Mobilities

This chapter explores mobility within cultural geography and considers its emerging directions. As the field of mobility studies has expanded and the currency of its approaches and concepts gained value and broader sub-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary relevance, it is important that we see that mobility is not really a singular or settled subject within the field, even while names and categories might give us that perception. It is a combination of plurality and transformation which this chapter holds onto both as a way of narrating some of the developments within the field, and to look forward to emerging directions and trajectories of research. This chapter uses the figure or foil which often stands in for a kind of trajectory and directionality of mobility: a line drawn from A to B, and recognises concern for the line as an abstraction of mobility, before it works with the line, and its abstractions, far more affirmatively. The chapter looks to other approaches focusing on the apparent activity and passivity of the mobile body and its capacities to affect and be affected; discussions and constructions of mobile relationality and non-relations; and mobile lives which pull away from racialised and gendered norms which have governed and marginalised mobile life through particular entanglements of racism, misogyny and homophobia.