Mobilities II

I Introduction

The subtitle of this report – ‘cruising’ – denotes a certain quality, style or means of travel, as well as a ‘betweenness’ fitting of a second progress report out of three. The English word ‘cruise’ can be traced back to a range of 17th-century terms that were in use in European, colonial seafaring nations (OED, 2015). ¹ Cruising, like terms such as coasting, free-wheeling, gliding, and drifting (on drifting see Peters, 2015), implies an effortlessness and consistency, as we ‘cruise to victory’ or reach a ‘cruising height’ (OED, 2015). ² Cruising becomes associated with certain practices, qualities, spaces, materials, subjects and events, and it is important to break down movements into such components (Cresswell, 2010; Peters, 2015), especially when seeking to understand their social, cultural, political, environmental or economic weight and significance. In this report I pay particular attention to these qualities, examining a few of the elemental geographies and dynamic processes associated with mobility practices and infrastructures. In section II, I focus on work which has examined how water, air, steel and aluminium shape our mobilities. In section III, I examine recent work on the processual nature of movement, and finally, in section IV, I reflect on the life and work of an ‘unexpected’ mobilities scholar: Stuart Hall. Before moving on, I want to make a few observations about key publications over the past year.

As has previously been reported (Cresswell, 2011, 2012, 2014; Merriman, 2015), the field of mobility studies is characterized by a striking multi- and inter-disciplinarity, and the past year has seen engagements with – and developments of – mobilities research by scholars working in and across a diverse array of fields, including archaeology (Leary, 2014), anthropology (Lipset and Handler, 2014), design (Jensen, 2014), socialist and post-socialist studies (Burrell and Hörschelmann, 2014), theatre and performance (Wilkie, 2015), sound studies (Bijsterveld et al., 2014), social interaction studies (Haddington et al., 2013; McIlvenny et al., 2014), media and communications (Goggin and Hjorth, 2014; Madden, 2014; de Souza e Silva and Sheller, 2015), literary studies (Murray and Upstone, 2014), and Foucault studies (Manderscheid et al., 2014; Paterson, 2014; Philo, 2014). A major new 600-page interdisciplinary collection, The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (Adey et al., 2014), seeks to transcend such disciplinary divisions, with 55 chapters from scholars working in history, management, media, English studies, tourism, politics, ethnology, communication studies, transport studies, and anthropology, as well as the expected disciplines of geography and sociology. The Handbook traces the genealogy and emergence of what is increasingly being characterized as a new ‘field’ – mobility studies – discussing different disciplinary approaches (section 1) and methods (section 7), as well as tracing the diverse materialities (section 4), subjects (section 5), events (section 6), qualities (section 2), and spaces and technologies (section 3) associated with movement and mobility (including travel and transport). As one of the editors of the Handbook, I am hopeful that it will help to open up new debates and make links with other established fields, and the increasing purchase and maturity of geographic studies of mobility is perhaps best reflected in the incorporation of a section on mobilities within one of the leading human geography textbooks published in the UK, Introducing Human Geographies, edited by Cloke, Crang and Goodwin (see Adey, 2014a; Minca and Wagner, 2014; Verne, 2014).

II The elemental mobilities of earth, wind and fire (and water)

To counter the suggestion that mobilities simply imply and evoke qualities of movement, flux, dynamism, and speed, mobility scholars have long emphasized how movement relies upon a wide range of relatively fixed ‘moorings’ (Urry, 2003, 2007), from seemingly grounded infrastructures (Graham and Marvin, 2001) to a diverse array of objects (Adey et al., 2014), all of which may become associated with experiences of stillness, waiting, boredom and stasis, as well as feelings of speed, thrill and excitement (Bissell, 2007; Bissell and Fuller, 2011). Infrastructures, routes, passages, and vehicles are revealed to have diverse and complex materialities associated with different experiences and affects, and the simple term ‘materialities’ somehow fails to capture the elemental, affective and dynamic qualities of mobilities past and present. As a result, an increasing number of geographers and mobility scholars have sought to unpick the elemental or elementary geographies of our mobile worlds, including the ‘elementary geographies’ of ‘being in passage’ (Adey et al., 2012: 180, 177). As I discuss in section III, considerable attention has focused on the vibrant materialities and mobilities of life (Bennett, 2010; Bissell, 2010; Merriman, 2012a), as well as the ‘elemental prejudices’ of a discipline which has, not surprisingly, been preoccupied with earthly topographies and materials (Jackson and Fannin, 2011: 435; Forsyth et al., 2013). In contrast, however, the past few years have seen increasing attention paid within human geography to the elemental geographies of air and water, as well as the significance of materials such as steel, aluminium and carbon. Moving far beyond his earlier work on airports, airmindedness and aerial life, Peter Adey’s Air: Nature and Culture arrived in 2014 in the Earth Series published by Reaktion Books. In a plush, small-format book with 99 illustrations (57 in colour), Adey provides an impressive account of ‘air and how we have come to know it, feel it, sense it’, as it has become central to ‘our ways of life, our science, our culture, our politics, our technologies’ (Adey, 2014b: 9). One aspect of this story is an account of how imaginations and knowledges of human flight and aerial ascendance have emerged and evolved, from classical and early modern imaginations of airborne figures to early experiments with balloons and aeroplanes. Airs blow through different imaginations, scientific experiments, and technological assemblages, lifting thoughts, hopes, wings, and bodies (Adey, 2014b).

In Aluminum Dreams Mimi Sheller reveals how this metal has been central to modern life, including modern mobilities: ‘aluminum is a substance constitutive of modern mobility due to the crucial part it plays in the transportation, construction, and the aviation industries. It also moves our electricity, without which many other things would not be able to move’ (Sheller, 2014a: 10; also Sheller, 2014c). Aluminium is utilized in a broad range of domestic, industrial and military technologies, with its strength and lightness proving ideal for airborne vehicles. In a very different study Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein (2014) discuss the materialities, mobilities and enthusiasms involved in restoring a rare Czech Tatra T87 car purchased on eBay. In describing how they restored this rusty wreck to a ‘gold standard’ winner of the 2010 New York Times Collectable Car Contest, DeLyser and Greenstein trace the artisanal production practices, ‘transnational networks of enthusiasm’, and global mobilities involved in restoring a rare, Eastern European motor car (DeLyser and Greenstein, 2014: 10). Drawing upon ‘follow the thing’ literatures, they reveal the flows of materials, bodies and knowledges involved in repairing, replacing and sourcing three parts – the clock, the wheels, and the steering wheel – as they are rebuilt, moulded or replaced with the aid of fellow enthusiasts, collectors and restorers (DeLyser and Greenstein, 2014).

The bulk of the Tatra’s restoration was undertaken in the Czech Republic, and this rare and distinctive steel car was shipped across the Atlantic in a standardized steel box container, entering a system of cargo logistics whose mobilities and political economy have been carefully traced and unpicked in a number of recent studies, most notably Deborah Cowen’s important new book The Deadly Life of Logistics (Cowen, 2014; see also Martin, 2013, 2014; Parker, 2013; Hepworth, 2014; Birtchnell et al., 2015). Mobile ‘elements’ enable mobilities, but they may also emerge from or be generated by mobilities. Of these, carbon is perhaps the most significant. Through fossil-fuel extraction and combustion, carbon is ‘released’ and ‘mobilized’ in ways most scientists understand to be detrimental to the global climate (on oil, see Urry, 2013, 2014), and as Mathew Paterson explains in an article on carbon mobilities, contemporary ‘climate change politics has been precisely organised around the generation of newly mobile objects – specifically the rights to generate carbon emissions, as mobilised via carbon markets’ (Paterson, 2014: 570).

The final element I want to discuss is water, focusing on the elementary geographies and mobilities of our oceans, seas and rivers. While physical geographers have held a long-standing interest in its physical processes and mobilities, human geographers have only recently begun to examine the elemental qualities and materialities of water, moving beyond early work on the political and cultural geographies of ocean territories, exploration, ferries and shipping ‘to fully appreciate the ocean as a uniquely fluid and dynamic space’ which requires ‘an epistemology that views the ocean as continually being reconstituted by a variety of elements: the non-human and the human, the biological and the geophysical, the historic and the contemporary’ (Steinberg, 2013: 157). Seas, oceans and rivers may be explored, governed, imagined and represented in diverse ways, but their elemental qualities and physical properties are vital to how they are encountered and traversed. As Steinberg succinctly argues, oceans are ‘wet, mobile, dynamic, deep, dark spaces that are characterized by complex movements and interdependencies of water molecules, minerals, and non-human biota as well as humans and their ships’ (Steinberg, 2013: 159; also Steinberg and Peters, 2015). Following Steinberg’s influential work, a number of geographers have begun exploring different aspects of the geographies of seas, oceans, and indeed ships. Jon Anderson and Kimberley Peters’ edited collection Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean includes sections on ocean knowledges, experiences and natures, with a number of chapters on oceanic mobilities, including surfing, ice roads, kayaking, pirate radio ships, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, and an ethnography of wreck diving (Anderson and Peters, 2014). Oceans are examined as surfaces traversed and experienced, depths explored, and above all as meaningful, material, elemental, practised spaces, and such enquiries are increasingly multi-disciplinary, with a recent special issue of the Harvard Design Magazine on ‘wet matter’ including contributions from architects, designers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and geographers (Bélanger, 2014; Peters and Steinberg, 2014).

Ships and boats come in many different forms, and a special issue of Mobilities on ‘the mobilities of ships and shipped mobilities’ outlines the shear diversity of ship technologies and ship mobilities which have, over centuries, transported people and things, whether these mobilities were voluntary or forced, feared or enjoyed, rough or smooth, carefully planned or accidental, fortuitous or disastrous (Anim-Addo et al., 2014). Ships are diverse mobile technologies, and the special issue includes papers on pirate ships (Hasty, 2014), steamships (Anim-Addo, 2014), super yachts (Spence, 2014a; see also Spence, 2014b), maritime surveillance (Peters, 2014), naval mutinies (Davies, 2014), containerization (Martin, 2014), and creative voyaging (Straughan and Dixon, 2014). Other maritime studies have, of course, focused on the slave ship (Rediker, 2008), the ferry (Vannini, 2012), the cruise liner (Wealleans, 2006; Ashmore, 2013), the migrant passenger (Ong et al., 2014), and most recently the prison ship (Peters and Turner, 2015). With the increasing interest of scholars in the volumetric properties of ocean space, attention has also turned to sub-surface movements, currents and vehicles, including underwater drones and submarines (Steinberg and Peters, 2015), although the elite military, scientific and exploratory uses of these expensive underwater vehicles creates patterns and experiences of mobility which may be more difficult to observe and access.

III Processual movements and the politics of becoming mobile

Elemental mobilities direct our attention to the many incessant, forceful, vital and vibrant movements and materialities which seemingly underpin and shape our worlds, simultaneously generating and fragmenting ‘simple’, ‘common-sense’ understandings of subjects, objects, actions, movements, and stillness. Inspired by the processual philosophies of Lucretius, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze and Serres, a notable number of thinkers are rethinking notions of movement, materiality, subjectivity, and affect (Bissell, 2010; Merriman, 2012a). Jane Bennett (2010: x) has famously examined how ‘the vital materialities that flow through and around us … are crucial to political life’, while more recently Erin Manning has focused her attention on the primacy of (relational) movements which subjectify, materialize, body, and en-world:

A body never pre-exists its movement. Total movement courses through all incipient form-takings (the edging into itself of ‘object’, the shading into itself of ‘figure’). What actualizes as this or that displacement, this or that form, is but a brief instantiation of what that movement has become. Choreographers such as William Forsythe know this well: Forsythe speaks not of hitting a form (‘do this figure’) but of dancing the very force of movement-moving (‘find the movement in the figure, and move with it’). He asks his dancers to body, not to ‘represent’ a body. From noun to verb, what movement does is make apparent that nothing is quite what it seems. (Manning, 2014: 164–5)

The Israeli wall which Cresswell enrols as a concrete example of a fixed and solid barrier clearly does restrict Palestinian embodied mobilities – forming part of a complex network of Israeli infrastructures that includes bypass roads, settlements, and check-points designed to ‘secure’ Israeli occupied territories and prevent the movement of suicide bombers – but it also generates, enables and embodies distinctive movements, rhythms and affects which have political resonance and significance (Till et al., 2013: 56). In one sense, the wall is mobile, for although possessing molar stability – appearing to be fixed – it has a molecular mobility, as it very slowly degrades over time and moves through cultural and political discourses and imaginations. What’s more, the wall has the potential to move, and may well be removed:

The wall appears permanent, but is actually made up of prefabricated modules that have been dropped into place by crane without deep foundations; in the same manner that they have been laid, they can also be extracted. While not to diminish the present distress caused to Palestinians, or the unpleasant tendency of such ‘temporary’ structures to endure, it is important to realize that, as a structure, the wall can come down. (Till et al., 2014: 56)

IV Mobility: A life

As Tim Cresswell so eruditely outlined in his landmark book On the Move, movement and mobility are central to both everyday life and academic enquiry, whether we are talking about molecular movements, embodied gestures and practices, transport systems, or global and trans-national forces and flows (Cresswell, 2006). In my first progress report, I discussed the growing body of work on elite mobilities, including those of skilled migrants, international students, academics, and the super-rich (Merriman, 2015; Jöns, 2014; Jöns et al., 2015). As academics, we are all too familiar with the different mobile practices associated with our employment sector, whether these are the movements entailed in conference attendance, short-term research trips and sabbatical visits, international exchanges, or migration to seek employment. Until recently, geographers have only really paid indirect attention to how those mobilities and movements shape ‘us’ as academics. At the forefront of this work have been postcolonial and feminist scholars who actively theorize and reflect upon their own positionality, mobility and biographies, and their work has highlighted the important role that mobilities play in the personal identities and trajectories of scholars.

The passing of the prominent black sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall in February 2014 prompted me to think not only about the important influence of his work (and that of the CCCS and Marxist cultural studies) to the development of cultural geography (see Jackson, 1989; Mitchell, 2000), but also the centrality of issues of movement and mobility to Hall’s life and work, ranging from his migration from Jamaica to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship in the 1950s, to his critical thinking around questions of hybridity, relationality, multiculturalism, the Left, and identity in the 1990s (Akomfrah, 2013). While surprised by the absence of editorial comment or obituaries for Stuart Hall in cultural geography journals – especially given his influence on cultural geography, and in sharp contrast with the extensive coverage of his life and work in cultural studies and other disciplines (e.g. Blackburn, 2014; Morley and Schwarz, 2014; Grossberg, 2015) – I turned to an essay entitled ‘Travelling Thoughts’ written by Doreen Massey for the volume marking Hall’s retirement from the Open University (Massey, 2000). Massey positions movement, journeys and relations at the heart of her approach to space and place, demonstrating the differential political and economic geographies that result from processes of globalization, imperialism and travel, all of which she illustrates through a critical reflection on her regular commute by car with Stuart Hall from North London to the Open University in Milton Keynes. While the chapter can be seen to form part of Massey’s ongoing theorization of places as dynamic, contested, products of political, economic, social and physical forces (cf. Massey, 2005), it also provides a convenient lens through which to approach key elements of Hall’s work.

In his attentiveness to the complex relational cultural-politics of imperialism, race, globalization, hybridity, diaspora and identity, Hall (like Paul Gilroy) was in many senses a theorist of mobility and mobilization, while also highlighting the ‘emplacing’ of cultural and political practices and relations. If, as John Urry and others have stated, the emergence of mobility studies reflects the ascendance of particular strands of non-essentialist, post-colonial, post-structuralist and feminist thinking, including ‘a focus on issues of identity, embodiment, performance, subjectivity, [and] transnational migration’ (Merriman, 2007: 5), then Hall could rightly be considered an important – though, perhaps, unwitting – mobility theorist, alongside mobility scholars such as Cresswell, Sheller and Urry, and critical thinkers such as Bauman, Castells, Clifford, Deleuze, Gilroy, Merleau-Ponty, and Simmel. Mobility theories come in many forms and from many disciplines, and this diversity, multi-disciplinarity and plurality is an important hallmark of this rapidly expanding field.