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In this article, I map subaltern mobilities: practices of movement that I define as flexible, vernacular, and specific to postcolonial subjects. I do so through a six-month ethnography of "dollar cabs" used by Caribbean immigrants in Brooklyn, New York--taxis recognized not by exterior color or medallion but by the way they blow their horns, the familiarity between driver and passengers, and other diacritics this article critically attends to. These discursive geographies and practices allow Caribbean immigrants to navigate the U.S. urban landscape and to interact with each other in unique ways. Because dollar cabs often operate outside of dominant structures of licensure, they have been studied primarily as informal paratransit systems. This article offers a critique of the framework of informality as it relates to mobilities of subaltern subjects and argues that, given their focus on systems rather than practices, scholars have foreclosed on the analytical possibilities of fully understanding the social within these geographies of mobility. Through this ethnography I make a significant theoretical and methodological intervention by showing how both international and local subaltern movements and flows have disrupted, produced, and been affected by the global city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the explosive growth of mobilities research, much sociospatial theory continues to be rooted in a sedentarist perspective, failing to incorporate the insights of this burgeoning field. Mobilities research, in contrast, often considers a variety of sociospatial relations, yet stops short of coherent integration with other dimensions of sociospatiality. In this article, we examine the mobilities turn in light of Jessop, Brenner, and Jones's (2008) TPSN framework, which recognizes the polymorphic nature of sociospatial relations. We discuss the interrelationships between mobility and the four distinct sociospatialities identified by Jessop, Brenner, and Jones: territory (T), place (P), scale (S), and networks (N). Each of these sociospatialities is coimplicated with mobility: Territory concerns the malleable areal and bordered structure of the state and the uneven freedoms granted, and constraints imposed on, objects and bodies as they attempt to move through and across political jurisdictions; place emphasizes the embedded and performative nature of mobility and considers place-appropriate and place-transgressive activity; scale concerns movement associated with the tangled and politicized processes of scale production and examines how mobility is affected by the uneven scaling of power, resources, opportunity, and identity; networks address flows of bodies, objects, and knowledge across space, through specific channels. To illustrate the coimplicated relationships among mobility and territory, place, scale, and networks, we examine the practice of automobility, stressing the ontological contingency of mobility: Neither mobility nor fixity can be assumed. Mobility is, rather, a social, cultural, and political achievement, inherently power-laden and recursively bound up in the production of territory, place, scale, and networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates over space and spatiality have touched on a variety of different fields within geography but have rarely considered transportation or mobilities. Mobile objects and actors can be seen as occupying space only temporarily; as constructing space through their travels (including waiting to travel); as being present and absent before, after, and during their travels; or a host of other possibilities that complicate the geographer's basic question: What is where? A theoretical consideration of the spatialities of transportation and mobilities could offer new analytic tools not only for scholars in these areas but for those interested in the production of space more broadly. It also offers the possibility to bring together transportation geography and mobilities under one framework. This article draws on the work of Kamil Skrbek, a Czech geographer active in the twentieth century, to explore four kinds of spaces: spaces of movement, spaces of transportation, structural transportation space, and areas of transportation. These four types include different extents infrastructure, vehicles, and passengers; places through which these objects pass or bypass; social, cultural, and economic discourses and meanings; and lived experiences of those within and outside of various transportation networks. Using the example of the shipment of crude oil by rail within North America, we explicate how these different spaces are relevant to the issue and what they offer to an analysis of this important topic that existing approaches cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]