Seniors’ Mobilities

Weiqiang Lin (National University of Singapore)
Jean-Baptiste Fretigny ( Université de Cergy-Pontoise )

Over the last decade, the mobility turn has illuminated how moving is a ubiquitous (f)act that suffuses through all aspects of life—whether it be walking, commuting or travelling. Rather than treating these mobilities as inert displacements between points, scholars have unpacked them for their diverse meanings, practices, and politics. Yet, as attentive as these theorisations are to the very phenomenon of movement, they have tended to implicitly base their understandings on the mobile projects of particular ‘active’ age groups. One population segment that this body of work has consequently omitted is that of seniors or old people. While many societies are increasingly ageing, mobilities research has yet to sufficiently address how seniors go about participating in these everyday movements; or how they may be (infra)structurally enrolled within, or excluded from, regular circuits of transport and travel. This session aims to open up a conversation about these missing mobilities, in an effort to plug this knowledge gap.

An analysis on seniors’ mobilities goes beyond a mere focus on accessibility and quality of life issues, which are often (pre)defined for old people as their top policy concerns in existing transport geographical research. Rather, it should open up seniors’ mobilities as active endeavours in their own right, which practitioners vigorously perform and negotiate, amid equally potent interventions from planners, service providers, and nonhuman actors. This session intends to explore these dynamics, in hopes of expanding the horizons of mobilities research, and to contribute to policy shaping. Additionally, it seeks to draw out new relationships between streams of movement attributed to the ‘aged’, and those that are not. It interrogates how seniors’ mobilities are, in fact, part and parcel of wider mobile regimes, which not only nurture certain assumptions about moving, but also work to relativise the (im)mobilities of different social (age) groups. In this CFP we invite submissions whose intention is to move towards these open-ended conceptualisations of seniors’ mobilities. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• theorisations of seniors’ (im)mobilities

• cultural logics and assumptions about seniors’ mobilities

• practices, experiences, and encounters

• bodies, affects and (dis)comforts

• politics, conflicts and social exclusions

• gendering ageing and mobilities

• infrastructures, design and their implications

• aeromobilities and retirement travel

• new methodologies in researching seniors’ mobilities

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to Weiqiang Lin ( weiqiang@nus.edu.sg) and Jean-Baptiste Fretigny ( jean-baptiste.fretigny@u-cergy.fr) by 9th October 2015.

Successful applicants will be contacted by 16th October 2015, and will be expected to register and submit their abstracts online to the AAG website by 29th October 2015. Please refer to the AAG website for a schedule of registration fees which are due at online submission.