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The relation between climate change and migration is subject to fast growing attention in scientific, policy, and public discourse. It is also subject to numerous representations and containment measures that carve out a new form of migration; one that includes visions of which populations deserve protection, should be stopped, or made mobile, and what areas are worth saving. This article interrogates these processes of bordering associated with climate mobilities research and policymaking, whilst also exploring how border-mobility relations and associated processes of bordering might be changed or rethought in a changing climate. Drawing on empirical examples from different world contexts—ranging from the Pacific to Southern Europe, we centre on the plural and contested ways in which borders in relation to climate mobilities manifest themselves in both geopolitical, conceptual, and cognitive terms, and in doing so build on, but also move beyond, literature examining the securitisation and exclusionary effect of borders vis-à-vis climate mobilities. We signal how a critical understanding of bordering further exposes classifications of so-called internal or international climate migration, of the un/deserving migrant, of the environmental un/privileged; and demonstrate how climate im/mobilities themselves feed into, resist, reshape, or even reimagine processes of (re)bordering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of domestic labor mobility among Brazilian construction workers in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. We start from the premise that mobile laborers are crucial for the physical development and expansion of cities. However, the importance of domestic migrants in this process is insufficiently addressed in mobility studies. Building on existing research on domestic population movements in Brazil, we argue that the current generation of mobile construction workers draws on the intangible and material infrastructure generated by previous generations of migrants to enable novel kinds of (permanent) labor mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between the movement across space and social mobility by analyzing the conditions for internal migration in Spain during the years of the Franco regime. Specifically it reflects on the ways in which migration from the countryside into self-constructed shantytowns in the greater Madrid area was perceived by migrants themselves, and on the strategies that enabled migration to be carried through. By focusing on the challenges that internal migration posed to the spatial practices and mobility regimes of the dictatorship, the article also explores the relationship between spatial movement, social mobility and political repression within the context of a nationalist dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, the Chinese government replaced strict control over outmigration with measures of ‘infrastructural governance’. Instead of dictating who can and who cannot leave, the state manages migration by influencing the sociotechnical conditions of mobility, for instance by defining what responsibilities commercial intermediaries should shoulder and what training a migrant should receive before departure. This article unpacks infrastructural governance by examining the working of ‘base’, orjidiin Chinese. A base is a tight cluster of public and private institutions in a labour source place, designated by the government as an important player in the recruitment of migrant workers. The base manages migration by conditioning the activities that lead to migration, such as how people choose destinations, make payments, and deal with uncertainties in preparing for migration. The base also works on migrants’ relations with family members, village cadres and fellow migrants in order to shape their mobilities. The ethnographic research on the base shows that, infrastructural governance regulates migration effectively, but makes migration more complicated and more costly for the migrants. Infrastructural governance empowers commercial intermediaries and local government, and as such affects broader social relations in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores Finland’s national information society strategies and uses the Finnish case as an example to identify the limitation of the so-called ‘methodological nationalism’ and to explicate the advantages of the mobility paradigm. The research material consists of the Finnish national strategies published between 1995 and 2010. The article identifies two trends from the studied strategies; a further intermingling of physical movement of objects and virtual mobility, and a tendency to reduce corporeal mobility. The study also shows that most mobility-related challenges require international cooperation and multinational solutions, although state-centred thinking was prevalent in the studied strategies. In addition, it provides evidence that the various modes of mobility operate differently in micro and macro level analyses and that the mobilities paradigm could be enriched by studying policies of mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that the cosmopolitan cinema has been largely un-theorised, and should be understood as a mode of production and a cross-cultural practice. It starts by probing the connection between mobility, borders and cosmopolitanism across a range of approaches in the social sciences. Using a cultural sociology lens, it then goes on to explore how images and experiences of borders and mobility matter for the constitution of cosmopolitan cinema as a mode of production, which invites structures of feeling (i.e. care, compassion and empathy) that enable new affective and intellectual engagements of the audience with ‘others’ whose access to cultural dialogue is severely limited. Looking at two film examples (In This WorldandKandahar), and their conditions of production and reception, the paper concludes by showing how particular aesthetic and narrative options are consequential for the creative ways in which human dignity and its violation can be made ‘representable’ and personalized so as to inspire public dialogue – among film-makers, film critics, journalists, interested citizens and viewers – in a transnational public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current text locates the anthropological study of roads within the wider context of studies on mobility and modernity. Besides introducing the articles of this special issue of Mobilities on roads and anthropology, this introduction also addresses some of the broader theoretical and epistemological implications of the anthropological perspective on roads, space, time and (im)mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon and seeks to extend accounts of systems of automobility through an examination of geographies of the motorcycle and motorcyclist – or what we term ‘moto-mobilities’. We utilize the figure of the motorcycle to raise the importance of analysing alternative mobilities: to consider how they appeal to different travelling dispositions and emotions; how they have been represented; and how they have been produced, marketed and consumed. The paper first reflects upon the experiences and embodiment of the motorcycle-rider; second, evaluates representations of moto-mobility; and finally attends to the materiality of mobility via an examination of the economy of motorcycle qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how a group of musicians produce and reproduce their identities whilst on the move. More specifically, it shows how touring (a very specific type of mobility) affects and impacts the musicians’ processes of identity construction. What is it like to be on the road? How do musicians value this experience? What meanings do they confer to their mobility? How does it impact on their identities as musicians? The paper is divided into four parts. First it provides a portrait of what it is like to be on the road with a band in order to inquire into the musicians’ motivations to tour in the second section. Then, there is a significant shift from ethnographic accounts to historical analysis. The third part explores links between the rock culture and mobile sensibilities, from a historical point of view. It concludes with a consideration of the musician as a figure of mobility: someone who depends on mobility to construct himself as such. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this article is to highlight the issue of potential mobilities, by first presenting some possible basic terminology, followed by a critical review of motility as potential mobility, and continuing with an attempt to put forward elements for potential mobilities at times of wide availabilities of mobility technologies. These elements include definitions and meanings for potential mobilities, a discussion of active and passive potential mobilities, and an examination of potential mobilities in light of practiced ones. These discussions permit to suggest a simple model for potential mobilities focusing on the accumulation of mobility needs, access and competences, all of which lead to an appropriation process. This process may bring about various modes of practiced mobilities which on their part may reshape future potential mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article the case of young Somalis with a Dutch passport living in the UK is taken as an example to illustrate that new mobilities have resulted in complex transnational orientations on the part of migrants that may involve more than two different countries. In the early 1990s many Somalis arrived in the Netherlands as asylum seekers. Ten years later, however, a third of the Dutch Somali community had moved to the United Kingdom, many of them at a very young age. These Dutch citizens with a Somali background who now live in the UK are orientated towards the Netherlands (a country where most have resided for more than ten years and where some were even born), the UK (their new ‘home country’), as well as Somalia where they themselves or their parents were raised. These complex affective links with various countries challenge us to reflect critically on the relationships between citizenship, identities and belonging and have an impact on Dutch Somalis’ return mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about the children of Greek labour migrants in Germany. We focus on two life-stages of ‘return’ for this second generation: as young children brought to Greece on holidays or sent back for longer periods, and as young adults exercising an independent ‘return’ migration. We draw both on literature and on our own field interviews with 50 first- and second-generation Greek-Germans. We find the practise of sending young children back to Greece to have been surprisingly widespread yet little documented. Adult relocation to the parental homeland takes place for five reasons: (i) a ‘search for self’; (ii) attraction of the Greek way of life; (iii) the actualisation of the ‘family narrative of return’ by the second, rather than the first, generation; (iv) life-stage events such as going to university or marrying a Greek; (v) escape from a traumatic event or oppressive family situation. Yet the return often brings difficulties, disillusionment, identity reappraisal, and a re-evaluation of the German context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The government of the United Arab Emirates requires all foreign migrant workers to reside on temporary visas. This affects transnational mobility patterns among the one class of residents whom we should expect to show the least degree of transnationalism: second-generation migrants. While the degree of transnationalism varies, a very high number of these migrants leave, then return and then leave again from Dubai. Drawing on 51 semi-structured interviews conducted in Dubai amongst second-generation migrants, most of them of South Asian origin, I argue that the state’s policy towards migrants is important, and more determining than other factors such as ethnic/nationality communities in understanding these migrants’ transnational behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how second-generation Ugandan descendents negotiate ‘return’ to their parental ‘homeland’. In this British-based community of citizens, refugees, asylum-seekers and the undocumented, questions of return intertwine with issues of sanctuary, solidarity, identity and documentation. Institutional categories vie with emotional subjectivities across generations. Many in the first generation maintain a transnational optic as they nest their return orientations to ‘home’ within aspirations for their children; whilst for the second generation questions of ‘return’ reveal multiple identity positions to ‘home’ as country-of-birth Britain and ancestral ‘homeland’ Uganda. Temporal considerations loom large and age, life course and generation act as key variables within these debates, with ‘return’ the contested site for negotiating ‘belonging’. What emerges is a differentiated picture as second-generation descendants enact a range of return mobilities and relational engagements to Uganda as ancestral ‘homeland’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the links of the second generation to their parental homeland, and return visits in particular, is largely lacking. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 75 Albanian teenagers in London, Thessaloniki and Florence, this paper brings a multi-sited perspective on attitudes towards and experiences of homeland visits. Contrasts are drawn between positive themes emerging from the narratives, which are about belonging, family and nature in Albania, and negative impressions which relate to poverty and traditionalism, and a developing sense of boredom as teenagers get older. We then relate some of these contrasting experiences to differences in social integration in the three different host-society contexts. The conclusion elaborates the uniqueness and significance of this case, both in terms of this being the first exploration of the transnational orientations of one of Europe’s newest second generations, and in relation to the home-country context of a liberalising ex-communist country still in a state of economic backwardness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces the special issue on return mobilities. Return movements have been relatively ignored in migration and mobilities research, despite their scale, frequency and variety across time and space. This special issue is part of an overdue but now growing interest in return visits, return migration and transnational circulation which lays special emphasis on ‘ancestral returns’ of the second generation and beyond. The main purpose of this paper is to develop an explanatory framework for locating return mobilities within three conceptual domains: the mobilities paradigm, the transnational approach and diaspora studies. A typology of return mobilities is then developed, onto which the following papers in this issue are mapped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To understand the social fields with which the children of immigrants actually identify, we interrogate the multiple sites and sources which Gujarati-origin Indian American Hindus and Muslims draw upon to construct their religious identities. We find that our respondents create religious selves by combining their imaginings of their parents’ religious upbringing with their own real and imagined experiences of religious life in the US, India, and other salient places around the world. They also incorporate real and perceived understandings of US religious traditions in four broad patterns which we call American-centric, Indian-centric, global-secular and global-religious. But while they adopt these various stances, they do so from their positions in the US. The circulation of religious ideas, practices and objects is filtered through uniquely American cultural structures and traverses uniquely American organisational channels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 25 years since the 1984-85 Great Sahelian Famine, the Ethiopian state has used the management of mobility as a tool to control the poorest of its citizens. In this paper I examine three cases: the forced resettlement of people during the 1980s, the repatriation of refugees during the mid-1990s and the more recent resettlement of food insecure people in the early 2000s. I argue that in each of these cases, people's movements have been controlled so as to undermine their agency with the net effect of increasing their vulnerability. Such strategies have transformed and reinforced class, ethnic and religious hierarchies to such an extent that those being managed have become silently complicitous in their own exploitation. The paper argues that analyses of how governmentality functions should be set in motion, and that mobility management strategies may be a central tool for promoting governmentality on wider levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive Palestinian exodus of the 1948 Nakba left a deep imprint in the Palestinian soul. These forced traversals - as well as the recurring flights in 1956, 1967, 1982 and more - transformed the meaning of 'mobility' in Palestinian discourse. Mobility is naturally adjoined to immobility. The emergence of Palestinian internet helped to overcome immobility and isolation. The remote and fragmented Palestinian nation started to reunite through websites, chatting and emailing. Cyberspace and online networks suggest new conceptual interpretations-Virtual Mobility. The internet presents a platform for the belated memoirs to be told. This article analyses the Palestinian internet production and consumption and illustrates how virtual mobility is a particular phenomenon for displaced communities. Applying a simultaneous offline and online methodology this article is based on research data based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Bogus' asylum seekers are widely alleged to be 'abusing' the UK's system, whilst similar perceptions exist more widely among industrialized host states. This article examines physical mobility for the purpose of claiming asylum, and whether it is meaningful to claim that the UK asylum route is being misused or abused by 'bogus' refugees with 'socio-economic motivations'. It examines procedural and definitional challenges to existing framings of the 'right' and 'wrong' forms of asylum mobility, and tests assumptions behind what it means to be 'bogus' or 'genuine' with reference to original empirical data. This article asks how different asylum mobilities are contested and made meaningful at the 'gate', presenting a challenge to such framings to reconsider the nature of what 'problem' exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether precipitated by political or environmental factors, human displacement can be more fully understood by attending to the ways in which a set of bodily, material, imagined and virtual mobilities and immobilities interact to produce population movement. Very little work, however, has addressed the fertile middle ground between mobilities and forced migration. This article introduces the special issue by setting out the ways in which theories of mobilities can enrich forced migration studies as well as some of the insights into mobilities that forced migration research offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that recent literature on the 'new mobilities paradigm' largely overlooks the role of state mobilities. It argues for the inclusion of state mobilities, and addresses a range of sites of study to build this case. These landscapes offer material expressions where state mobility can be examined. The paper then offers a sustained examination of the port of entry as a seemingly static and yet increasingly mobile expression of state infrastructure and power. The ports of entry under examination are all found in close proximity to the US-Canada border. The provisional nature of their appearance and disappearance highlights the dialectical spatial relations between mobilities and moorings, working simultaneously to conceal exclusion and shrink spaces of asylum. This concealment requires, in turn, an ontology of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In trying to outline the relationship between mobilities and cosmopolitanism, the nation state is always posited by scholars against cosmopolitanism. Mobility of images however, instead of denationalising spaces in fact fortifies the stereotypes of different territories. The cosmopolitan outlook that is deemed to be inherent to critical mobilities can identify with these mobile images and ideas precisely because of what is already perceived about a certain country. The article examines how the mobile images of the 'Help Bangladesh' poster and the concert in 1971, reinforces a certain representation of East Pakistan/Bangladesh as only poor and starving. It is this fixing of the image of the nation through mobile images which also comes into play when considering the concept of 'forced' migration. In trying to unpick and critique the so called the disjunction between the idea of 'forced' migration and migration by 'choice', in this article I focus on the encounter between middle class refugees, the poor and the raped migrant woman of the Bangladesh war of 1971 and the resulting displacement. The documentary Muktir Gaan (Songs of Freedom 1995) - billed as a documentary and a 'road movie' imbued with adventure, eroticism, pain and prospect of freedom - is the lens through which the paper highlights the encounter between different 'forced' migrants as a result of war and its resultant implications for a sociology of mobilities. It also allows an examination of the political economy of different 'forced' migrants, their classed and gendered locations. By focusing on romanticism linked to the idea of the adventure of war, the paper reveals who can be mobile or not and the conditions under which this mobility is made possible. In the process, the paper questions the potential of a global economy of signs to nurture a transantional civil society and global public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experiences of Iraqi refugees in Jordan through the lens of their motility. In doing so, it demonstrates that the motility of Iraqis is largely shaped by pan-Arab ideologies concerning 'hospitality' and the politics surrounding the category of the 'refugee' in Jordan. The intersection of these factors have meant that Iraqis occupy an ambiguous and precarious socio-legal position in Jordan and the populist view in the Kingdom regards them as a politically and socially problematic demographic. Processes demonising Iraqis in Jordan, however, also reflect wider global processes that have pathologised and criminalised - and in the process im-mobilised - the figure of the refugee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute to our existing knowledge on lineups and the transitory places of everyday life writ large, this paper attempts investigates lineups at small island ferry terminals. Drawing upon fieldwork including travel to, on and from ferry boats, for a total of about 250 journeys over three years, and about 400 qualitative interviews, this mobile ethnography focuses on practices of ferry mobility in coastal British Columbia. Lineups are portrayed as complex orchestrations of rest and movement weaved through relational performances of mobility and relative immobility. As neither a place in the sedentarist nor nomadic sense, lineups defeat facile, dichotomous conceptualizations of spatialities and temporalities. Neither still nor flowing, neither public nor private, lineups are animated by idiosyncratic practices of dwelling whereby multiple and unique forms of livelihood are performed. Ferry lineups are ephemeral moorings: places where communities form and dissolve in temporary zones, as if suspended from the regular rhythms of the rest of the day and the week. On small islands lineups exist as stolen time-spaces - an original concept that draws inspiration from the musical idea of tempo rubato and from Michel de Certeau's (1984) treatment of tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative walking practices, or modes of conversational activity set in motion by the conditions of wayfinding, potentially offer mobile and dialogic methods of engaging with experiences of mobility and of representing those experiences. They also offer alternative ways of intervening in politics and policy impacting on the distribution of mobility or immobility. The artwork way from home employed such practices as a performative, participatory and interventional methodology for eliciting and representing the transnational experiences, affects and significances of place for refugees and asylum seekers across the UK. The various strategies conceived here as homing devices, homing tales and conversive wayfinding, were employed to construct 'meeting places' where transnational views, perspectives, experiences and knowledge could be exchanged. This methodology proposes alternatives to hegemonies of communication, representation and authorship in both artistic and scholarly production, through processes that interrelate experiential, analytical and interventional ways of knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographers have always had to be concerned with the movements of their informants, and this article identifies the continuing importance of bodily technique and skill in fieldwork from a mobilities perspective. It develops an approach to technology and technique from Marcel Mauss to consider the relationship between ethnography as a technological enterprise and as a set of bodily skills. Evidence is presented on technology as 'gear' amongst hill-walkers in north east Scotland, many of whom adhere to a 'low-tech' aesthetic. Drawing inspiration from them, the suggestion is made that ethnographers should be cautious of adopting 'high-tech' tools for their research. Examples of GPS (Global Positioning System) use amongst the hill-walkers and in cases from the literature illustrate these themes. Finally, the article argues that making the techniques of ethnographic research more broadly known might have the advantage of making the results more useable and accessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a collection of methodological reflections on mobilities research, and additionally discusses the general status of methodology in the scholarship. Fast advancements on empirical and conceptual levels of mobilities studies have not been equivalently matched by efforts on the methodological front. While microsociological and phenomenological approaches are predominant in the scholarship, large-scale studies on mobility tend not to systematically analyse research frameworks used in the process of knowledge production. The articles featured in this special section examine some of the methodological challenges and innovations arising within several topical strains of mobilities studies. This introductory article argues that multi-scalar and critical methodologies are necessary for further expanding the analytical and interventional possibilities of a mobilities research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the rubric of transport much previous research on everyday mobility has focused on understanding the more representational and readily articulated aspects of everyday movement. By way of contrast, emergent theorisations of mobility suggest that an understanding of the less representational - those fleeting, ephemeral and often embodied and sensory aspects of movement - is vital if we are to fully understand why and how people move around. Accordingly, the ability of conventional methods to complement new research agendas, particularly those related to issues around the sensory, affect and embodied experience has been called in to question. This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on mobile methodologies by critically discussing a theoretical and methodological journey towards mobile video ethnography in the context of a project researching cycling in London, UK between 2004 and 2006. In doing so it highlights three ways in which mobile video ethnography can contribute to research in the new mobilities paradigm: video as a way of 'feeling there' when you can't be there; video as a way of apprehending fleeting moments of mobile experience; and video as a tool to extend sensory vocabularies. It also critically discusses the limitations of video as a text and the importance of embodied experience, interpretation and audiencing to its success as part of a mobile methodology. Whilst emphasising the need for caution, the paper demonstrates the way in which mobile video ethnography can contribute to a new mobilities agenda by facilitating more situated understandings of daily corporeal mobility which highlight an alternative time-space politics to those inscribed in road spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility as a key modern phenomenon can be seen in multiple ways and this article raises the question of how mobility becomes visible and real through diverse ways of seeing mobility. Mobility's different aspects appear and take place in particular spatial settings under the workings of diverse forms of power, and recognizing this informs us about the making of spatialised mobility. It is shown how mobility intermingles with perceptions, experiences and desires of the modern self. Such workings of power relate, among other things, to framing and imagining, practising and experiencing mobility. Capturing ways of seeing mobility thus widens our language for engaging with questions of mobility and its political and social reality and possible futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a survey of over 500 people whose travel was affected. Stranded passengers used various support networks and means of contact. While travel providers were most likely to be able to help, they were less contactable and willing to help than family, friends and employers causing the impacts to ripple through 'home' networks. The findings demonstrate how flying maintains dispersed networks but has 'created distance' by raising expectations and eroding other travel services. The disruption illustrated the vulnerability of systems of aviation, their importance to many people's lives and the challenge to improving sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated in the Dred Scott case that if one African American was free to move unhindered throughout the United States, then all African Americans, enslaved or otherwise, would have 'the right to enter every other State'. Such a situation, he argued, was untenable. The Supreme Court thus suggested that if U.S. citizenship included a de facto right to mobility, then African Americans could not be considered citizens. Although not formally written into the U.S. Constitution, numerous Supreme Court rulings since 1857 have underpinned the right to mobility in the United States. Yet the ability to be mobile in the United States has been fundamentally intertwined with the construction of racial identities. It was the white settlers that were free to move westward, the mobile nomadic lifestyles of the peoples they encountered being understood as primitive and inferior. Native peoples subsequently became immobilized on reservations. Similarly, African Americans in the era of slavery were immobilized on plantations and movement away from plantation space was illicit, codified as illegal, and required the hidden networks of the Underground Railroad. An African American moving through white American spaces faced often deadly consequences. African Americans should, in the parlance of the times, 'know their place' and not have the ambition, or the right, to move freely around the USA. To explore these contentions, I draw on four landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that elaborate on the mobility, or curtailment thereof, of African Americans in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chinese, 'dagong' means 'working for the boss'. Dagong migrants constitute the most populous group of China's mobile population, so knowledge of their cultural practices is crucial to understanding how globalisation and mobility rework people's sense of locality. This paper is an analysis of poems by dagong workers - a cultural phenomenon that is relatively unknown both outside and inside China. Drawing on ethnographic insights into China's rural migrants, this paper engages the concept of translocality to explore three recurring themes in dagong poetry: alienation of the body in the industrial regime; displacement and homesickness; and disenchantment with the south. The analysis shows that, for the same reason that mobility itself is a stratified process, the means of addressing translocal desires and longings are also stratified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the suggestion by architect Will Alsop that the future prosperity and influence of Northern English cities will be best achieved through merging into one discrete urban entity facilitated by the M62 motorway corridor. The article will locate Alsop's plan within the concerns of literature drawn from the mobilities strand of social science research, as well as architectural theories of urbanism and contemporaneous governmental policy. The article concludes by looking at the Northern English region and Alsop's plan within a national, European and global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the framework of 'automobility' as outlined by Sheller and Urry, this article uses the bicycle tour to explore one way the middle class mediates the automobile's dominance of the American landscape. The material history of the American road is first placed into the current automobilities discourse and then used to situate the bicycle tour. The romantic notion of lost public place in the city is seen as a driving force for escaping on two wheels into the 'authentic' American landscape. As the long distance bicycle tourist experiences the material landscape in a new way, the idea of a lost public landscape is challenged and the tourist is able to come to terms with his or her place in the dominant mobility assemblage of human and machine. The result is not a full resistance of the automobile, but a new conception of place and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at how social relations change when proximity is re-established after a long period of separation. This theoretically inspired question is discussed in the case of Sri Lanka, where a peace process in 2002 enabled exiled Tamils to temporarily return to their 'homeland'. The new mobility of these migrants constituted a significant momentum for the re-negotiation of Tamil identity. Proximate relations resulting from mobility led to a growing awareness of differences in cultural expression and perspective. The empirical data show that the construction of difference is related not only to spatial mobility and to temporality. Spatial, but also temporal distance in translocal relations determines the construction of images, detached from face-to-face interaction and the locality, constituting an identity space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on a selection of local transport films, dating from the 1930s to 1970s, to explore issues of mobility, place and identity in Liverpool and Merseyside. The archive footage discussed in the paper includes amateur film of the Birkenhead and Wallasey tunnel openings, commuter ferry services to Liverpool, and also of the river crossings at Runcorn. Mapping the changing social and cultural geographies of mobility in Merseyside, it is argued that these films engage in a spatial dialogue expressive of a shift between, on the one hand, local, organic spaces of place and identity and, on the other, centrifugal spaces and non-places of transit, which, since the 1960s and with the expansion of regional and national motorway networks, have shaped much of Liverpool's contemporary urban fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility in public environments is an important part of people's everyday life. However, living with functional limitations often means limited mobility. To plan for public environments that enable mobility for everybody, knowledge about various user groups' mobility is important. Up until now, knowledge concerning the mobility of people with cognitive functional limitations has been scarce. The aim of this paper is to explore, from experts' perspectives, mobility in public environments among people with cognitive functional limitations (target group). The findings of focus group interviews with experts showed that the target group had to keep external and internal challenges at a manageable level in order to maintain mobility. The target group's mobility is interpreted as depending on both the individuals' cognitive capacity in relation to environmental demands as well as the motility of the members of the target group, i.e. how they form their opinions about their possibilities for mobility. Both those aspects are important for planners to consider in order keep the target group mobile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our globalised age of accelerating travel and communication, many migrations and other forms of mobility are informed by a variety of emotional, affective and sexual liaisons, attachments and expectations, which can be powerful and necessary motivations for mobility and for the risks taken in crossing boundaries. In some cases, the emotional and sexual motivations involve economic sacrifices; in others, especially for migrants from poor countries, they can also be a means to economic betterment. In yet others the economic imperative of acquiring work and income through migration implies a loss of emotional expressiveness and sexual identity. In this introductory paper to the special issue, we argue for both a 'sexual turn' and an 'emotional turn' in mobility studies, stressing also the intersectionality of these two dimensions. Some of the most productive research on sexuality in relation to mobility comes from 'queer theory', an intrinsically post-structuralist heuristic paradigm which challenges established heteronormative and homonormative categories in favour of an emphasis on the polymorphous and performative dimensions of sexuality. The final part of the article provides an overview of the papers that follow and the themes they explore. Taken together, the papers investigate different globalised intersections of love, sexuality and migration, and the way they inform, and are informed by, existing narratives and practices of migration and settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since British colonisation of Australia began, Aboriginal mobility practices have been poorly understood within the Anglo-Australian consciousnesses. This paper examines current discourses and conceptualisations of Aboriginal mobilities in Yamatji country, Western Australia. Finding none of these explanations and interpretations singularly sufficient to encompass the diverse spatial practices of Aboriginal people in the region, the paper proposes an alternative framework for interpreting and understanding these population dynamics. The central tenet of this reconceptualisation is that contemporary Aboriginal spatialities - including spatial distribution, movements, and immobility - are iteratively shaped by the processes of procuring, contesting, and cultivating security and belonging. In a conscious shift away from generalised and pejorative interpretations of Aboriginal mobility, this more holistic framework considers historical and geographical context, cultural identity, and individual aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including research on childhood and youth mobilities, political struggles of the migrants and role of the youth on community and neighborhood cohesion.

As children's mobilities increase so does their engagement with the social worlds beyond the home and school. This paper examines the contacts that children aged 10/11 years had with adults as they moved beyond their local neighbourhoods to visit swimming pools, cinemas and the city centre. Their reports contain accounts of problems with individual adults and with adult-imposed, or supposed, restrictions such as those relating to age and 'stranger danger'. The findings suggest that the children's initial feelings of anticipation and excitement in moving into and through the public world were replaced by a greater awareness of divisions between childhood and adulthood. Setting these findings within the context of discussions on the purpose of travel and the nature of movement this paper draws children more fully into debates about connection and disconnection and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits John Urry's ideas on 'the end of tourism', or the de-differentiation of tourism and everyday life under disorganised capitalism (to the extent that the former ceases to be 'special' and the latter 'mundane'). Against the backdrop of the recent and exponential growth in the number of tourists and migrants flowing to and from the countries of the world that comprise the 'pleasure periphery', it takes the notion of everyday space (including cyber-space) being reconfigured as tourism space one step further with reference to two quite distinct, but theoretically intertwined phenomena: urban beaches and virtual worlds (the former represented by a case study of Paris Plage, and the latter by examples of the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Social Games or MMOSGs, including Second Life and There). In exploring what these case studies have in common reference is made to ideas about liminality and liquid modernity, which provide a context for understanding the contemporary relationship between tourism and the everyday. There follows a brief conclusion that reflects upon the consequences for tourism-related research of the turn to mobilities in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research with students at the Birzeit University in Palestine to examine how their experiences of university are shaped by a range of im/mobilities. In particular I am interested in how students who rent accommodation in Birzeit and make frequent trips to the cities and villages where they grew up experience a range of im/mobilities that are heavily impacted by technologies and practices of the Israeli Occupation Forces that are designed to render Palestinians less mobile in the West Bank. After mapping how students understand these im/mobilities, I explore how these differently mobile practices create Birzeit as place, how they unsettle particular notions of home, and the micropolitical responses they embody and engender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary cities and places are defined by mobility and flows as much as by their sedentary and fixed properties. In the words of Shane the city may be seen as configured by 'enclaves' (fixed and bounded sites) and 'armatures' (infrastructure channels and transit spaces). This paper takes point of departure in a critique of such a sedentary/nomad dichotomy aiming at a third position of 'critical mobility thinking'. The theoretical underpinning of this position reaches across cultural theory, human geography and into sociology. It includes a notion of a relational understanding of place, a networked sense of power and a re-configuring of the way identities and belonging is being conceptualised. This theoretical framing leads towards re-conceptualising mobility and infrastructures as sites of (potential) meaningful interaction, pleasure, and cultural production. The outcome is a theoretical argument for the exploration of the potentials of armature spaces in order to point to the importance of 'ordinary' urban mobility in creating flows of meaning and cultures of movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes the need for a critical examination of the notion of children's 'independent mobility', a concept rather uncritically accepted by social science and human geography research. It examines the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the concept by drawing on data from a study of children's mobility in a suburban area of Copenhagen and two villages in Jutland, Denmark. The study combined ethnography with GPS-tracking and a rolling mobile phone survey. This produced a rich data set that allows us to show that children's mobility has to be recognized as primarily social, and that companionship pervades every aspect of the activity. The findings suggest that researchers need to attend to the diversity of children's mobility patterns, the local geographical contexts of children's movements and the different relations of interdependency that children's mobility involves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the notion of children's movement has been examined across diverse settings in the minority world, explorations within majority world contexts have remained more sporadic. This paper contributes to an emerging body of literature offering new perspectives on mobility which crossover with, and in some instances challenge, those understandings drawn from the minority world. The manipulation of mobility, central to the existence of the apartheid state in South Africa, has left an indelible mark upon the landscape of this emerging democratic society. However, through an investigation of children's independent outdoor mobility within a suburban area of Cape Town, this paper argues that the legacies of apartheid should not be considered as the seminal factor shaping geographical movements throughout neighbourhood space. Rather, it should be positioned alongside a range of different concerns, such as the mobility of baboon troops, domestic 'guard' dogs, traffic and family composition. Thus, for these children growing up in a post-apartheid context, the influence of apartheid upon their outdoor mobility was both nuanced and inconsistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the patterns of quotidian physical mobility of the population are at the very centre of transformations in contemporary urban life. The city of Santiago, Chile is no exception to this trend. But these changes do not affect the whole population in the same way. This paper is based on a case study of a low-income population group and how their situation of social exclusion interferes with their patterns of everyday mobility. In order to do so we describe in-depth their everyday mobility in two central interrelated aspects: where and how these individuals travel during workdays and weekends. We conclude that in contemporary Santiago the low degrees of motility of low income population constitute one of the main ways in which contemporary social exclusion is enacted in everyday practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China 2003 endangered individual lives and disrupted societal organization on a trans-continental level. SARS was rapidly spreading along the international routes of air traffic and therefore was not only treated as a trans-regionally spread disease but was feared it would become a pandemic threat, i.e. a global epidemic. Drawing on empirical material, the Canadian experience is given special relevance to highlight the global impact of the cosmo-politics of SARS that directly related local, regional, national and global risk practices, which dramatically reassembled the relations of nature/culture, local/global, private/public etc. The paper also discusses the relevant impact of SARS on a globalizing sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider how we might interpret the implications of the coincidence of emigration and immigration in Italy. Some scholars have situated Italy's population changes in the past 30 years within the framework of the ‘Mediterranean model of Migration’. Although this model offers a general picture of the structural features in common among ‘Mediterranean’ countries, it assumes the existence of the nation rather than questioning its very becoming or possibility and how emigration and immigration as forms of mobility might suggest the limits to the symbolisation of nationalism. Employing concepts derived from Slavoj Žižek, I explore the potential to explain the constitution of Italian nation spaces through the concept of the ‘Real’ to analyse the threats that mobilities make to the fantasmic category of the Italian nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]