Allison Hui

Things in motion, things in practices: How mobile practice networks facilitate the travel and use of leisure objects

While complex spatialities and mobilities underlie patterns of contemporary consumption, many of their dynamics remain unexplored. Authors have taken up Warde’s suggestion that consumption is a moment within social practices, yet the implications of multi-sited performances and travel for this consumption have not been fully considered. This article therefore focuses upon the objects within practices, adopting Appadurai’s strategy of following things-in-motion in order to highlight how the travel of objects opens up opportunities for their use. Qualitative research is used to follow the things of two leisure practices, patchwork quilting and bird watching, illustrating how they involve both multi-sited performances and instances of consumption on-the-move. In order to discuss the changing sets of objects that enthusiasts make use of, the article proposes the concept of ‘mobile practice networks’, which recognizes how temporary coalitions of objects and people actualize the portability of things. Whereas Latour’s immutable mobiles maintain their links after travel, mobile practice networks are made to be broken, with their stability existing only during travel. Mobile practice networks are enacted as temporary accomplishments: as moments within the circulation of objects, when objects gain additional materials to facilitate their mobility. Following things-in-motion highlights the cycles of use and disuse, mobility and immobility within consumption, and demonstrates that the appropriation of objects is inseparable from the work of moving materials around.

Many homes for tourism Re-considering spatializations of home and away in tourism mobilities

Tourism mobilities have long been spatialized as circular structures emanating from a primary home that is opposed to a space of `away. Increasingly complex personal mobilities and experiences with multiple homes, however, challenge the assumptions on which this spatialization of tourism rests. This article utilizes an analysis of travel memoir narratives of return home and second home mobilities to deconstruct the oppositions within traditional spatializations of tourism, revealing in the process the way in which the everyday and tourism are entangled and interactive. Memoir authors construct complex relationships between spaces and places, wherein second homes can inspire new tourism practices at both unfamiliar locations and primary homes, and returning to previous homes can involve tourism of and at home. A consideration of these relationships reveals the difficulty of labeling mobilities as essentially touristic and suggests possibilities for new spatializations, ontology and methodologies that leave room for many homes for tourism.

Traces of a Mobile Field: Ten Years of Mobilities Research

Abstract Since the launch of this journal 10 years ago, the field of mobilities research has developed at a rapid pace. In this editorial introduction, we explore how this development has been curated, how the field has evolved and what maturation might mean for mobilities research. After reviewing how early editorials encouraged particular trajectories of development within mobilities research, we introduce the papers in this special issue, which build upon and re-shape key discussions that have emerged in the last decade. Drawing out issues of power, interdisciplinarity, social processes and futures, the papers raise important questions about not only how understandings of mobilities are changing, but also how the field of mobilities research is itself on the move. Taking up these themes, we examine how understanding mobilities research as a field, contributes to considerations of the potential for future struggles, fragmentation and sub-disciplines. We argue that the open nature and strategic diversity of the mobilities field has fed the successes of the past decade, and therefore needs to remain a priority in the future – with a careful balance curated between convergence around key themes and the exploration of varied ‘internal goods’ which remain an important source of inspiration and creative potential within the field.

The Boundaries of Interdisciplinary Fields: Temporalities Shaping the Past and Future of Dialogue between Migration and Mobilities Research

Abstract This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of migration and mobilities research by temporalizing understandings of their boundaries – places where differences have been entrenched and some concepts have remained beyond negotiation or dialogue. While the creativity and boundary-crossing potential of interdisciplinary fields is often set in opposition to disciplines, which define and regulate appropriate concepts and knowledge, such characterizations obscure how interdisciplinary fields have boundaries that change over and in relation to time. This paper therefore uses three temporal dynamics – a/synchronicity, sequencing and accumulation over time – to consider the evolving boundaries that have limited collaboration between these fields. By tracing past discussions of concepts such as ‘transnationalism’, ‘mobility’ and ‘methodological nationalism’, it highlights the contingency and complexity of dialogue between these fields, and how they, like disciplines, ‘define what it is permissible not to know’. The new concept of ‘migrant exceptionalism’ is introduced to acknowledge the boundaries created through privileging ‘migrants’ as unique and continuously relevant subjects. Both migration and mobilities scholars are seen to perpetuate migrant exceptionalism, and countering it through the study of sometimes-migrants is identified as a means of modulating existing boundaries and opening new spaces for interdisciplinary dialogue.

Moving with practices: the discontinuous, rhythmic and material mobilities of leisure

When considering mobilities within social life, researchers have emphasized the importance of enactment and embodied practices. Yet such understandings of practice as praxis—human action in general—have often left the relationship between practices and mobilities vaguely characterized. This paper therefore engages with an understanding of practices as praktik—distinct patterns of social action made up of interconnected elements—in order to explore how people move not only with cars and trains but also with practices. Praktik provides a context for studying the multiple mobilities of people, objects and ideas, highlighting important dynamics of performance and units of study. Leisure subcultures, the empirical focus of the paper, are important social practices and yet limited attention has been given to how they rely upon and are constituted by mobilities. Drawing upon a qualitative study of patchwork quilting and bird watching, the paper demonstrates that enacting leisure is inextricable from enacting discontinuous mobilities. Enthusiasts goals lead to common experiences of travelling-in-anticipation and travelling-in-disappointment, while the systematic circulation of objects, such as bird lists and bird books, shape travel even when they are not moving alongside participants. In this way, leisure practices unfold through temporally marked patterns of mobility.

Demanding Energy: An Introduction

This edited collection starts from the question: what social processes constitute and make energy demand? That is, what is energy for? Pursuing this question requires stepping back from energy demand per se to investigate the social practices that contribute to its constitution, patterning and transformation. Drawing in part upon social theories of practice and bringing together empirical cases addressing transportation, institutional and domestic settings, chapters draw particularly upon socio-theoretical understandings of space, time and change in order to provide new and sophisticated contributions to discussions of energy demand. This introduction discusses key themes and outlines the book’s structure.

Identifying Research Strategies and Methodological Priorities for the Study of Demanding Energy

This chapter revisits the whole edited collection with an explicit focus upon research strategies for studying demanding energy. Investigating what energy is for, it argues, involves embedding three methodological priorities into research designs: (1) posing questions that focus upon social dynamics rather than upon energy itself; (2) reflecting upon how particular units of study facilitate the examination of different types of interconnections; and (3) incorporating spatial and temporal dynamics into research designs. The approaches to case selection and sampling that follow from these priorities are then elaborated. By challenging the idea that energy research must place energy at the centre of all of its research questions, this chapter provides openings for developing innovative accounts of what energy is for and how it is changing.

Understanding the positioning of “the electric vehicle consumer”: variations in interdisciplinary discourses and their implications for sustainable mobility systems

Abstract The discursive category of “the consumer” has multiple characterizations, connected to varied accounts of social action, relations and change. This paper is interested in the implications of these varied characterizations for understanding the interdisciplinary knowledge about mobility systems being marshalled in the pursuit of social change. It focuses upon the case of electric vehicles (EVs), examining the varied representations of consumers in three fields – psychological and economic, consumer culture and transitions management research. It identifies that the EV consumer is positioned within these fields as a purchaser of an inferior “car”, a user of multiple materialities, and as one among many important social actors. In order to further consider the implications of these strategically contrasting cases, it considers two questions about how “the EV consumer” is discursively positioned in each: How does this imagined consumer shape what the EV needs to be in order to be widely adopted? What action is required to steer change towards a future of EVs? Doing so highlights how assumptions about “the EV consumer” can establish problematic comparisons between EVs and internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) and exclude the analysis of how EVs and electricity are simultaneously consumed. The usage of “the consumer” as a floating signifier within transitions management literature is argued to provide both risks for interdisciplinary dialogue and potential opportunities for both EV research and steering change towards sustainable mobility systems.