Module 5 Flashcards
} Contemporary paradigm in the social sciences that explores the movement of people
(human migration, individual mobility, travel, transport), ideas (see e.g. meme) and things
(transport), as well as the broader social implications of those movements.
} Can also be thought as the movement of people through social classes, social
mobility or income, income mobility
Mobilities
} A mobility “___“ in the social sciences began in the 1990s in response to the increasing
realization of the historic and contemporary importance of movement on individuals and
society.
} This ___ has been driven by generally increased levels of mobility and new forms of
mobility where bodies combine with information and different patterns of mobility.
Turn
_____ incorporates new ways of theorizing about how these mobilities
lie “at the center of constellations of power, the creation of identities and the
microgeographies of everyday life.”
The Mobilities Paradigm
travel of people for work, leisure, family life, pleasure, migration and escape
Corporeal
movement of objects delivered to producers, consumers and retailers
Physical
travel elsewhere through images of places and peoples upon TV (1 billion
worldwide)
Imaginative
travel often in real time on the internet so transcending geographical and social
distance; as Microsoft asks: ‘where do you want to go today?’
Virtual
travel through person-to-person messages via letters, telephone, fax
and mobile
Communicative
} Acceptance that mobility is endemic to life, society, and space
} Elevated mobility to a class of core geographic concepts to which space, place,
network, scale and territory also belong
} Diversified the understandings and definitions what has always been a fuzzy term
Mobilities Turn (1990s) Benefits
Emerging Themes in the Study of Mobility:
} Conceptualizing and Analyzing Mobility
} Inequalities
} Politics of Mobility
} Decentering Mobility
} Qualifiying Abstractions of Mobility
} Addressing general and broad theoretical, conceptual, analytical and
methodological issues of mobility
} Spaces of movement, transporation, structural transport,and areas of transportation
} Data-driven geography
Conceptualizing and Analyzing Mobility
} ____ and exclusion in transport (senior,pwd, etc)
} Mobilities generate an outcome of exclusion
} Gender, race, and their intersection with other processes of social differentiation
} ____ in mobility are not linked to social identity
} Differences in network capital and motility create social stratifications that are only
weakly correlated with gender, class and age.
Inequalities
} Ways in mobilities are productive of social relations (production and distribution of
power) and produced by them
} Mobilities and citizenship: refugeeism
} Geopolitics, Borders and territories
Politics of Mobility
Globalized and globalizing mobilities of people, info, and ideas – scholarship is
veering away from the Global North
Decentering Mobility
Benefits of Decentering Mobility:
} Opens new questions and concers across traditions of studying mobility
} Demonstrates spatial & historical contingency of understanding mobility
} Facilitates the diffusion of postcolonial and decolonial thinking
