MobilitiesPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2109986
Miguel A. Avalos , Ghassan Moussawi
{"title":"(Re)framing the emerging mobility regime at the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: Covid-19, temporality, and racial capitalism","authors":"Miguel A. Avalos , Ghassan Moussawi","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2109986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2022.2109986","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this paper, we examine transborder commuters’ experiences (i.e. individuals who commute between U.S. and Mexican border cities frequently) during the Covid-19 pandemic, with keen attention to the links between racial capitalism and temporality. We address two interrelated issues: first, we unpack how the United States framed the pandemic through the metaphor of war and the production of the categories of ‘essential work(er)’ and ‘essential travel’ to ensure racial capitalism’s surplus labor and continuation. These categories function like a double-edged sword, tying racialized populations to racial capitalism’s temporality to exploit them while excluding privileged others. We argue that Covid-19’s temporality conflicts with racial capitalism’s temporality. While the former relies on the deceleration of everyday life, the latter depends on constant acceleration driven by profit-seeking. Using queer and feminist theoretical lenses, we then demonstrate how U.S. Covid-19 border restrictions at land ports of entry exacerbated transborder commuters’ cross-border travels and privileged some based on legal status. As a result, they used public Facebook groups to navigate and comprehend new commuting conditions, disidentifying with the United States’ official pandemic framing and producing their own. This shared experience catalyzed ‘digital transborder kinships’ or temporally-bound socialities rooted in relational care, advocacy, and knowledge production.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50192746","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2101896
Jeanette Steinmann , Brian Wilson
{"title":"The underground bicycle economy: an exploration of social supports and economic resources that Vancouver’s homeless and variably-housed cyclists utilize","authors":"Jeanette Steinmann , Brian Wilson","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2101896","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2101896","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Many people living in poverty ride bicycles and many also participate in informal work such as recycling. A small number of studies have begun to explore homeless cyclists’ experiences with and perspectives on bicycles and recycling. In the current study, we seek to contribute to this emerging area of study, focusing in this case on the social support and informal and formal resources homeless and variably-housed cyclists use in Vancouver. Interviews, including go-along mobile methods, were conducted with five men living in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver who use bicycles. Findings show that the cyclists, especially recyclers, navigated an ‘underground economy’ of bike-related spaces that allowed them to make money, keep their bicycles in working condition, and cultivate social connections. In particular, a few highly valuable sources and spaces of support existed for participants within a landscape where barriers of many sorts were encountered regularly. These findings bring attention to the needs of and resources considered to be most valuable for some cyclists living in poverty, to the creativity and resilience of an often stigmatised group, and to ways that more inclusive cycling policy might support the efforts of a marginalised group to live a healthy life.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44508290","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2082882
Antonella Ceccagno , Ru Gao
{"title":"The making of a skilled worker: the transnational mixed embeddedness of migrant workers","authors":"Antonella Ceccagno , Ru Gao","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2082882","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2082882","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Migrant workers’ employment pathways are mainly analysed by observing their behaviour in receiving societies. In dialogue with critical studies of mobility, migration, and skill, we argue that the ‘transnational mixed embeddedness’ approach, used to analyse migrant businesses, should extend to include migrant workers. Based on multi-sited ethnography, we discuss the phenomenon of Chinese migrant workers in Italy who exploit the transnationally embedded opportunities to access training courses in China. We analyse the transnational workers’ agency in circumnavigating socially constructed notions of training and skill, and stress the transformative logic of the migrant trajectories as transnational mobility influences the trainees’ perspectives.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44676330","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2096413
Fran Martin
{"title":"Enterprising self and bohemian nomad: Emerging subjectivities in Chinese education mobilities","authors":"Fran Martin","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2096413","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2096413","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This article approaches the question of how experiences of mobility mediate subjectivities through a case study of middle-class Chinese women’s education mobilities. Drawing from longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with 56 young women who moved from China to Australia for university, the article focuses on two of their stories to illustrate how education mobility mediated their negotiation of available understandings of gendered personhood and competing life value regimes. It demonstrates that for these middle-class women, transnational education mobility may on the one hand reinforce identification with an ideal of enterprising selfhood that is prominent in both global and Chinese public cultures, or on the other hand, facilitate identification with a countervailing model of ‘bohemian’ mobility that has hitherto mainly been observed among more privileged subjects. It also analyses how mobility shaped the women’s negotiations of the linear feminine life scripts that are normative in post-socialist Chinese society versus more flexible, individualized models of gendered biography. The article thus illustrates the gendered aspects of Chinese women’s experiences of education mobility, and the subjective effects that flow from them.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49182669","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2090021
Kornelia Boczkowska
{"title":"Inside cars: changing automobilities and backseat passengering in experimental film and 360 video","authors":"Kornelia Boczkowska","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2090021","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2090021","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Despite the recent upsurge of interest in passengering, there are no accounts on how backseat passengering links to experimental film and 360 video or how it responds to the broader relationship between automobilities, the organization of car travel and on-screen storytelling. To fill this gap, I follow up on the profiling of the passenger as a distinctive subject and object of infrastructures of mobility to discuss the backseat passenger’s experience, seen as both a socially engaged and embodied practice, in four stylistically distinct works, Larry Gottheim’s <em>Harmonica</em>, Lluis Escartín’s <em>Mohave Cruising</em>, Ken Jacobs’ <em>Berkeley to San Francisco</em>, and <em>ASMR Driving at night: Back seat view</em>. While <em>Harmonica</em>, <em>Mohave Cruising</em> and <em>Berkeley to San Francisco</em> are selective, self-aware experiments, which play out in various forms, <em>ASMR</em> is an authorless 360 drive video that lacks much aesthetic value and continues the long-established culture of scenic road and auto-tourism, turning on-site visitors into virtual tourists. Although each work approaches passengering visualities differently through exhibiting forward, side, parallax and 3 D views, they all articulate a multi-sensorial experience of driving and offer a relatively novel take on the practices of automobility through shifting the perspective of the driver and frontseat passenger to the backseat view.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46323124","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2092887
Olivia Engle , Cordelia Freeman
{"title":"‘All this way, all this money, for a five-minute procedure’: barriers, mobilities, and representation on the US abortion road trip","authors":"Olivia Engle , Cordelia Freeman","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2092887","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2092887","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The abortion road trip is a narrative device that has emerged in the last decade whereby the central plot of the story is the journey taken in search of an abortion. In this paper we analyze two young adult novels (<em>Girls on the Verge</em> and <em>Unpregnant</em>) and two films (<em>Grandma</em> and <em>Never Rarely Sometimes Always</em>) that follow adolescent girls traveling for abortions in the contemporary United States. Through the analysis of these four narratives, we argue that representations of the abortion road trip are novel for their focus on the barriers and politics of abortion access in the United States. While the representations do prioritize certain barriers over others, they mark an important shift in abortion discourse in popular culture. Instead of the ‘drama’ of the plot being the decision to have an abortion, it is increasingly other socio-politico-legal issues such as the lack of abortion clinics, the distance required to travel, legal rights for adolescents, the cost of the procedure, and the opinions of family and friends that take center stage. The focus on these structural, political barriers can help to educate audiences about the realities of abortion access in the US and move abortion discourse beyond the individual.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49029417","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2092417
Ivan Harsløf , Dennis Zuev
{"title":"Temporary transnational labour mobility and gendered individualization in Europe","authors":"Ivan Harsløf , Dennis Zuev","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2092417","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2092417","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In a context of a new transnational division of labour, temporary international labour mobility is on the rise in Europe. In particular, recent decades have seen considerably more women seeking work experience abroad. Observers have been concerned with how such mobility is related to individualization, and in particular how it may challenge collective institutions, communities and families. The aim of this study is to explore such issues among women and men with international work experience. Using data from European Social Survey, the paper investigates previously mobile workers in terms of their current working and living conditions. Across genders, we consider different forms of individualization that may be associated with transnational labour mobility. While both women and men with transnational work experience generally feature strong strategic individualization, this is most pronounced among men. Hence, men's mobility is among other things associated with increased autonomy in working life, while – in contrast to women – it does not seem to hamper their integration in the sphere of social reproduction.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42858520","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2088297
Roza Tsagarousianou
{"title":"Time and mobility/immobility: the chronopolitics of mobility and the temporalities of suffering and hope in situations of encampment","authors":"Roza Tsagarousianou","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2088297","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2088297","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The article engages with the relationship between the chronopolitics of mobility and migrants’ narratives of the past, their present suffering, and hope for the future. Data collected through observation and repeat interviews with migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps in Lesvos, Greece, challenge the assumption that ‘time’ spent waiting in the camps by illegalized migrants represents a linear and singular metanarrative of the migrant in ‘temporal suspension’ from the ‘grid of modernity’. I suggest, that the concept of historical time allows for a critical analysis of illegalized migrants’ narratives of their past lives, their present suffering and future aspirations, through which they challenge the chronopolitics of control inherent in the current EU migration system. While such narratives might at first sight be understood as accepting a migration system based on suspension and gradual re-introduction into western historical and political time, they present a challenge to the exceptionality of western modernity and their suspension from it. I also argue, that narratives of ‘pasts’, ‘the present’ and hope for the ‘future’, challenge academic discourses of migration that centre on the notion of ‘bare life’, where historical and political time is suspended in the liminal space of the camp.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48345200","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2088298
Annabel Dulhunty
{"title":"Disciplinary mobility and women’s empowerment: a complicated connection","authors":"Annabel Dulhunty","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2088298","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2088298","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The intersections between gender, mobility and power have been well established. While research has examined the inequity of (im)mobility, the role of restricted mobility as a form of domestic violence and the connection between freedom of movement and feminism, hardly any attention has been given to the relationship between physical mobility and women’s empowerment programming. By drawing on the literature on ‘disciplined’ mobility and feminist understandings of space and violence, this research argues that mobility and empowerment are complicatedly entwined. Through qualitative field research in West Bengal, India, this article illustrates that empowerment programming is limited in what it can achieve due to the disciplining of mobility. Women’s mobility is disciplined through patriarchal control, evident in three key domains: first, through actively restricting women’s mobility; second, through surveillance and monitoring; and third, through women self-regulating their own behaviour. Through showing the difficulty of improving women’s wellbeing via empowerment programs, this research illustrates the pervasive violence of disciplined mobility.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46016516","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2071630
Alexandre Rigal
{"title":"Changing habits in the cycling subculture: the case of two bike workshops in France","authors":"Alexandre Rigal","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2071630","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2022.2071630","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>How do habits change? Some mobility scholars describe habits as regularly evolving. Several psychologists, on the other hand, observe radical changes originating from disruptions in our environment. I show that these two perspectives can be integrated using Berger and Luckmann’s model of individual change. In the first phase, a shock from the environment disrupt a habit or habits, which are later replaced by new habits progressively learned as part of a group. I applied this model to two French bike workshops active in cycling subculture. I used interviews and participant observation in the two workshops to examine how communities potentially lead their members to change their body habits (their way of moving, seeing, touching), their perception of the car and social mobility, and to adopt a radical definition of the “good life”. I found that the depth and breadth of habit change depended on the individual’s involvement in the bike workshop and of the type of shock he/she experienced. As a result, I show how an instance of the cycling subculture transforms habits, both progressively and radically, by strengthening the relationship between individuals and their bikes. The article opens the path to applications of Berger and Luckmann’s theory to mobility.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47736380","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}