Mobility Flashcards
Blunt (2007)
Mobility is not simply a question of movement, it is about the politics of how we think about the governance of space.
“The frameworks that facilitate some mobilities while restricting others are themselves inseparably bound up with the embodied politics of difference”
Cultural geographical research on migration in relation to broader debates about mobility, trans-nationality and diaspora. The cultural geographies of migration represent a wide and diverse field of research- as shown by recent work on mobility (e.g. link to Cresswell)
The ‘mobility turn’ has sought to challenge both the sedenterist and nomadic production of knowledge. There is a key interest in the embodied politics of mobility and immobility.
Cresswell (2006)
Mobility is associated with freedom, opportunity and modernity. The modern individual is above all else, a mobile human being (seems self-evident to the notion of Western modernity).
High modernity has been characterized by a particular way of seeing- one which seeks to impose order on the chaos of life (making the unknown known). This means that mobility is also a source of anxiety and fear in modernity (chaotic and forever on the move).
Mobility involves a displacement; the act of moving between locations. The movements of people are also the products and producers of power.
Mobility is a socially produced motion: something that is observable, ideas about mobility and mobility as an embodied process. Mobility seems like chaotic thing; but this is only because the experiences of mobility are often not revealed.
Mobility is a fact of life- to be human is to have some capacity for mobility. However, it is precisely its universality that makes is a powerful part of ideology.
The fact that our bodies allow us to move means that the meanings that are mapped onto mobility become all the more powerful. Knowledge surrounding mobility is so deeply implicated in the politics of the modern world.
Sheller and Urry (2006)
Mobility is not simply the movement from A to B- it captures a broader set of infrastructures and systems that structure forms of mobility…
Space and time: space is produced through forms of mobility- technology has practically shrunk space
People and place: diverse types of mobility have consequence for different people around the globe; fast/slow lanes
Infrastructure: this can condition types of mobility- they are often embedded (urban infrastructure, borders or bodies).
Nyers (2010)
Argues that it is “through movement that bodies encounter and confront one another, thereby developing relationships that constitute the myriad ways of being and living in the world”
How these encounters are structured and performed is of intense political significance. This can determine whether people are hospitable or hostile.
EXAMPLE: I am American’ is a complex declaration. There is an absence in this statement- something unspoken and unnamed. This implies a claim to citizenship- this is absent, even though its absence can leave one open to a whole host of everyday forms of exclusion.
The good person gets associated with the good citizen. Citizenship is more than just legal status or the distribution of rights- it is a struggle for the right to have rights.
There are attempts to reject this notion- don’t ask don’t tell services in NYC or sanctuary cities like San Francisco seeking to build communities without reference to status. BUT, the lines here are blurred; the provision of such services are closely linked to the core rights of citizenship: welfare, housing and emergency services…
Amoore (2006)
Argues that the “line of sight that is at work in contemporary border controls is a regime of perception and a set of practices by which the lines of discrimination and partition are concealed”
EXAMPLE: Biometric borders. Migrants have to claim asylum in the first country that they arrive in. In this country a fingerprint is taken by border police and uploaded to a database. This acts to limit further mobility.
Gill et al. (2018)
Argue that the EU has been a proponent of the development of carceral spaces; the development of detention centres in countries that are not part of the 1951 agreement.
Mobility is linked to detention and imprisonment . Offshoring is increasingly being used to restrict the mobility of migrants.
EXAMPLE: Example: Australia and Nauru. A regional processing centre was set up here in 2001; essentially a detention centre. By 2014, there were 1344 asylum seekers on the island (still 189 in 2018). These asylum seekers were prevented from reaching the places in which they intended to claim asylum. They are instead transported to places outside of the international law. This is an example of the externalization of borders.
Leitner and Ehrkamp (2006)
Argue that it is important to recognize that regimes of mobility are increasingly creating new forms of social resistance.
New spaces of belonging are being created- spaces of shared struggle. This links to cities of sanctuary and Nyers (2010).
Edkins and Phin-Fat (2005)
Argue that “asylum policies produce asylum seekers as nothing more than bare life in the camps that house them while they wait to be processes. Then neither their claim is granted, or they are deported a northing more than economic migrants. It is yet another example of how sovereign power draws lines”
Vaughan-Williams (2008)
The borders of Europe are not necessarily where they are meant to be according to the conventional inside/outside model.
The concept of the border relates to a site where control takes place on the movement of subjects into, or within, the EU. BUT, since the Schengen Agreement, the sites of control over the movement of subjects have been disaggregated from the territory of member states
Border controls are becoming more differentiated and detached from the territorial logic and more targeted at specific groups. Additionally, new technologies such as biometrics disperse the EU’s borders spatially and temporally; multiplied but reduced in their localisation.
The EU’s response to the perceived threat of terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 has witnessed a shift from traditional security practices to technologies of surveillance. Surveillance should be understood as a form of bordering.
But what is interesting here is that citizens are becoming objects of surveillance AND agents of surveillance (citizens are becoming Europe’s border guards). The EU is increasingly linking notions of European citizenship with anti-terrorist initiatives
EXAMPLE: The Hague Programme does this- putting the two together in a narrative of freedom, security and justice. The role of the citizen is helping to counter the threat of terrorism. BUT, we need to ask who is the ‘we’?
Pallister-Wilkins (2016)
Argues for an understanding of security barriers as socio-technical devices.
Security fences should be understood as products of particular modes of government. They are also producers of particular populations through their ability to perform interruptions and capture data.
This article challenges the dominant narratives of walls fences and barriers that is present in much border studies- the idea that walls don’t work due to social relations.
BUT, this article shows that security barriers productively work with and through these social relations by the practices of interruption data capture. This is increasing with the emergence of technology such as biometrics- which places the body at the centre of mobility.
Seeing security barriers as socio-technic devices foregrounds their productive nature, uncovering their role in creating deliberate times and spaces for the production of data.
