The Politics Of Mobility

The Politics of Mobility presents case studies of local transport policy-making and in-depth analysis of UK national transport policy in the period 1987-2000 to highlight how policy was promoted and resisted.

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and experiencing the extreme challenges of urbanization. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of movement. Sheller shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement. She connects the body, street, city, nation, and planet in one overarching theory of the modern, perpetually shifting world. Concepts of mobility are examined on a local level in the circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and “the right to the city.” On the planetary level, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other elites are able to roam freely, while migrants and those most in need are abandoned and imprisoned at the borders. Mobility Justice is a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility in a world in which the mobility commons have been enclosed. It is a call for a new understanding of the politics of movement and a demand for justice for all.

Increasingly, everyday living and practices depend on how mobility (and immobility) is articulated through the ever-present influence of a range of physical and virtual infrastructures. This book focuses in particular on the 'political' dimension of mobility and immobility, which plays a key role in establishing patterns of proximity in real and virtual co-presence. Proximity is seen as the result of choices, negotiations and practices carried out in different settings. Drawing from different literature streams (Sociology, Organization Studies and Science and Technology Studies), this book analyses patterns of mobility in relation to new possibilities of organizing space, time, and proximity to others. Different phenomena - from memorial sites to migration, from urban mobility to mobile work - are analysed, illustrating different types of proximity through mobility and immobility. In doing so, this book offers a cross-cultural and innovative theoretical framing of issues linked to mobility, through the link with immobility and proximity.

Irregular migration has emerged as an issue of intensive political debate and governmental practice over recent years. Critically intervening in debates around the governing of irregular migration, The Contested Politics of Mobility explores the politics of mobility through what is defined as an ‘analytic of irregularity’. It brings together authors who address issues of mobility and irregularity from a range of distinct perspectives, to focus on the politics of control as well as the politics of migration. The volume develops an account of irregularity as a produced, ambivalent and contested socio-political condition, showing how this is activated through wide-ranging ‘borderzones’ that pull between migration and control. Covering cases from across contemporary North America and Europe and examining a range of control mechanisms, such as biometrics, deportation and workplace raiding, the volume refuses the term ‘illegal’ to describe movements of people across borders. In so doing, it highlights the complexity of relations between different regions and between a politics of migration and a politics control, and makes a timely intervention in the intersecting fields of critical citizenship, migration and security studies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, international relations, sociology, migration and law.

This collection of essays investigates the convergence between the postmodern politics of mobility and a politics of metaphor, a politics, in other words, in the context of which the production and displacement of meaning(s) constitute the major stakes. Ranging from discussions of re-territorialization, multiculturalism, “digisporas” and transnational politics and ethics, to September 11th, the Pentagon’s New Map, American legislation on Chinese immigration, Gianni Amelio’s film Lamerica, Keith Piper’s online installations and Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios, the collection aims to follow three different theoretical trajectories. First, it seeks to rethink our concepts of mobility in order to open them up to the complexity that structures the thoughts and practices of a global order. Second, it critically examines the privileged position of concepts and metaphors of mobility within postmodern theory. In juxtaposing conflictual theoretical formulations, the book sets out to present the competing responses that fuel academic debates around this issue. Finally, it evaluates the influence of our increasingly mobile conceptual frameworks and everyday experience on the redefinition of politics that is currently under way, especially in the context of Post-Marxist theory. Its hope is to contribute to the production of alternative political positions and practices that will address the conflicting desires for attachment and movement marking postmodernity.

Our world is unquestionably one in which ubiquitous movements of people, goods, technologies, media, money, and ideas produce systems of flows. Comparing case studies from across the world, including those from Benin, the United States, India, Mali, Senegal, Japan, Haiti, and Romania, this book focuses on quotidian landscapes of mobility. Despite their seemingly familiar and innocuous appearances, these spaces exert tremendous control over our behavior and activities. By examining and mapping the politics of place and motion, this book analyzes human beings’ embodied engagements with their built world and provides diverse perspectives on the ideological and political underpinnings of landscapes of mobility. In order to describe landscapes of mobility as a historically, socially, and politically constructed condition, the book is divided into three sections-objects, contacts, and flows. The first section looks at elements that constitute such landscapes, including mobile bodies, buildings, and practices across multiple geographical scales. As these variable landscapes are reconstituted under particular social, economic, ecological, and political conditions, the second section turns to the particular practices that catalyze embodied relations within and across such spaces. Finally, the last section explores how the flows of objects, bodies, interactions, and ecologies are represented, presenting a critical comparison of the means by which relations, processes, and exchanges are captured, depicted, reproduced and re-embodied.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Mobility and security are key themes for students of international politics in a globalised world. This book brings together research on the political regulation of movement - its material enablers and constraints. It explores aspects of critical security studies and political geography in order to bridge the gap between disciplines that study global modernity, its politics and practices. The contributions to this book cover a broad range of topics that are bound together by their focus on both the politics and the material underpinnings of movement. The authors engage diverse themes such as internet infrastructure, the circulation of data, discourses of borders and bordering, bureaucracy, and citizenship, thereby identifying common themes of security and mobility today.

Mobility, which has represented a critical scientific category and political driver, is currently under strong public scrutiny: has mobility lost its potential for social cohesion and political integration? Europe Beyond Mobility: Mobilities, Social Cohesion and Political Integration assesses this question by focusing on the European integration process, conceptualized as a political project for the promotion of different flows of mobility. Mobility has been a fundamental tool for territorial strength and political integration among European countries. Based on a realistic understanding of the potentials and limits of mobility, this book pleads for a "resonant mobility" in the interest of a renovated European integration process. It examines how, in opposition to those advocating for national borders and mobility restrictions, the EU needs to explore new regulatory models which limit mobility’s adverse social, economic, and environmental impacts and make accessible the benefits of alternative flow models. It also provides an analytical framework for the study of current trends of mobility limitation, migration restriction and re-bordering, and offers a complementary and innovative framework for the study of globalization. Europe Beyond Mobility will be of interest to academics and students as well as policy makers and practitioners internationally in the fields of mobility, migration and border studies.