Geographies of Mobility

Abstract

This introductory piece sets the context for the special issue and explains its rationale. It offers a series of reflections on the rise of the mobilities turn and its relations with preexisting research traditions, most notably transportation geography. Rather than placing different approaches in opposition and favoring one over others, we contend that all need to be seen as situated, partial, and also generative modes of abstraction. Each of these approaches makes mobility exist in specific and ultimately simplified and selective ways. In addition, we argue that geography as a pluralistic discipline will benefit from further conversations between modes of conceptualizing, theorizing, and examining mobility. We outline five lines along which such conversations can be structured: conceptualizations and analysis, inequality, politics, decentering and decolonization, and qualifying abstraction. The article concludes with discussion on three fruitful directions for future research on mobility.

此一引介文章, 为此特刊提供脉络, 并解释其逻辑依据。本文提供一系列对于能动性转向兴起的反思, 及其与既有的研究传统之间的关係, 其中多半是运输地理学。有异于将不同的方法相互对立并偏好其中一种方法, 我们主张, 所有的方法皆需被视为情境化、不完全、且同时具有生产力的抽象化模式。每一种方法, 皆使能动性存在于特定且最终是简化且选择性的方式。此外, 我们主张, 地理学作为多元的领域, 将会进一步从概念化、理论化、以及检视能动性的各种模式之间的进一步对话中获益。我们概述此般对话可进行建构的五大方向༚概念化与分析, 不均等, 政治, 去中心化与去殖民, 以及限定抽象化。本文于结论中, 探讨未来能动性研究的三种成果丰硕之方向。

Esta parte introductoria pone el contexto para el número especial y explica su razón de ser. Ofrece una serie de reflexiones sobre el ascenso del giro de las movilidades y sus relaciones con las tradiciones de investigación preexistentes, más notablemente con la geografía del transporte. Más que formular diferentes enfoques en oposición y favoreciendo a uno sobre los demás, planteamos que todos los enfoques deben verse como situados, parciales y también como modos generativos de abstracción. Cada uno de estos enfoques hacen que la movilidad exista de maneras específicas y, en últimas, simplificadas y selectivas. Argüimos, además, que como disciplina pluralista la geografía se beneficiará de conversaciones avanzadas entre los modos de conceptualizar, teorizar y examinar la movilidad. Presentamos un esquema de cinco líneas a lo largo de las cuales puedan estructurarse tales conversaciones: conceptualizaciones y análisis, desigualdad, política, disgregación y colonización, y abstracción calificada. El artículo concluye con la discusión de tres direcciones productivas de investigación futura sobre movilidad.

Key Words:

• decentering
• inequality
• mobility
• mode of abstraction
• politics
• transport

关键词：:

• 去中心化
• 不均等
• 能动性
• 抽象化的模式
• 政治
• 运输。

Palabras clave:

• descentración
• desigualdad
• movilidad
• modo de abstracción
• política
• transporte

Acknowledgments

We thank all individuals who submitted abstracts and manuscripts for consideration. We deeply appreciate all of the authors for their excellent contributions and their efforts in adhering to the tight timetable and length restriction we are required to impose. We are also grateful to the editorial board members and reviewers who provided constructive and timely comments. Publication of this special issue would be impossible without the superb assistance of Jennifer Cassidento, Miranda Lecea, and Robin Maier of the AAG Office.

Funding

Mei-Po Kwan was supported by the following grants when writing this article: NSF IIS-1354329, NSF BCS-1244691, and NSFC 41529101. Tim Schwanen was supported by grant ES/N011538/1 by the ESRC.

Notes

1. We conducted a search of the journal's back catalogue by using mobility as the search term for the first 100 volumes of the Annals on the JSTOR Web site. More than 400 articles and commentaries were returned, going as far back as 1914.

2. Although the field is more vibrant, engaging, and concerned with more topical issues than many geographers believe (Schwanen 2016), it remains slow in engaging with the wider philosophical and theoretical debates elsewhere in the discipline. It continues to struggle with the legacy of the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s and finds it difficult to reconcile the concerns of cultural and critical geography with the pressures exerted by cross-disciplinary dialogues with engineering, economics, and business studies and the unequal power relations characterizing those dialogues (see also Hanson 2000; Ng et al. 2014).

3. Whitehead himself was particularly concerned about inertia and obsolescence in abstractions. His philosophical project in the 1920s and 1930s can be seen as a fallible attempt to revise abstractions in thought dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but no longer appropriate in light of the works of Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and others.

4. Staeheli, Marshall, and Maynard (this issue) discuss ethnographic fieldwork conducted at an international youth conference that took place in Sri Lanka, and Best (this issue) studies dollar cabs operated by Caribbean immigrants in Brooklyn, New York.

5. See Mignolo (2011) for discussion of the differences between postcolonial and decolonial thought. Although both seek to confront the legacies of colonialism, these bodies of thought have different origins and genealogies. Postcolonial scholarship emerged from the experience of British colonization in the Middle East and South Asia and has been influenced heavily by postmodernity and poststructuralism. Originating from the Caribbean and Latin America, decoloniality seeks to make visible, critique, and move beyond historic and contemporary forms of epistemic, social, political, and economic domination that place Eurocentric concepts and practices at the apex of civilization.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mei-Po Kwan

MEI-PO KWAN is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include GIScience, environmental health, human mobility, sustainable transport and cities, and GIS methods in geographic research.

Tim Schwanen

TIM SCHWANEN is Associate Professor of Transport Studies and Director of the Transport Studies Unit in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include mobility, cities, well-being, energy consumption, and the conceptualization of temporality in geography.