Moving Together

As we strolled down the city’s sidewalks, Xipoógi walked behind me, with Xaboási behind him. I slowed down to let them catch up. They slowed down too. I slowed down more. Ditto. I stopped. They stopped. They simply would not walk beside me, not even when I asked them to. This makes sense on a narrow jungle path. [. . .] In the city, though, walking abreast, while spatially inefficient, allows the walkers to converse more easily and to be perceived as a group. I smiled about our walking arrangement.

This special issue highlights new research that is concerned with the detailed analysis of the interrelations between talk and embodiment in social interaction and the practices of mobility and spatial movement. As the body of work in interactional mobility studies is consolidated and comparisons are made across different modes and sites of mobility (Haddington, Keisanen, & Nevile, 2012; Haddington, Mondada, & Nevile, 2013b; McIlvenny, Broth, & Haddington, 2009), it has recently come to light that there is more to investigate of the ways in which embodied actors or participants orient to each other and organize their actions together while they are engaged in specific modes of collective movement or joint mobile action. Social and cultural occasions such as driving a car, strolling on the pavement, riding in a bicycle competition, following a guide, or learning the Lindy Hop, all involve, and are constituted by, a continual and skillful orientation to a flexible assemblage of participants, materialities, spaces, presences, and modes of communication. Without this orientation by members to different types of assemblage which form different kinds of perceivable and recognizable “mobile formations-in-action,” then there would be no traffic, no promenade, no race, no guided tour, and no dance to speak of.

Earlier work on the local social organization and coordination of embodied actors has formulated specific and precise ways of understanding the relations between social space, embodiment, and mutual attention/presence, and this body of work has sometimes hinted at movement into and out of the focal static social formations or spaces (Goffman, 1963, 1971; Goodwin, 2000; Kendon, 1990, 2010). Some scholars have independently wrestled with a mode of mobility and its local constitution as a social practice, for example, walking, pedestrian crossings, driving in traffic, route finding, forest driving, flying, and so on (Hester & Francis, 2003; Nevile, 2004; Psathas, 1986; Relieu, 1999; Ryave & Schenkein, 1974; Watson, 1999). Building on these earlier studies, we develop new ways of documenting and describing the types of formations, patterns, structures, constellations, and relations that are accomplished interactionally and attended to by participants as a constitutive part of those practices while mobile or on the move. Recently, Goffman’s work has been suggestively extended to generate a new vocabulary, such as the notion of the “mobile with” (Jensen, 2010). Thus, there is much scope for generating richer conceptualisations of “mobile formations” based on an understanding and analysis of the endogenous practices of forming collectivities (diverse articulations of relations between actors) while on the move (see also Haddington, Mondada & Nevile, 2013a, pp. 40-42).

This special issue brings together leading scholars who are studying, with the help of video recordings and other traces of unfolding events, how participants do mobility together, in and as groups. Mobile formations are seen in their purest form as social groupings of two or more individuals that start moving, maintain relative movement, change mobile trajectories, or stop moving together. Participants in a mobile activity may, of course, begin or stop moving at different times and they may maintain different speeds, but yet still be accountable (Garfinkel, 1967/1984) as a mobile formation. In all cases, people traveling or moving together have to work, sometimes intensely, to maintain alignment, a sense of presence, mutual awareness, frameworks of co-participation, and to coordinate transitions between modes of mobility while maintaining togetherness, pace, and flow. Indeed, a mobile formation is not necessarily a simple matter of the coordination of co-participants. Traffic can comprise a variety of interdependent mobile actors of different velocities, shapes, and trajectories, for example, cars, trams, pedestrians, and bikes, whose coordination as a situated practice is temporally and spatially distributed as well as often highly contingent (despite, e.g., traffic rules and regulations).

The articles in this special issue focus specifically on how such formations are accomplished, maintained or dissolved under the constraints, resources, and affordances of being mobile. The articles study the talk, interactional actions, resources, and work that are required for managing such formations dynamically in naturally occurring activities. Phenomena that are considered in this special issue include

In sum, this special issue grasps the opportunity to revisit the rather static concept of formation (or, for that matter, Goffman’s (1971, pp. 6-7) famous term vehicular unit) in order to uncover the social and cultural practices in which it is ongoingly constituted and the work that is done by “formings” in situ, that is, their action-directed nature and their social accomplishment. At the same time, by focusing specifically on how people practice and orient to mobility together, as active participants in the social world who accomplish their everyday activities in and through “intermobility,” it responds to the need to study how people “do mobility” (Adey, 2010). In doing so, all the articles in the special issue adopt an interactional approach, and therefore they not only demonstrate the richness of taking such an approach to mobility but also generate a new, movement-centered vocabulary for talking about “structuring” as a social and interactional practice in studies of mobilities.