence, inequalities, and differential access in contemporary societies (Sheller and Urry 2006); rather than obfuscating inequalities, the mobility lens further elucidated them. The field of mobility studies (e.g. Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006) is itself built on a number of previous works that, in one way or the other, had pressed towards taking mobility seriously, as exemplified by Janet Wolff’s study of gendered traveling, where she demonstrates that meanings of movement are intrinsically rooted in conceptions on gender (1992), or Doreen Massey’s analysis of space, where she considers that meaningful places only exist as always ‘moving on’ (1993), or yet James Clifford’s influential Routes (1997). Inspired by the rich literature on mobility and moved by our own interest in the labourrelated production of difference, we used the concept of mobile labour as a catalyst for current, innovative, and ethnographic approaches to labour and mobility. That includes movements for labour (migrant trajectories, economic-induced displacements), movements as labour (highly mobile jobs), and movements of labour (labour-related geographical displacement and its different rhythms). It also includes the associated production and reproduction of ideologies, stereotypes, processes and conditions of exclusion, and the making of hierarchized, racialized inequalities. Overall, this special issue on Mobile Labour explores how mobility and labour conflate to create and perpetuate conditions of segregation, discrimination and differentiation, with a special emphasis on processes of racialization (although not excluding others, like gender and age). MOBILITIES 2021, VOL. 16, NO. 2, 155–163 https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2021.1885840