mobility studies

A movement in Cultural Studies and human geography concerned with mobility in the most broadly understood sense of that word---not just the movement of things, people, and ideas, but also both the means of moving things, people, and ideas and the actual fact and, more especially, the experience of moving as well as attitudes towards moving. In On the Move: Mobility in the Western World (2006) Tim Cresswell argues that mobility is the dynamic equivalent of place, which is to say it is a form of movement that is in a certain sense socially produced and imbued with meaning and perhaps most importantly embodied. Cresswell suggests that mobility can be thought of as a way of being in the world. In an edited volume explicitly produced as a manifesto for mobility studies, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (2009), Greenblatt, Stephen identifies five key principles underpinning the field: firstly, it should take mobility literally and examine the huge varieties of forms of movement as well as the routes movement takes---it should look at the speed of travel, the limits to travel, and so on; secondly, it should look at licit and illicit forms of mobility, that which takes place in plain sight and that which is hidden (e.g. people smuggling); thirdly, it should identify contact zone, places where the different trajectories mobility can take cross-over with one another, producing new and unexpected syntheses and mixtures (e.g. Filipino adobo-style food, which is Mexican in origin, a by-product of the galleon trade); fourthly, it should illuminate the tension between agency and constraint, the ability to control movement, and the restrictions placed on movement (e.g. asylum seekers who can perhaps escape their own country but cannot enter another country); lastly, it should analyse rootedness and belonging, the different ways people are anchored to a particular location and carry that with them when they move.