Mobilities

Mobilities is a contemporary paradigm in the social sciences that explores the movement of people, ideas and things, as well as the broader social implications of those movements.

A mobility "turn" (or transformation) in the social sciences began in the 1990s in response to the increasing realization of the historic and contemporary importance of movement on individuals and society. This turn has been driven by generally increased levels of mobility and new forms of mobility where bodies combine with information and different patterns of mobility. The mobilities paradigm incorporates new ways of theorizing about how these mobilities lie, "at the center of constellations of power, the creation of identities and the microgeographies of everyday life." (Cresswell, 2011, 551)

The mobility turn arose as a response to the way in which the social sciences had traditionally been static, seeing movement as a black box and ignoring or trivializing "the importance of the systematic movements of people for work and family life, for leisure and pleasure, and for politics and protest" (Sheller and Urry, 2006, 208). Mobilities emerged as a critique of contradictory orientations toward both sedentarism and deterritorialisation in social science. People had often been seen as static entities tied to specific places, or as nomadic and placeless in a frenetic and globalized existence. Mobilities looks at movements and the forces that drive, constrain and are produced by those movements.