Abstract The article reports on a reflection consisting in thinking of the object and the method of investigation in the same movement: deceleration. The author thus presents a methodological and ethical approach that allows for the study of the network of Italian Cittàslow while analyzing the slowness of the research process: the fieldwork journeys are made by bicycle. Through the feedback of this experience, he highlights issues that are rarely present in the scientific literature, as they are often relegated to the “kitchen of research”: the practical and ecological organization of a survey, the links between knowledge creation, work and travel rhythms, and the pleasure and passion that link the researcher to his object of study.
Abstract This article investigates fashion as a dynamic medium of cultural mobility, focusing on the role of the Indian diaspora in the circulation of clothing practices, motifs, and aesthetic traditions across borders. Drawing on mobility studies and Arjun Appadurai's concept of “ethnoscapes,” it conceptualizes diasporic fashion as both product and agent of deterritorialized cultural flows. Fashion is approached not merely as material adornment but as a mobile archive carrying histories, identities, and affective attachments from homeland to hostland. Through analysis of selected works by emerging diasporic Indian designers, alongside narratives accompanying their social media representations, the article demonstrates how garments become sites of negotiation between memory and modernity, tradition and adaptation. These designers blend inherited textile vocabularies with global styles, challenging fixed notions of cultural belonging. Ultimately, the article argues that diasporic fashion functions as a conduit of cultural transmission, revealing how mobility reshapes identity and expression in an interconnected world.
Abstract The geography of vehicle exports to Africa is shifting from established North–South circuits of second-hand automobiles to emerging East–South exchanges led by China and India. Unsettling long-standing geopolitical hierarchies, the growing influx of used cars and electric two- and three-wheelers from the Global East is reshaping mobility cultures and infrastructures, regimes of value, and livelihood across the continent. However, this influx risks exacerbating existing, or creating new socio-environmental burdens, related to road traffic crashes, toxic end-of-life vehicles, and electric vehicle batteries. These issues illuminate the tensions of low-carbon transitions globally, extending both access to affordable green mobility technologies and the associated human-environmental hazards. Africa's position within these evolving automotive geographies reveals the spatial and moral asymmetries of global mobility transitions.
Abstract The article identifies the tools that Lee Child's popular Jack Reacher series employs for mobilizing readers emotionally and physically. It first explores how the novels’ thematic focus, mobile vigilante justice in an unjust world, is designed to put readers’ emotions in motion. Second, it proposes that the series’ narrative strategies, prose style, and linguistic-sensory realm create readerly embodied mobility. The fast reading experience becomes analogous to the mobile, able-bodied, and agentive corporeality and sensory attentiveness epitomized by the series’ nomadic protagonist. More broadly, the article proposes that text-based research enhances mobilities studies’ understanding of embodied mobilities and how literary texts may speak of and position mobilities, perform mobilities, and construct agentive readerly emotional and physical mobility.
This article examines how young Muslim soccer players in South Delhi navigate spatial segregation and infrastructural exclusion through everyday sporting practices. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how soccer becomes a site for negotiating moral legitimacy and limited urban mobility in neighborhoods like Meerabh Bagh. Drawing on theories of neoliberal governance, political society, and edge politics, the article argues that soccer fields function as “zones of transition” where marginality is both reproduced and contested. NGOs enable movement but also reinforce symbolic boundaries. In this context, sport is not merely recreational, it is political. Soccer becomes a method through which marginalized youth assert visibility, claim space, and reimagine their relationship to the city.
The association of morality with mobility transitions is a little investigated phenomenon, but it offers a particularly timely direction for scholarship located in Southern urban contexts. In this brief introduction, I begin by emphasizing the particular import of the terms of urban, transition, and morality guiding this special issue by decentering their implicit Eurocentrism. Building upon this base, I draw upon critical mobility theory (and the diverse interpretations of the field that contributors to this special issue have elaborated on) to examine what moralities and normativities accompany transitional urges in Southern urban contexts. I do so by employing three axes: spatio-temporal embeddedness that decenters Eurocentrism, questions of power and inequality, and shifts in valuations arising through the reimagining of mobilities rooted in lived experiences.
Bengaluru, a metropolitan city in India, struggles with high levels of traffic congestion caused by enormous increase in personal automobiles. To tackle congestion, Bengaluru has designed streets restricting automotive usage and with dedicated spaces for walking and cycling to facilitate sustainable transition. These design efforts are heralded as transformative initiatives to solve congestion. However, through a longue durée analysis, this article reveals that congestion has been consistently mobilized to intervene in the streets of Bengaluru. We argue that historically, in Bengaluru, congestion was the rationale for reimagining streets and has been the leitmotif in transitional impulses and the ongoing colonization of Indian streets. We conclude by considering what it takes to decolonize and make sovereign the transition in streets in Bengaluru and in India.
Tiitu Takalo and Tiina Männistö-Funk, Polkimilla: Nyt, ennen ja tulevaisuudessa (Tampere: Suuri Kurpitsa, 2023), 168 pp., €28 (paperback). Safdar Ahmed, Still Alive: Graphic Reportage from Australia's Immigration Detention System (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books Inc., 2022), 222 pp., $30.00 (hardback).
In this article we argue for attention to the everyday ethics of mobilities transitions, demonstrated through the example of possible everyday futures in a site of South–North encounter. Dominant transition narratives seek to leverage changes in mobility systems within calculated timescales by orchestrating diverse actors through technologically solutionist automated and electric mobility interventions. We reframe mobilities transitions through futures anthropology, to investigate how people, other species, environment, and tech- nologies configure in continually emergent, indeterminate, and unquantifiable or unmeasurable futures. We draw on design ethnography research undertaken in a multicultural and multispecies university precinct in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, to demonstrate how everyday ethics participate in, complicate, and offer new insight for possible future mobilities transitions.
Various regions in the Global South have embraced the call to transition to low carbon mobilities, often accompanied by promises of sociotechnical solutions that aim to better existing mobility conditions. Building upon the work on decolonizing transitions research, this article takes the case of the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program in the Philippines—which aims to phase out old paratransit vehicles called jeepneys—to understand the implicit embedding of moral values based on Western narratives that drive such programs. Based on fieldwork with jeepney users in Metro Manila, the article argues that the casting of the program as “better” and “modern” advances a particular vision of transport and development, while obscuring other perspectives on the importance of jeepneys for the everyday mobilities of marginalized groups.
Civility and etiquette underpin how we are expected to move, where the mobile subject—particularly in transit mobilities—is conditioned and expected to perform in certain manners. In this article, I consider civility and etiquette as more than fixed codes of conduct but a contested and situated process that is both infrastructurally mediated and affectively charged. In the context of transit mobilities, etiquette is closely entangled with not only the ways mobile subject interacts with the infrastructures of mobilities but also the bodily and affective experiences of mobilities. Drawing on the intersecting conceptual lenses of affect and infrastructure, I seek to rethink civility and etiquette in relation to the politics of the body, investigating how socio-cultural norms of mobility are materialized or transgressed at the level of the body. Moreover, I argue that attention to transgression is crucial to uncovering the power dynamics that underlie and construct the norms of civility in transit, revealing an uneven geography of bodily comportment as well as a politics of mobility across intersecting social differences.
Diao, Ying. Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland: Media, Mobility, and Christianity at the Margins. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2023. Kielman, Adam. Sonic Mobilities: Producing Worlds in Southern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.
The multi-fold developments in science and technology have led to enhanced mobility among people in the present times. The desire to have a better life impels migration to far off lands even when it involves facing alien, different cultures, and unknown people. The struggle to adjust and adapt to the new surroundings takes them along various paths filled with numerous challenges. This leads to the creation of a space for them that is transcultural, imbibing the characteristics of more than one culture and often perceived as embodying the promise of an escape from the existing complexities, constraints, and norms governing national and communal identities. However, cross-cultural conflicts as well as those due to the implications of gender have to be negotiated before one can hope to achieve a coveted kind of existence. Additionally, the caste factor is a major construct in the formation of identity particularly in the Indian cultural context where it is deeply embedded in the social set-up and determines the social norms. Its implications are vast and it continues to impact identity even as people migrate to the new land. Sunjeev Sahota in The Year of the Runaways (2015) provides a realistic peep into the struggles identity undergoes on venturing into the transcultural spaces. The article explores Sahota's portrayal of issues such as factors impacting migration, negotiations of identity, caste, and gender conflicts in the transcultural space even as one strives to make a home of the outside world.
Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking (London: Windmill Books, 2017), 308 pp., €13 (paperback). Chris Abani, GraceLand (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 321 pp., $18.08 (hardcover).
Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.
This article repositions digital nomads not as stateless figures of freedom but as central actors in evolving regimes of mobility governance. Moving beyond the lifestyle framing, we propose two lines of inquiry. First, we examine how race, class, and passport privilege shape differentiated access to mobility infrastructures co-produced by states and platforms. Second, we examine how nomads navigate and produce networked digital enclaves and cloud states- topological formations where territory is reconstituted through platforms, co-living hubs, and e-residency regimes. The article calls for scholarship that treats nomads not as exceptions to state power but as actors in its reconfiguration, where motion itself becomes a site of governance. By bridging political geography, mobility studies, and critical migration scholarship, this agenda seeks to theorize sovereignty beyond fixed borders and nomadism beyond neoliberal individualism.
This article explores dogs' mobilities in the context of canine adoption and rescue. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of adopting a Romanian dog and on my involvement in dog rescue in Switzerland, it examines how canine adoption is not a linear or purely logistical process but a form of interspecies im/mobility governed by intersecting regimes of mobility and categorization. The article highlights the complex nature of animal rescue routes and the embodied, emotional, and everyday negotiations they entail in the adoption process. It contributes to the growing field of mobility studies by positioning dogs' im/mobilities as a compelling and emerging area of inquiry.
Temporariness, precariousness, and uncertainty feature prominently in late capitalism, manifesting in temporary labor mobility from low-income to high-income countries and heavily burdening the lower migration strata. However, precariousness affects mobile workers unevenly. I advance the concept of a transnationally mobile labor aristocracy to capture the situation of skilled mobile Polish tradesmen who, due to their European nationality and the employability of their skills, gain high motility capital with which to navigate the uncertainty of temporary labor mobility and achieve socioeconomic advancement. Drawing on a 2007-2019 multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Nordic countries , Belgium, and Poland, the article applies an anthropological lens to labor mobility to show how the politically underpinned intersection between what people do and how they move produces stratified mobilities and contributes to the transnational remaking of class.
Research indicates that an increasing number of Vietnamese international students return to Vietnam after graduation, yet migrants' return decision-making remains understudied. This article draws on eighty-six ethnographic interviews with highly skilled migrants in Vancouver and Paris who have considered or decided against returning to Vietnam, as well as with those who have already returned. Centering on migrants' aspirations for the "good life" in Vietnam, the study takes a mobility studies approach, moving beyond traditional push-pull migration frameworks to offer a nuanced understanding of return decision-making. It considers not only economic motivations but also social and lifestyle factors, as well as agency and subjectivity shaped by intersecting personal circumstances and social markers such as class and gender.
Bengaluru, a metropolitan city in India, struggles with high levels of traffic congestion caused by enormous increase in personal automobiles. To tackle congestion, Bengaluru has designed streets restricting automotive usage and with dedicated spaces for walking and cycling to facilitate sustainable transition. These design efforts are heralded as transformative initiatives to solve congestion. However, through a longue dur & eacute;e analysis, this article reveals that congestion has been consistently mobilized to intervene in the streets of Bengaluru. We argue that historically, in Bengaluru, congestion was the rationale for reimagining streets and has been the leitmotif in transitional impulses and the ongoing colonization of Indian streets. We conclude by considering what it takes to decolonize and make sovereign the transition in streets in Bengaluru and in India.
