Mobility/Mobilities

Scelta modale, atteggiamenti e condivisione dello spazio nella mobilità quotidiana

by Giulio Mattioli

Published in "Sociologia Urbana e Rurale", , 94, pp.103-118.

The unsustainability of current trends in daily mobility and the need to manage travel demand constitute the... more The unsustainability of current trends in daily mobility and the need to manage travel demand constitute the background of this article, which focuses on the notions of attitudes and mode choice behavior. In this context, an approach to the study of their mutual relationship is put forward and exemplified by the discussion of an attitude dimension, “social mixing and secessionism in daily mobility”, focused on the propensity to share space with strangers during travel. The author then presents the results of an exploratory empirical study, carried out on a sample of college students in Milan in 2010 and aimed at testing the existence and the internal structure of the construct. While the complexity of the attitude dimension will probably require further studies, the results confirm the heuristic potential of the proposed theoretical framework.

Multihoming Support based on Mobile Node Protocol LIN6

by Arifumi Matsumoto

Does Lower Mobility Help Maintain/Stabilize Group-Hierarchy? Link Between Mobility & Hierarchy-Related Beliefs

by Laysee Ong

Co-authored with Angela Leung. Poster for 24th APS Annual Convention, 2012.

Question: Does mobility influence individual’s hierarchy-related beliefs?

Empirical Test: Two self-report... more Question: Does mobility influence individual’s hierarchy-related beliefs?

Empirical Test: Two self-report studies were conducted. 

Findings: The answer is YES.  Individuals with higher (vs. lower) mobility are less likely to endorse hierarchy, less collectivistic and more egalitarian.  It is the mobility of the self (vs. general environment) that plays a stronger role.

Moving Home: Housing studies and the ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences

by Rae Dufty-Jones

Off-grid Mobilities: Incorporating a Way of Life

by Phillip Vannini

Published in Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies

Drawing from sensory ethnography, the present multimodal writing—accompanied by photography and digital... more Drawing from sensory ethnography, the present multimodal writing—accompanied by photography and digital video—documents and interprets the mobilities of off-grid living on Lasqueti Island, British Columbia, Canada. The data presentation focuses in particular on the embodied experience of off-grid inhabitation, highlighting the sensory and kinetic experiences and practices of everyday life in a community disconnected from the North American electrical grid and highway network. The mobilities of fuel and energy are presented in unison with ethnographic attention to the taskscape of everyday activities and movements in which off-grid islanders routinely engage. The analysis, based on Tim Ingold's non-representational theory on place, movement, and inhabitation, focuses on how the material and corporeal mobilities of off-grid life body forth a unique sense of place.

Have You Ever Been in Bosnia? British Military Travelers in the Balkans since 1992

by Catherine Baker

Journeys: the International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 12:1 (2011): 63-92

Tens of thousands of British military personnel traveled in former Yugoslavia as peacekeepers between 1992 and 2007.... more Tens of thousands of British military personnel traveled in former Yugoslavia as peacekeepers between 1992 and 2007. The settlements where British forces established their military presence and supply chain were conceptually far from former Yugoslavia’s tourist sites, but military travelers made sense of them by drawing on the commonplaces of previous travel accounts and the lessons of pre-deployment training.

British military travelers constructed themselves as often frustrated helpers in Bosnia who struggled with political limitations on their activities but found satisfaction in improving socio-economic relations at the level of the immediate community. For troops, long otiose periods in a stabilizing and startlingly cheap country engendered a touristic sensibility. This paper draws on published memoirs and more than fifty new oral history interviews with British peacekeepers and their Bosnian employees to illustrate how British military travelers drew on, perpetuated and changed the patterns and representation of British travel to the Balkans.

An iterative channel estimator for fast-varying channels using successive OFDM symbols

by Youssef El Hajj Shehadeh

Fast varying channel estimation in downlink LTE systems

by Youssef El Hajj Shehadeh

Entre banalité et exotisme, le panel individuel des destinations touristiques

by Hadrien Commenges

Définir l'intermédiarité par le système des mobilités spatiales

by Hadrien Commenges

Living with multiple borders

by Joris Schapendonk

The European Union’s soutern borderlands are spaces where the politics of mobilities (Cresswell 2010) becomes... more The European Union’s soutern borderlands are spaces where the politics of mobilities (Cresswell 2010) becomes explicitly visible; some mobilities are passing through without much interference, while others are traced, slowed down and blocked. This paper  discusses social life of a particular group of migrants whose mobility is hindered by the hard borders of the EU: Sub-Saharan African ‘transit migrants’ in Morocco and Turkey. By focusing on migrants’ in/visibility, im/mobility and dis/connections, I stress that migrants are not simply immobile actors who are only passively waiting ‘in transit’. Instead, mobility in general, and border crossings in particular, belong to the tactics of migrants that help them dealing with the restrictive socio-political environment they live in. I show how these everyday tactics contribute to the making and re-making of borderlands. With these insights, I criticize the notion of borderlands as consisting of two (or more) territorial entities that are seperated by the border. Instead, I plead for a relational understanding of borderlands (Massey 2005; Amin 2002) as spaces where various spatio-temporal trajectories come together for different duration. Hence, multiple borders come together in single borderlands.

Hypermobility in Backpacker Lifestyles: the Emergence of the Internet Café

by Michael O' Regan

P. Burns, and M. Novelli (2008) Tourism and Mobilities. Wallingford: CABI .

Mobility, an inherent quality of globalization, is characterized by movement and is arguably an integral part of... more Mobility, an inherent quality of globalization, is characterized by movement and is arguably an integral part of modern travel. A particular category of mobility can be associated with the travel lives of budget travellers (backpackers, vaga-bonds, gap year travellers), falling within the realm of extreme mobility as they move from location to location. Internet cafés play a vital function in traveller mobility networks and are a symbol of their mobility. While all tourist places are mobility places, Internet cafés are a particular and growing type of tourist activity place – a place of hypermobility, where travellers can manage and facilitate their multiple mobilities, fully embracing a hypermobile lifestyle. This chapter will argue that Internet cafés materialize by necessity (market forces) in specific places like traveller enclaves and within hostels but are not fully embedded in the place. A café then isn’t just defined by its fixity and physically bounded location but also by the multiple mobilities of today’s travellers; not just from their increased numbers and diversity but also from the technology they bring and use. By using mobility studies as a conceptual base for this chapter, we can learn something about what it means to live and consume in the age of globalization and ask how globalization processes such as hypermobility (and how travellers
have to manage and facilitate it) mesh with countercultures like backpacking.

Does the Priest Have to Be There? Contested Marriages Before Roman Tribunals. Italy, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 3, 2009, 10-30.

by Cecilia Cristellon

The Council of Trent established the requirements that a marriage be celebrated by the parish priest and two or more... more The Council of Trent established the requirements that a marriage be celebrated by the parish priest and two or more witnesses be present at the marriage (1563), but neglected to specify who the parish priest was. The decrees provoked confusion among both laymen and churchmen. Traces thereof can be found in the hitherto essentially unexplored documentation of The Congregation of the Council. This institution was founded in 1564 specifically to resolve the questions that arose all over the catholic world by the application of the decrees promulgated at Trent. The related records are held in the Vatican Secret Archive. Through an examination of this documentation, complemented by files of the Holy Office the author analyzes how the new rules were understood, experienced, used, circumvented, and manipulated both by laymen and churchmen in order to end an unwanted marriage, to facilitate a union that was socially transgressive, opposed by family, or even heterodox, and to respond to pastoral concerns.

Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, by Tim Ingold (book review)

by Phillip Vannini

Forthcoming, yet-to-be-copy-edited review of Ingold's recent work, to be published in the journal Transfers

My book review of Tim Ingold's Being Alive, Ways of Walking, and Redrawing Anthropology My book review of Tim Ingold's Being Alive, Ways of Walking, and Redrawing Anthropology

Disciplined mobility and carceral geography: prisoner transport in Russia

by Dominique Moran

in early view in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

co-authored with Laura Piacentini and Judith Pallot

This paper identifies and addresses a significant weakness in the literature on mobility – the theorisation of... more This paper identifies and addresses a significant weakness in the literature on mobility – the theorisation of mobility and power, and specifically, the consideration of mobility as an expression of power. It argues that the ‘mobilities turn’ has tended to draw a connection between mobility, autonomy and freedom, and in so doing has inadequately explored and theorised involuntary and coerced mobility. To illustrate this, the paper draws together two literatures that have thus far been poorly integrated, and that at first seem an unlikely pairing – the mobilities work that has exploded in scope and diversity over the past decade and that seeks to ‘undermine sedentarist theories’ in geography (Sheller M and Urry J 2006 The new mobilities paradigm Environment and Planning A 38 207–26, p 208), and the nascent field of ‘carceral geography’, a body of work beginning to coalesce around the spatialities of detention and imprisonment, but that, in its focus on spatial regulation, has thus far tended to overlook the mobilities inherent in carceral practices. The two are drawn together through consideration of an example of ‘disciplined mobility’– contemporary prisoner transport in the Russian Federation, which serves as an illustration both of punitive power expressed through mobility and of mobility in the carceral context. The paper then argues that future research in mobilities must consider more fully the disciplinary nature of mobility, and suggests that the concept of ‘disciplined mobility’ (after Packer J 2003 Disciplining mobility: governing and safety in Bratich J Z, Packer J and McCarthy C eds Foucault, cultural studies, and governmentality State University of New York Press, New York 135–63), may form a framework for such future research.

(2012) “Im/Mobilities in a ‘Hostile Territory’: Managing the Red Line.’” Geopolitics

by Lisa Bhungalia

Interview with Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint of Ecoarttech

by Leila C. Nadir

Furtherfield.org Interview with Sophia Kosmaoglou - 20/04/2012

Refusing to regard technology merely as a tool, Ecoarttech expand the uses of mobile technology and digital networks... more Refusing to regard technology merely as a tool, Ecoarttech expand the uses of mobile technology and digital networks revealing them to be fundamental components of the way we experience our environment. Their most recent work Indeterminate Hikes + (IH +) is a phone app that maps a series of trails through the city. IH + can be accessed globally, or wherever users have access to Google Maps on their mobile phones. After identifying the users’ location, IH + generates a route along random “Scenic Vistas" within urban spaces. Users are directed to perform a series of tasks along the trail and provide feedback in the form of snapshots generating an ongoing, open-ended dialogue. But the experience of their work is primarily an encounter with technology. Since 2005, Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint of Ecoarttech have been engaged in an artistic exploration of environmental sustainability and convergent media. By drawing our attention to the increasing replacement or mediation of physical experiences by technology, Ecoarttech challenge the widely reproduced distinction between nature and culture. They present their work in the form of videos, digital networks, blogs, performance and installations. Their early video-based work (Wilderness Trouble and Frontier Mythology) plays out a performative and ironic encounter with the natural environment as a historically constructed concept. In the summer of 2005 Ecoarttech made A Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness (2005) a database networked performance in QuickTime (DVD and Podcast).

Screens on Site: Mobilizing Urban Screenspace

by Nanna Verhoeff

Turbulent Trajectories: African Migrants on Their Way to the EU

by Joris Schapendonk

This is a paper published in the open access journal SOCIETIES: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies/special_issues/on-the-move/

Power, Difference, and Mobility: feminist advances in migration studies

by Rachel Silvey

Published in Progress in Human Geography, 28 (4), 2004.

The feminist migration literature in geography has contributed to bringing several critical social theoretical themes... more The feminist migration literature in geography has contributed to bringing several critical social theoretical themes to the forefront of migration studies. Specifically, feminists have foregrounded the politics of scale, mobility as political process, questions of subjectivity/ identity and critical theorizations of space and place. This article provides an overview of the feminist migration literature organized around these themes. In addition, it argues that feminist migration studies can play a pivotal role in the ongoing project of marrying the materialist concerns of political economy to those of critical social theorists.