MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-11-02Epub Date: 2025-06-03DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2498760
Zachary Whyte , Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne
{"title":"Moving camps: ‘refugee villages’ between Denmark and Bosnia, 1992–2017","authors":"Zachary Whyte , Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2498760","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2498760","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper traces a cluster of asylum housing units that were shipped from Denmark to Bosnia in 1996, ostensibly to house repatriated Bosnians, and which remain in place today. That is to say, camps that were literally moved. These buildings and the logistics surrounding their movement served to structure a range of humanitarian and administrative connections both in and between Denmark and Bosnia. Instead of tracing movements, networks, and careers of migrants, we present an ethnographic and archival account of the trajectories of these housing modules, designed as temporary shelter solutions for Bosnians in Denmark in the 1990s. Exploring the sentimental and relational in the commonplaces of infrastructural logistics, we deploy the idea of <em>moving camps</em> in its double meaning to shed light on how infrastructural and logistical operations may also generate a spillover that works in surprising and unintended ways. Designed as temporary, the buildings endured, and the mobility of the camps at once reached into the past and the future. Conceived of as isolating, the camps and not least the logistics involved in their movement engendered extensive connections, which reached well beyond the use of the housing modules themselves.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 6","pages":"Pages 1255-1271"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145814324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-11-02Epub Date: 2025-06-13DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2512377
Claire Nelischer , Dana Cuff , Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris
{"title":"The social life of the sidewalk: tracing the mobility experiences of youth in Westlake, Los Angeles","authors":"Claire Nelischer , Dana Cuff , Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2512377","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2512377","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Although many young people travel independently in the city, transportation research seldom considers the experiential qualities of their routes, focusing instead on the functional aspects of mode choice. More in-depth understanding of how adolescents experience, negotiate, and perceive everyday mobility can support informed design, policy, and planning interventions to make these journeys safer and more enjoyable. This study explores the mobility experiences of 28 youth aged 11 to 15 as they travel to after-school activities in Westlake: a dense, underserved Los Angeles neighborhood. We use the concept of ‘sidewalk ecologies’ to investigate the spatially-situated social and material features that shape mobility experiences, and employ a range of interdisciplinary, youth-centered, mobile methods including thick mapping and walk-along interviews. We uncover how youth negotiate travel through adaptation rather than avoidance, how they develop agency to travel without supervision, and how social and material conditions create a lack of continuity between safe and enjoyable spaces. These insights inform design and programmatic interventions to enhance mobility for young pedestrians; five propositions for urban planners and designers include tending to the social determinants of safety, reinforcing familiar routes, and demonstrating care for people and place.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 6","pages":"Pages 1342-1364"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145814347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-11-02Epub Date: 2025-04-11DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2481305
Gela Merabishvili
{"title":"Borderization in Georgia: a mobility perspective","authors":"Gela Merabishvili","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2481305","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2481305","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>‘Borderization’ refers to the process of installing fences and other infrastructures of control and surveillance by the Russian security services along the de facto boundary between Georgia and South Ossetia. Georgian political discourse generally focuses on a territorial dimension of borderization and views it primarily as a physical demarcation of an already existing geopolitical condition, understood as the Russian occupation of Georgia’s sovereign territory. Borderization has dramatically curtailed mobility between the two sides of the de facto border. Georgian political discourse describes this aspect of borderization as Russia’s purposeful strategy to estrange Ossetians from Georgians. However, the narrow ethnic frame sidelines various other forms of immobility experienced by local residents. An expanded concept of mobility can offer a more nuanced understanding of borderization and illustrate overlooked geopolitical and geographical complexities. Through interviews with residents of Nikozi, Ergneti, and Ditsi, the article identifies four distinct forms of immobility resulting from borderization that shape how people and goods move inside the villages, across the de facto boundary, between the border strip and Tbilisi, and between the strip and Russia. The mobility perspective offers a complementary lens to understand the effects of the existing geopolitical condition on the local community’s security and welfare.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 6","pages":"Pages 1059-1078"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145814351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-11-02Epub Date: 2025-08-05DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2532407
Qing Tingting Liu
{"title":"Disenchantment, disembedding, and reembedding: Chinese working holiday makers and the remaking of individual biography","authors":"Qing Tingting Liu","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2532407","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2532407","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Research on transnational Chinese youth mobility has largely overlooked the experiences of working holiday makers (WHMs), particularly those from non-elite backgrounds. Drawing on Beck’s theory of triple individualization—disenchantment, disembedding, and reembedding—along with a discussion of the paradox of China’s path to individualization, this study examines how Chinese youth become disillusioned with normative life trajectories and turn to transnational migration as a strategy for remaking their individual biographies. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and life-story interviews with 30 Chinese WHMs in Australia conducted between May and August 2023, the findings reveal that disenchantment emerges from tensions surrounding common sense in China, particularly in three key areas: collectivism and uniformity, workplace interpersonal relations, and gender norms. In contrast, the working holiday visa offers Chinese youth a temporary space in Australia to redefine identity and pursue autonomy. Their decisions to disembed from China and reembed abroad are shaped by marginalized pre-migration status associated with Hukou, education, gender and sexual orientation. This study deepens our understanding of how non-elite Chinese youth respond to institutional failure in their home country and contributes to broader discussions on transnational youth mobility, individualization in post-Xi Jinping China, and the intersection of migration, precarity, and identity reformation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 6","pages":"Pages 1306-1323"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145814352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-09-03Epub Date: 2025-03-20DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2478205
Anna Gawlewicz
{"title":"‘It changes your priorities’: stay-return motivations among UK’s Polish essential workers in the polycrisis of Brexit and Covid-19","authors":"Anna Gawlewicz","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2478205","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2478205","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article explores stay-return motivations among Polish migrant essential workers in the UK and how the combination of Brexit and Covid-19 shapes them. It conceptualises Brexit and Covid-19 as <em>polycrisis</em>, ie multiple, mutually reinforcing crises and illustrates how the intertwinement of both produces a new context against which migrant aspirations and transnational mobilities are negotiated. In doing so, the article calls for sustained engagement with polycrisis in research on migrant workers’ decision-making. The focus on Polish migrant workers is far from arbitrary: Polish remains one of the most numerous non-British nationalities in the UK despite decreasing by approximately 25% post Brexit referendum. Poles are also heavily represented in the essential work sectors such as food production, healthcare and transport, in particular in the more precarious and lower-paid roles. Methodologically, the article is based on a mixed-methods study including an online survey (n = 1105) and 40 qualitative interviews with Polish migrant essential workers alongside 10 expert interviews with key stakeholders providing support to migrant workers in the UK. It draws upon the first major study exploring lived experiences of migrant essential workers in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 5","pages":"Pages 853-870"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145195806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-09-03Epub Date: 2024-10-09DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2409639
Phillip Vannini , April Vannini
{"title":"Im-possible moorings and mobilities: the story of Jules’ Undersea Lodge, the world’s only fully submerged hotel","authors":"Phillip Vannini , April Vannini","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2409639","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2409639","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper shows how and why it is ‘im-possible’—i.e. simultaneously possible and impossible—for humans to travel and stay underwater by narrating the story of how Jules’ Undersea Lodge was designed and how its guests can remain there for relatively long periods of time. Drawing from interviews with its designer, Ian Koblick, reflexive ethnographic material collected at Key Largo’s (Florida) Jules’ Undersea Lodge in the early spring of 2024, and an interview with Joseph Dituri—who in 2023 set a world record for the longest time spent in an underwater habitat – we conceptualize im-possibility as a dialectical tension between possibility and impossibility.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 5","pages":"Pages 719-733"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145195878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-09-03Epub Date: 2025-03-13DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2475918
Paul C. Adams , Jacek Kotus
{"title":"Multiscalar homing digital media use by Ukrainian refugees","authors":"Paul C. Adams , Jacek Kotus","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2475918","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2475918","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The influx of millions of Ukrainian refugees into Poland following the Russian invasion in 2022 initiated processes of digital homing by members of this refugee stream. Brun and Fábos (<span><span>2015</span></span>) have developed a heuristic of <em>home, Home</em> and <em>HOME</em> for understanding the multiplicity of home-like experiences lived by people in protracted situations of displacement. We integrate this framework with geographical concepts of place-making and the active construction of scale, to consider processes of <em>multiscalar homing</em> employed by the Ukrainian refugees. Surveys of 555 displaced Ukrainians currently living in Poland and interviews with 17 of the survey respondents help demonstrate <em>multiscalar homing</em> in the context of international displacement and contemporary media technologies. Our findings demonstrate the agency of displaced persons building a variegated sense of at-homeness and rooting themselves in multiple scales of diasporic life.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 5","pages":"Pages 788-804"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145195879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-09-03Epub Date: 2025-04-08DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2481309
Rob Kitchin , Juliette Davret , Carla Maria Kayanan , Samuel Mutter
{"title":"Data mobilities: rethinking the movement and circulation of digital data","authors":"Rob Kitchin , Juliette Davret , Carla Maria Kayanan , Samuel Mutter","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2481309","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2481309","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The mobility of data has been variously described as data: flows, streams, journeys, threads, transfers, exchanges, and circulation. In each case, data mobility is conceived as a movement from here to there; that data moves along a chain of receivers and senders. However, we contend that the metaphors of data flows (or journeys, threads, etc.) does not reflect well the processes by which digital data are shared. Rather, we propose moving from a metaphorical conceptualisation to a description of the actual mechanisms of mobility. Through a case study of the planning data ecosystem in Ireland, we detail how data replicate (replica copies produced), with the original source retaining the data and a new source gaining it, and data proliferate (multiply) across systems and sites when made available. As data replicate and proliferate, they are transformed through processes of data cleaning, data wrangling, and data fusion, producing new incarnations of the source data. Importantly, this rethinking of data mobility makes clear how and why various data incarnations are produced and, in so doing, create fundamental issues regarding the integrity of data sharing and data-driven work, the repeatability, replicability and reproducibility of science, and data sovereignty and the control of data use.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 5","pages":"Pages 1002-1020"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145195881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-09-03Epub Date: 2025-05-02DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2484233
Russell Cannon , Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren , Mats Fred
{"title":"Organising integrated urban mobility: actions, roles and identities in an evolving landscape","authors":"Russell Cannon , Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren , Mats Fred","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2484233","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2484233","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Multimodal integration is currently being discussed as a way to challenge the dominance of automobility by providing attractive alternatives to private car ownership. Combining critical organisation studies with a mobilities perspective, this article maps actions taken towards integrated urban mobility in two Swedish cities over the course of a year and explores how these actions shape the roles and identities of the actors involved. The results demonstrate that integration is a relational process enacted through diverse practices, from the development of new concepts such as ‘collective mobility’ and the piloting of new infrastructure such as mobility hubs, to the everyday processes of operating public transport and facilitating active travel. These relations develop with varying degrees of formalisation, ranging from regulations and contracts to participation in reference groups. We show that through these actions, public sector actors are continuously making sense of themselves and others within an evolving urban mobility landscape, reflecting not only on potential new roles and organisational identities, but also on the distribution of responsibilities and tasks. Despite concerns about institutional silos and organisational inertia, public sector actors are gradually (albeit hesitantly) emerging as co-producers of integrated urban mobility, even though these efforts often lack systematic coordination.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 5","pages":"Pages 950-968"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145195874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}