Mobility

Is this a book about mobility or a book about ideas about mobility? Essentially it is both. This book will explore a series of different understandings of mobility as well as different approaches to it, whilst it will set about exploring how exactly mobility works and what it means for contemporary issues as diverse as globalisation and disability politics. Before I go into this any further, the book puts forward one inescapable truth of mobility: in all its various guises, definitions, approaches, from the most abstract understanding to the most grounded, mobility, at least for me, is a relation. In fact, borrowing from Lois McNay (2005: 3-4) I reckon it is a lived relation; it is an orientation to oneself, to others and to the world. Just as Nigel Thrift (1996) outlines mobility as a particular 'structure of feeling', mobility is a way of addressing people, objects, things and places. It is a way of communicating meaning and significance, while it is also a way to resist authoritarian regimes. For some it is a desperate passageway full of hope. For others it is banal and forgettable. It is a way to bond with one's friend, while it could be the means to threaten a boundary. In a certain sense then, mobility appears much like a notion such as space or time. Peter Merriman (2012) sees mobility as a key 'primitive' of social and spatial thought. It is ubiquitous; it is everywhere. It might even be found in everything. But importantly it is almost always born in relation-to something or someone.