Nancy Cook

Mobility Justice in the Context of Disaster

Abstract This article contributes to the critical mobilities literature by developing the concept of mobility justice in relation to its social justice referent. To meet this objective, we draw on two resources. Theoretically, we deploy Iris Marion Young’s theory of social justice that includes relations of institutional domination, alongside those of material distribution, as key aspects of just social relations. Empirically, we focus on the Attabad landslide, which destroyed a large section of the arterial roadway in the Gojal district of northern Pakistan, stranding those living north of the landslide. Our analysis of this mobility crisis demonstrates that state domination is an important mobility justice issue, which tends to be overlooked in studies of mobility exclusions that implicitly privilege relations of distribution. State disaster management strategies enact domination, but also render visible preexisting relations of domination that were established in the context of road infrastructure development and the region’s political liminality, and that have organized and shaped an unjust mobility regime overtime. Achieving mobility justice in post-disaster Gojal requires democratic institutional change at the state level, which will be particularly difficult to realize by this politically peripheral jurisdiction.

Canadian development workers, transnational encounters and cultures of cosmopolitanism

This article focuses on cosmopolitanism as an object of sociological analysis, through an empirical study of Canadian development workers who were posted in Pakistan for extended periods of time and have subsequently resumed their lives in Canada. These global migrants developed various attachments to Pakistani culture and people through their transnational experiences. Employing a continuum of cosmopolitanism, the article describes these attachments, which, it argues, form the basis of a tentative and ambivalent culture of cosmopolitanism as it is lived by these development workers on their return to Canada. The study’s aim is to clarify the concept of cosmopolitanism by documenting the emergence of a new sociality characterized by global connectivities that engender justice-oriented alliances and solidarities.

The Atta Abad Landslide and Everyday Mobility in Gojal, Northern Pakistan

Abstract In early 2010, the massive Atta Abad landslide blocked the Hunza River in the Gojal region of northern Pakistan. It also buried or flooded 25 km of the Karakoram Highway, the only vehicular transportation route connecting this region to the rest of Pakistan. Since the Karakoram Highway opened in 1978, road mobility has become deeply integrated into the everyday economies and time–space fabric of Gojali households. In this paper, we focus on what happens when a natural disaster unexpectedly slams the brakes on movement as a way to understand more fully the sociodevelopmental implications of roads in the rural global South. We review the history of mobility in the region to explain the importance of the Karakoram Highway as a mobility platform that restructured sociospatial relations in Gojal. We then turn to interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and local news sources to outline how residents of 4 Gojali communities were experiencing the economic, social, and emotional impacts of landslide-induced mobility disruptions in the 18 months following the disaster.

Political Ecology of Human-Environment Change in Gojal, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan

In the past half-century, the Gojali people of northern Pakistan have experienced dramatic human-ecological change, the dynamics of which have been shaped by key aspects of the region’s environmental governance context, including Gojal’s geographical peripherality and constitutional liminality, the emerging influence of global conservation and international Ismailism as non-state transnational governance actors, the construction of the Karakoram Highway and subsequent development of a regional road network and the 2010 Attabad landslide disaster and associated influx of food relief. These contextual features have complemented and sometimes contradicted each other to influence Gojal’s political ecology in three ways: they have (1) diminished Gojalis’ inclination and capacity to maintain and productively use agricultural and pastoral environments, (2) limited locals’ access to their ecological resource base and undermined the legitimacy of local resource control and (3) created new Gojali identities that are both less materially rooted in the local environment and more capable of acting politically in support of local resource control.

The dialectical constitution of mobility and immobility: recovering from the Attabad Landslide disaster, Gojal, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan

This paper contributes to the critical mobilities literature by analysing local mobilities in Gojal, northern Pakistan in the aftermath of the 2010 Attabad Landslide, in order to develop new insights regarding the dialectical relationship between mobility and immobility. The landslide destroyed a large section of the Karakoram Highway, the regions arterial roadway. Among its disastrous effects was prolonged disruption of the accustomed movements of 20,000 villagers stranded north of the slide. To show how mobility is constituted dialectically in relation to immobility in this context, we detail the social and economic demobilisations Gojalis faced when the highway became impassable, and outline new mobilities they developed to mitigate the disaster of protracted strandedness. Gojalis responded to demobilisation by remobilising, at different scales, along new routes, in different directions and via new mobility platforms, thereby re-establishing circulation as a paradigm of everyday life and demonstrating the papers argument that disasters are social processes that have simultaneously demobilising and remobilising effects. We conclude that nurturing a multiplicity of mobile relations and practices in several directions and across scales during the disaster recovery process will help Gojalis avoid a similar mobility disaster in the future.

Gendered mobilities in the making: moving from a pedestrian to vehicular mobility landscape in Shimshal, Pakistan

ABSTRACT Although feminist geographers understand gender and mobility as mutually constitutive social processes, few studies explain how gender relations are constituted in particular mobility contexts, and how and why they shape mobility patterns in specific socio-spatial circumstances. We address these questions in an analysis of gendered mobilities in Shimshal, Pakistan, which until recently have taken shape in the context of a pedestrian mobility regime. The gender and mobility relationship has transformed as vehicular mobilities have replaced pedestrian mobilities with the construction of the Shimshal road. To demonstrate empirically the co-constitution of gender and mobility, we analyze aspects of socio-spatial context that have shaped gendered pedestrian mobilities, followed by those associated with the new vehicular mobility regime that are modifying gender relations in Shimshal. Shifting gender relations reshape corporeal mobility patterns. Road infrastructure has enhanced men’s and youth’s outbound travel as wage earners and students, respectively. These mobilities have reshaped women’s capacity to move, constraining their mobility beyond the village. As prosperity becomes contingent on outbound movement, men’s and youths’ social horizons and mobilities are expanding, while women’s compromised access to mobility as a social resource produces new mobility hierarchies and gendered exclusions.

Dealing with Danger Spatial and Mechanical Manipulations in Gilgit, Pakistan

Abstract This article provides a spatial and technologically-oriented analysis of sexual imperialism in contemporary northern Pakistan. I interrogate Western women development workers’ experiences of sexual vulnerability in Gilgit, and argue that their representational practices and spatial negotiations are ambivalently organized by a discourse of racialized sexuality that lingers from the colonial era. This discourse evokes a vague moral panic about ‘lascivious’ indigenous men who lust after white women. Western women cope with sexual threat by regulating social interaction with men and avoiding sexualized public space. But when this is not possible, women prefer to negotiate that space in vehicles, which serve as protective barriers between themselves and Gilgiti men. I draw on Bruno Latour’s actor network theory to explain how jeeps are transformed into social actors as they are employed by Western women to manage gendered, racial, sexual and spatial relations. Once mechanized social actors are implicated in these hierarchical and exclusionary imperial relations, they help perpetuate and solidify them through time and across space. Eroticist and racist discourses about Other men, which are circulated through this effort to cope with sexual danger, reinforce established social, sexual, and spatial boundaries that keep imperial hierarchies between Gilgiti men and Western women intact.