Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes

Movement is inherently political. In Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, mobilities scholar Mimi Sheller shows us exactly why and how. In an ambitious and wide-spanning monograph that transcends disciplinary boundaries, Sheller presents a much-needed model of mobility justice to help us rethink ways in which a mobilities framework can be used to understand the multiscalar and entangled dimensions of how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, how unequally mobile subjects are created, and how a justly mobile future can be imagined. Drawing from spatial theory, critical theory, and philosophical theories of justice, the book is divided into six chapters of multiscalar case studies.

Sheller first delineates her concept of mobility justice, which combines the new mobilities paradigm and diverse theories of justice. The new mobilities paradigm is a concept, originally put forth by herself and fellow mobilities scholar Urry (Sheller and Urry 2006), that pays particular attention to how mobilities, rather than being secondary to space, have actually always been “the precondition for … different kinds of subjects, spaces, and scales” (p. 9). The paradigm follows the spatial turn in the social sciences in the late twentieth century, with Sheller citing scholars such as Lefebvre (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith 1991) and Massey (1995) as contributing to ideas that the new mobilities paradigm builds on—a relational analysis of space and the understanding that space is always under construction. Likewise, Sheller argues that we must think of mobility as being relational and always under construction as well; thus, movement is not simply the outcome of spatial and political relations, but in fact integral in their making.

Moreover, mobility does not merely concern the movement of people on different scales, but also nonhumans as well, such as information technology, goods, and global systems of energy flow and resource extraction. For example, in Chapter 6, exemplifying Sheller’s multiscalar approach, she demonstrates how the use of electricity itself on a planetary scale has a materiality (p. 139). According to her, it is imperative that we think about where the raw resources come from, what they leave behind, at what costs they come, and the “uneven accessibility” (p. 138) of global energy distributions, simultaneously disproportionately affecting locations of fossil fuel and resource extraction. Even in the case of global logistical networks, systems of “the management of the movement of stuff” (p. 151), a mobility lens allows us to see the multiscalar entanglements of mobility—from macrolevel physical movement of goods; mesolevel policies, infrastructures, and transportation systems governing the movement of goods; to the microlevel embodied labor relations, and the ways in which these are classed, racialized, and gendered.

A key point that Sheller makes clear is that mobility justice is different from spatial justice and transport justice because they are sedentary in nature, relegating mobility to solely being the act of shifting from one set location to another. When we adopt a mobility justice framework, we avoid beginning social analysis from the perspective that nation-states, societies, or people are sedentary, and we are able to uncover relational power dynamics creating friction in movement and striated mobilities.

Mobility justice also represents an intersectional and decolonial attempt to critically combine social justice, racial justice, and climate justice. Whether concerning microlevel injustices like biased policing and “driving while black/brown” racial profiling (p. 63), or macrolevel migrant detention and exclusion, mobility justice is a scale-jumping framework that integrates ideas about mobility from the Global South (she draws on Latin American and Caribbean scholars such as Escobar and Wynter), Indigenous knowledge, and queer and critical disabilities scholarship. When looking at how kinetic elites and the mobility poor are made, Sheller stresses the importance of understanding legacies of settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery, which itself were forms of coerced mobility.

For example, looking at the effects of climate change and climate migration through the lens of settler colonialism can show us not just the global mobilities of energy, but also histories of resource extraction. In the example of access to transport, we can also think of how macrolevel landscapes and political systems are associated with automobility that create differently mobile people—not only playing into everyday embodied mobilities (e.g., physical distance from transport, universal transport design), but also being influenced by histories of highway investment, investment in whiteness through the promotion of homeownership and suburbanization, white flight, and the design of transport systems largely neglecting daily experiences and needs of women.

With uneven (im)mobilities as an important point of inquiry, Sheller also points to the importance of examining “subversive mobilities” (p. 19), as historian Shell (2015) discussed while looking at rebellious forms of animal mobility, to look at forms of resistance against dominant mobility regimes and to show how mobilities, like space, are always contested, made, and remade. From the historical Underground Railroad during slavery in the United States revealing alternative, hidden mobilities guiding people to free states to migrants crossing national borders clandestinely and directly challenging border logics, these are all important in a mobility justice framework that aims to promote a mobile commons, a “socially produced shared space” (p. 160) with communal decision making and governing “outside of capitalism, and beyond or beneath the limits of national borders” (p. 169). Sheller also names Open Streets Initiatives such as Colombia’s Ciclovía as examples of a mobile commons.

Now more than ever, Sheller’s Mobility Justice presents a necessary framework to understand how mobility encapsulates more than simply moving and the freedom to move. Rather, the kinopolitics of mobility also includes thinking about being immobile, differently mobile, and stopped or managed. According to Sheller, “slowness …, acceleration, blockages, stoppage, friction … and coerced movements” (p. 3) reveal the ways in which mobilities are relationally produced, and are sites of localized production of power. Moreover, employing a mobile ontology pushes us to see ways in which infrastructure, laws, practices, and histories of colonialism all shape mobilities. Thinking about the “triple mobility crisis of climate change, migration and urbanization” (p. 1) is also timely as the United States withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement; as migrant deaths across the world continue to soar; and as gentrification, traffic pollution, mass incarceration, immigration detention, and digital divides continue exacerbating the gap between the kinetic elites and mobile poor.

Mobility Justice is a theoretically dense book spanning multiple disciplines, historical periods, and scales. Sheller takes us on a journey from the physical realm of the Earth’s core to the virtual realm and the “imaginative” (p. 12), and leaves us wondering about the limits of a mobility justice framework in the future of space travel, and also in other nonhuman mobilities such as sound and music. The book definitely has a lot to offer for scholars from a wide range of disciplines. From border scholars who might be able to better understand bordering practices as mobility regimes designed to manage mobilities to communication and media scholars who might be able to use concepts of virtual mobilities to understand the inequality in information access and distribution, Sheller’s text will also undoubtedly be of use to urban planners; political scientists; legal scholars; political, climate, and urban geographers; and sociologists, to consider how a mobile ontology can reveal nexuses for alternative mobile possibilities. Overall, Sheller compellingly lays out the foundational theories and moral principles for scholars to use and apply to empirical work, thus successfully theorizing mobility justice and mobilizing theories of justice on multiple scales, proving that mobility justice is as much about daily transport rights and access to the city as it is about global migrant and environmental rights.