The Politics of Mobility

Session organizers: David Butz (Brock) and Phillip Gordon Mackintosh (Brock)

Session type: 15-minute presentation, in person

The politics of mobility – entanglements of power, economy, social inequality, and mobilities ¬– is an abiding preoccupation in social and historical geography, critical mobilities, and transportation studies. These scholarly fields identify mobility (physical movement, and the technologies and substrates stimulating motion and its social-cultural-historical consequences) as a fundamental structuring dimension of social life. They also demonstrate that the capacity for movement under conditions of one’s choosing is a valuable resource that is unequally distributed in social contexts structured by hierarchies of power. In other words, movement is socially differentiated; it reflects and reinforces structures of power to configure inequitable social hierarchies. Ironically, and in many cases, the corollary to the politics of mobility is immobility: the social, political, and economic opportunities of mobilizing conspiring, often unwittingly, to impede movement, to hinder the hurry often implied by mobilizing, especially in cities. Critical geographers and mobility scholars trace the ways in which relations of gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship, and political economy shape discourses and practices of mobility that produce beneficial movement for some people and too little or too much movement for others.

We are seeking papers from geographers and critical mobilities scholars that attend to the multi-scalar relationship between human corporeal movement and power in its everyday, official and multifaceted manifestations. Papers might, for example, (a) delineate a particular set of power relations (of gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship) that are operating to produce differentiated movement with particular inequitable social effects; (b) explain how mobility exclusions operate and are experienced; (c) examine formal policies that regulate human movement and thereby produce social hierarchies; (d) reveal how political economies—current and historical—and urban capitalist relations promote, construct, maintain, and even inhibit urban mobilities; or (e) identify mobility strategies and practices employed to negotiate inequitable fields of movement.

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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Movement

Movement is the crossing of space by people, objects, capital, ideas and other information. It is either oriented, and therefore occurs between an origin and one or more destinations, or it is more akin to the idea of simply wandering, with no real origin or destination.

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Please convey your interest in this session, or send any questions you may have, to Phillip Gordon Mackintosh [pmackintosh@brocku.ca] or David Butz [dbutz@brocku.ca]. We will need your abstract (max. 250 words) by end of day, May 10, 2024. Note that the deadline for Registration and Submission of Abstracts for CAG 2024, August 14-18, is May 15. Thank you.