Mimi Sheller

The New Mobilities Paradigm

It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we draw out some characteristics, properties, and implications of this emergent paradigm, especially documenting some novel mobile theories and methods. We reflect on how far this paradigm has developed and thereby to extend and develop the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences.

Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings

Mobility has become an evocative keyword for the twenty‐first century and a powerful discourse that creates its own effects and contexts. The concept of mobilities encompasses both the large‐scale ...

Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car

Car cultures have social, material and, above all, affective dimensions that are overlooked in current strategies to influence car-driving decisions. Car consumption is never simply about rational economic choices, but is as much about aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses to driving, as well as patterns of kinship, sociability, habitation and work. Through a close examination of the aesthetic and especially kinaesthetic dimensions of automobility, this article locates car cultures (and their associated feelings) within a broader physical/material relational setting that includes both human bodies and car bodies, and the relations between them and the spaces through which they move (or fail to move). Drawing on both the phenomenology of car use and new approaches in the sociology of emotions, it is argued that everyday car cultures are implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling in which emotions and the senses play a key part – the emotional geographies of car use. Feelings for, of and within cars (‘automotive emotions’) come to be socially and culturally generated across three scales involved in the circulations and displacements performed by cars, roads and drivers: embodied sensibilities and kinaesthetic performances; familial and sociable practices of ‘caring’ through car use; and regional and national car cultures that form around particular systems of automobility. By showing how people feel about and in cars, and how the feel of different car cultures generates habitual forms of automobilized life and different dispositions towards driving, it is argued that we will be in a better position to re-evaluate the ethical dimensions of car consumption and the moral economies of car use.

Mobile Publics: Beyond the Network Perspective

As practices of social coordination and connectivity shift in contemporary urban spaces, in part because of the increasing hybridisations of technologies and infrastructures of communication and transportation, public life is being reconfigured and respatialised. In this paper I argue that models of ‘publicity’ have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which publics are deeply embedded in social and machinic complexes involving the mobilities of people, objects, and information. The first half offers an overview of how the converging technologies of mobility and communication have created new temporalities and spatialities for public participation. In the second half I turn to a theoretical programme for rethinking public connectivity and disconnectivity not in terms of the conventional imagery of networks, but as more fluid and contingent social structures that Harrison White has described in terms of coupling and decoupling. Publics are becoming more ‘mobile’ in two ways: first, there is an increasing tendency to slip between private and public modes of interaction, as a result of the new forms of fluid connectivity enabled by mobile communication technologies; and, second, there are opportunities for new kinds of publics to assemble or gel momentarily (and then just as quickly dissolve) as a result of newly emerging places and arenas for communication.

The new mobilities paradigm for a live sociology

This article offers an overview of the field of mobilities research, tracing the theoretical antecedents to the study of mobilities both within the classical sociological tradition and at its borders with other disciplines or theoretical schools. It examines how ‘the new mobilities paradigm’ differs from earlier approaches to globalization, nomadism, and flow, and outlines some of the key themes and research areas within the field, in particular the concepts of mobility systems, mobility capital, mobility justice, and movement-space. In addressing new developments in mobile methodologies and realist ontologies, this review of the field concludes with a call for an emergent vital sociology that is attentive to its own autopoiesis.

The islanding effect: post-disaster mobility systems and humanitarian logistics in Haiti

Natural disasters bring to the fore the astounding interdependence and fragility of the complex mobility systems and infrastructural moorings that make up contemporary transnational geographies. Cities – and especially entire islands – suffering catastrophic events are illustrative of how the dynamic intertwining of transportation, communication, provisioning, and scheduling systems can rapidly unravel. Through an analysis of the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, this article examines how natural disasters demobilize and remobilize; how they strike at mobility systems and trouble mobility justice; and also engender their own unique mobilities (and immobilities). Through an analysis of the uneven network capital expended as humanitarian mobility into post-earthquake Port-au-Prince (with comparison to post-hurricane New Orleans) it is shown how post-disaster logistics simultaneously produce disconnections, limit capabilities for mobility, and introduce what is theorized as an ‘islanding effect’ on the victims of the disaster. This is further delineated through close analysis of two crucial post-earthquake reconfigurations: the militarization of air mobilities and the humanitarian use of aerial visioning technologies and GIS in the emergency response. US military control of the international airport and use of aerial surveillance and geo-mapping for disaster response reinforced existing uneven mobility regimes, which subject marginalized and racialized populations of the Caribbean to enhanced border control, migrant interdiction and criminalization. Through the disaster response itself, rapid deployment of these new (im)mobility infrastructures deepened spatial inequalities, diminished mobility justice, and reproduced subjects with differential mobility capability. The article also considers counter-geographies and resistance to the injustices of post-disaster mobility regimes.

Bodies, cybercars and the mundane incorporation of automated mobilities

Cars are technologies that re-shape corporeal existence, material environments and social temporalities in diverse and complex ways, with impacts on all people, spaces and times, not only those that are explicitly ‘automobilized’. This article aims to interrogate claims that the new technologies of mobile data processing, information transmission and wireless communication that have been brought into the ‘banal’ performance of car driving are affecting not only the driving experience but the entire body-person. The first part reviews recent phenomenological approaches to the embodied car driver–road assemblage, including claims that kinaesthetics and haptics are significantly transforming ‘movement-space’. The second part presents a content analysis of US corporate advertising, car industry websites, sales brochures and media reports on new technologies to consider whether and how reconfigurations of mundane mobility systems might be impinging upon the performances, practices and materialities of the human and the car, in particular the habituation of the luxury car driver to new technologies. In contrast, participant observation in the Philadelphia International Auto Show (5–13 February 2005) and analysis of local advertising markets suggests that changes in the embodied experience of driving have been minimal. The third part draws on internal industry reports and publications by road safety and oversight agencies in the USA (with some attention to Europe) to show that the most significant changes are actually taking place in less visible software-driven systems, automated communication, surveillance and ‘intelligent transport systems’, which are transforming the quotidian infrastructures and ‘infostructures’ of cars, streets, highways and cities in ways that are more mundane yet more far-reaching than the individualistic and personalized rhetoric of commodity marketing would suggest.

Mobilizing the new mobilities paradigm

Abstract A new mobilities paradigm emerged a decades or so ago in the context of significant theoretical shifts, methodological developments and novel research questions and approaches. We begin by considering what is meant by the idea of a “paradigm” from Thomas Kuhn. We then examine many ways in which this new paradigm transformed applied mobilities research over the past decade and how it might continue to reconfigure it. The new paradigm and three interconnected theoretical approaches are set out, before turning to assess the impact of the new paradigm upon emerging fields of social science by using various quantitative and qualitative measures. We examine the transformed ecology of this significant emergent field. Finally, the article explores the paradigm’s important relevance for applied research in urban transportation, climate change and energy transitions.

Together and Apart: Affective Ambiences and Negotiation in Families’ Everyday Life and Mobility

Abstract This article addresses the affective, emotional, and familial dimensions of urban everyday mobility. Drawing on theoretical inspiration from phenomenology, non-representational theory, and mobilities research on the relational mobilities of children and families, the paper explores the everyday mobility of 11 households with children in the multi-modal context of Copenhagen, Denmark. Following the conceptualization of everyday mobility practices as heterogeneous ‘negotiation in motion’, the empirical analysis investigates how the strong relational dynamics between household members are organized around affect, care, familial bonding, and the rhythms of everyday life, which shape spatial patterns of moving together and apart. A new qualitative method combining GPS tracking, mapping, and household interviews is explored to show how everyday patterns of relational mobility are filtered through spatial affordances, affective ambience, and the temporalities of the lifecourse to influence transport alternatives of route and modal choices.

Uneven Mobility Futures: A Foucauldian Approach

Abstract This assessment of past and future directions in mobility research calls for a Foucauldian approach to better understand the apparatus of uneven mobility illustrated via three examples: tourism mobilities and racialized space, geo-ecologies of elite secession, and disease mobilities and quarantine. Building upon an ‘archaeological’ and ‘geneaological’ study of territory, communication, and speed, this essay argues for both a deeper historicizing of mobility research in terms of colonial histories, political ecologies, and biopolitics, as well as a deeper excavation of the material resource bases of mobility in extractive industries, military power, and biomobilities of racial formation. Sovereign control over mobility, individual ‘disciplined mobility’ and counter-mobilities, and the surveillance, securitization, and production of knowledge about mobilities each emerge as fundamental elements for the future history of uneven mobilities.