Traces of a Mobile Field: Ten Years of Mobilities Research

This agenda-setting collection critically reflects upon a decade of contributions to the social scientific ‘mobilities turn’ in order to propose new trajectories for the future of this interdisciplinary research field. The chapters are all exemplars of how the past decade of research has opened up new insights into the place of mobilities in societies. They also highlight how attempts to look forward towards new conversations, understandings, and interventions in a mobile world will emerge from the transformations invoked by this field of research. Authors foreground issues of power, interdisciplinarity, transformative technologies, fragmented discourses and changing social processes whilst addressing automobility, aeromobility, tourism, communications technologies, urban infrastructures, migration, and emergencies. As a whole, the collection raises important questions about not only how understandings of mobilities are changing, but also how the field of mobilities research is itself on the move. The evocative empirical cases and provocative arguments in this book thus highlight the necessity of new concepts, conversations, methods, empirical studies and interventions to address transformations in both the complex mobilities of social worlds and what is examined or taken for granted in mobilities research itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.

James Faulconbridge is Professor in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology at Lancaster University Management School, UK. His research focuses, in particular, upon the way forms of mobility are used in global firms, with the role of business travel being of especial interest.

Allison Hui is an Academic Fellow in Sociology and the DEMAND Centre at Lancaster University, UK . Her research examines transformations in everyday life in the context of changing global mobilities, focusing particularly on theorising social practices, consumption and travel.