The Ethics Of Mobilities

With this book the international academic discourse on mobility is taken a step further, through the intertwined perspectives of different social sciences, engineering and the humanities. The Ethics of Mobilities departs from the recent interest in social surveillance, raised by the use of technology for the surveillance and control of mobility as well as for transport. It widens this theme to encompass a broad scale of issues, ranging from freedom and escape to social exclusion and control, thus raising important questions of ethics, identity and religion; questions that are dealt with by a diverse, yet structured range of chapters, arranged around the themes of ethics and religion, and freedom and control. Through their variety and diversity of perspectives, the chapters of this book offer a substantial interdisciplinary contribution to the socially and environmentally relevant discussion about what a technically and economically accelerating mobility does to life and how it might be transformed to sustain a more life-enhancing future. Ethics of Mobilities will excite not only international interest, but will also appeal to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, in fields as diverse as theology and engineering.

Human mobility is dramatically on the rise; globalization and modern technology have increased transportation and migration. Frequent journeys over large distances cause huge energy consumption, severely impact local and global natural environments and raise spiritual and ethical questions about our place in the world. 'Spaces of Mobility' presents an analysis of the socio-political, environmental, and ethical aspects of mobility. The volume brings together essays that examine why and how modern modes of transport emerge, considering their effect on society. The religious significance of contemporary travel is outlined, namely its impact on pilgrimage, Christology and ethics. The essays examine the interaction between humans and their surroundings and question how increased mobility affects human identity and self-understanding. 'Spaces of Mobility' will be of interest to students and scholars seeking to understand the impact of mobility on modern culture and society, the ethics behind contemporary transport systems and the conditions of immigrants in a world of constant travel.

This groundbreaking book investigates the clash between a desire for unfettered mobility and the prevalence of inequality, exploring how this generates frictions in everyday life and how it challenges the ideal of just cosmopolitanism. Reading fictional and popular cultural texts against real global contexts, it develops an ‘aesthetics of justice’ that does not advocate cosmopolitan mobility at the expense of care and hospitality but rather interrogates their divorce in neoliberal contexts.

The 21st century seems to be on the move, perhaps even more so than the last. With cheap travel, and more than two billion cars projected worldwide for 2030. And yet, all this mobility is happening incredibly unevenly, at different paces and intensities, with varying impacts and consequences to the extent that life on the move might be actually quite difficult to sustain environmentally, socially and ethically. As a result 'mobility' has become a keyword of the social sciences; delineating a new domain of concepts, approaches, methodologies and techniques which seek to understand the character and quality of these trends. This Handbook explores and critically evaluates the debates, approaches, controversies and methodologies, inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. It brings together leading specialists from range of backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessible way whilst giving detailed grounding in the evolution of past debates on mobilities. It illustrates disciplinary trends and pathways, from migration studies and transport history to communications research, featuring methodological innovations and developments and conceptual histories - from feminist theory to tourist studies. It explores the dominant figures of mobility, from children to soldiers and the mobility impaired; the disparate materialities of mobility such as flows of water and waste to the vectors of viruses; key infrastructures such as logistics systems to the informal services of megacity slums, and the important mobility events around which our world turns; from going on vacation to the commute, to the catastrophic disruption of mobility systems. The text is forward-thinking, projecting the future of mobilities as they might be lived, transformed and studied, and possibly, brought to an end. International in focus, the book transcends disciplinary and national boundaries to explore mobilities as they are understood from different perspectives, different fields, countries and standpoints. This is an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in mobility across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.

By thinking in terms of the geographies of mobilities, we are better able to understand the central importance of movements, rhythms and shifting emplacements over the life-course. This innovative book represents research from a new and flourishing multidisciplinary field that includes, among other things, studies on smart cities, infrastructures and networks; mobile technologies for automated highways or locative media; mobility justice and rights to stay or enter or reside. These activities, cadences and changing attachments to place have profound effects—first upon how we conduct or govern ourselves and each other via many social institutions, and second upon how we constitute the spaces in and through which our lives are experienced. This scholarship also has clear connections to numerous aspects of social and spatial policy and planning.

This collection investigates the relationship between mobilities and social justice to develop the concept of mobility justice. Two introductory chapters outline how social justice concepts can strengthen analyses of mobility as socially structured movement in particular fields of power, what new justice-related questions arise by considering uneven mobilities through a social justice frame, and what a ‘mobile ontology’ contributes to understandings of justice in relation to 21st century social relations. In 15 subsequent chapters authors analyze the material infrastructures that configure mobilities and co-constitute injustice, the justice implications of ‘more-than-human’ movements of food and animals, and mobility-related injustices produced in relation to institutional acts of governance and through micro-scale embodied relations of race, gender, class and sexuality that shape the uneven freedom of human bodily movements. The volume brings numerous scales, types and facets of mobility into conversation with multiple approaches to social justice, to theorize mobility justice and reimagine social justice as a mobile concept appropriate for analyzing the effects and ethics of contemporary life.

Grounded in scholarly analysis and personal reflection, and drawing on a multi-sited and multi-method research design, Momentous Mobilities disentangles the meanings attached to temporary travels and stays abroad and offers empirical evidence as well as novel theoretical arguments to develop an anthropology of mobility. Both focusing specifically on how various societies and cultures imagine and value boundary-crossing mobilities “elsewhere” and drawing heavily on his own European lifeworld, the author examines momentous travels abroad in the context of education, work, and spiritual quests and the search for a better quality of life.

Being socially and geographically mobile is generally seen as one of the central aspects of women's wellbeing. Alongside health, education and political participation, mobility is indispensable in order for women to reach goals such as agency and freedom. Building on new philosophical underpinnings of 'mobility', whereby society is seen to be framed by the convergence of various mobilities, this volume focuses on the intersection of mobility, social justice and gender. The authors reflect on five highly interdependent mobilities that form and reform social life: *