Mobilities

AbstractMobilities are thesine qua nonof globalization. Without extensive systems of mobility, social processes could not take place on a global scale. But the field of mobilities research goes far beyond this moot point. Over the past decade a new mobilities paradigm has been emerging in the social sciences involving new approaches to studying the combined movements of people, objects, and information in all of their complex relational dynamics, as well as the representations, ideologies, and meanings attached to such movement. Unlike the traditional sociological study of social mobility, transdisciplinary mobilities research encompasses not only human mobility, but also thespatialmobility of objects, information, images, and capital, as well as the study of the physical means for movement such as infrastructures, vehicles, and software systems that enable travel and communication to take place. Mobilities research overlaps with some aspects of globalization studies, communications research, migration and border studies, tourism studies, transport geography and the anthropology of circulation, but it also differs in its scope, foci, and methodologies from each of these.