This article studies the links between public transport (PT) policing and fare policies. On the one hand, policing has recently been conceptualized as ‘practices of bordering’ (Christensen and Albrecht 2020), converging with research on the surveillance of enclosed public spaces. This research underlines the critical role of access control and flow management, through the facilitation of desirable circulations and the exclusion of individuals deemed dangerous (Klauser 2020). On the other hand, fares are usually viewed as neutral tools, although they embody political functions of maintaining social order on PT, filtering flows, and disciplining passengers. We ask how PT policing dynamics are affected by fare policy changes, through the cases of fare abolition in Luxembourg and fare diversification in Santiago de Cuba, using ethnographic observations and interviews with PT workers. We find that fare abolition changes transport workers’ policing practices, as they attempt to compensate for fares’ absent bordering role. With or without fares, PT staff engage passenger categorisation. In Luxembourg, this is used to enforce exclusionary social control of vagrant people. In Santiago, our research reveals the instrumental role of fares in producing mobility options, while passengers, rather than fares, play a central role in policing PT spaces.
This paper explores the place of the university in the struggle for spatial and mobility justice in Palestine, focusing on Al Quds University (AQU) in occupied East Jerusalem. Recognising the function of the university as one that requires the movement and circulation of bodies, ideas and knowledge, as well as co-presence in physical space, we examine how the university has moved over time to deliver its function, maintain its presence, and defend the Palestinian right to the city. Undertaking a spatial history of the university supported by semi-structured interviews with students and staff as well as maps and photos of the university, we argue that, in spite of ongoing attempts to fracture, isolate, and remove it from the city, the university continues to function as a mobile constellation of heterotopic spaces that remain rhizomatically connected to one another and to the city through the moves of students and staff, as well as of the university itself. Reconsidering the function of the university through the lens of mobility and presence, our analysis reveals the more dynamic and mobile place(ment) of the university in the city and in the struggle for spatial and mobility justice in Palestine.
This article examines how automobility reproduces and governs itself through textual practices. Focusing on the European Accident Statement (EAS) - a standardized form used across Europe to document vehicle collisions - it explores how a seemingly mundane document participates in the apparatus of automobility by transforming embodied violence into administratively legible events. Drawing on ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and science and technology studies, the paper develops the concept of text acts to analyze how documents not only record but actively constitute the social and epistemic order of mobility. The EAS functions as a mediating device that eventifies the continuous violence-field of automobility, converting the kinetic and affective disruption of collisions into a spatiotemporal 'accident event' that can be processed, effaced, and normalized. In doing so, it restores the flow of circulation, making automobility's systemic violence appear episodic and manageable. The analysis reveals that automobility depends not only on cars, roads, and fuel, but also on paper, pen, and the textual coordination of conduct through which the apparatus sustains its promise of uninterrupted movement.
A key objective of the European Commission's flagship European Universities Initiative (EUI) is the enhancement of international student mobility through the formation of transnational alliances between universities within Europe. Since its establishment, universities participating in EUI alliances have increased and broadened the scope of student mobility opportunities, transforming the existing mobility landscape and stretching the concept of mobility to cover a wide array of practices from virtual short courses to full degrees. Yet, the qualitative range of experiences, how they are taken up by students within EUI alliances, and their impact on students' futures is not well understood. This study examines the emerging mobility landscape presented in students' own accounts, asking how selective participation in intra-alliance mobility opportunities informs an increasingly stratified landscape for student mobility in Europe. Its findings align with a growing body of scholarship which finds both qualitative and quantitative differences in mobility participation by socioeconomic backgrounds, calling for policies sensitive to equitable access to quality mobility opportunities for all.
This special issue explores the intricate relationship between mobility and uncertainty as co-constitutive phenomena. Human movements are increasingly shaped by structural inequalities and intersecting crises—economic, environmental, and political—while also punctuated by sudden events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the embeddedness of (im)mobilities in uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic research, the introduction situates uncertainty not as a given but as socially and politically produced through global mobility regimes, infrastructural arrangements, and governance strategies that arbitrate human (im)mobilities. Uncertainty emerges as both a constraint and a catalyst for action, fostering creativity, resistance, and speculation about the future. The issue addresses three core questions: How are mobilities employed to navigate uncertain circumstances? How does uncertainty act as a limitation or driver of movement? And how is uncertainty negotiated across mobility trajectories? By examining diverse cases—from clandestine migration along the Balkan route and precarious journeys from West Africa to Europe, to post-socialist road infrastructures in Russia, tourism labor in the Swiss Alps, and bureaucratic hurdles faced by skilled migrants—the contributions reveal uncertainty as a governing mechanism and a lived experience. Ultimately, embracing uncertainty can become a deliberate strategy for transformation, challenging structural constraints and opening new possibilities for the future.
As the transition to electric mobility accelerates, debate over whether such a transition can be inclusive and equitable has grown. There is also debate as to whether a mainly distributive approach to transport policymaking can adequately address injustices within urban transport systems. Through use of Foucauldian analysis of subject formation, this paper assesses how multiple dimensions of mobility justice beyond the distributive are accounted for within policy documents relevant to the transition to sustainable and electric mobility in the UK city of Bristol. We find that despite a collective desire for socially just transitions to electric and/or sustainable mobility, the subjects constituted in Bristol’s policy documents are, with narrowly classified exceptions, fairly generic and in keeping with neoliberal discourses of behavioural choice and citizen activation. Opportunities to be involved in transport policy development tend to generalise and responsibilise participants. Thus, the framing and language used constitute subjects in ways that largely prohibit the creation of genuinely diverse, including contrarian, knowledges about existing and future transport systems, increasing the likelihood of misrecognition and injustice. We conclude that although local policy contributes to a more just mobility transition, it could do more if subject formation was practiced differently.
This paper explores the role of car sharing in better meeting the needs of older adults, through a case study of Arvida Park Lane (APL) - an upscale retirement village in & Omacr;tautahi, Christchurch, which hosts the largest retirement village car-sharing scheme in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 residents, the research identifies how APL's car sharing scheme and related activities both supported and unsettled everyday life: reshaping perspectives on independence and interdependence, supporting opportunities for ageing well and practices of care, building community, and simultaneously, amplifying relational tensions. The paper argues that APL's scheme has partially evolved into a commons: reconfiguring meaning and practice while remaining entangled with some private ownership and entitlement logics. Even as partial commons, APL's car sharing and related activities shows the potential for cultural and relational shifts in how mobility is understood, organised, and practiced - pointing towards wider possibilities for reimagining mobility as a collective good in contexts of ageing and beyond.
Connectivity projects have been analysed largely through geostrategies and state narratives, with insufficient attention to how they are inhabited in everyday life. In the China-Pakistan borderlands, the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor promise revived Silk Road connectivities, yet in Gilgit-Baltistan, the emergent border regime consolidates advantages for the Pakistani military-state and large private transport companies while constraining local shuttle traders. The article advances the concept of strategic remembering to explain how trader-sojourners from Hunza mobilise living histories of diplomatic and trade exchanges with China as state-legible claims on movement, recognition, and inclusion. These actors neither follow corridor scripts nor do they directly 'resist' them. Rather, they selectively activate these collective memories to critique discretionary gatekeeping and contest unequal commercial terms in the contemporary border regime linked to neoliberalisation and securitisation. The argument draws on multi-sited ethnography in Hunza, Sost, and Tashkurgan, including interviews and sustained participant observation along market and logistics nodes. Two findings follow. First, corridor geopolitics operate as temporal governance: states curate pasts to produce promised futures, and subaltern actors work within those frames to convert memory into practical claims. Second, this repertoire is ambivalent: strategic remembering can open space for claims-making yet can also echo a local sectarian imaginary, hardening boundaries of belonging.
Armed conflicts disrupt mobility in multiple ways, displacing millions while immobilizing others. The 2022 Russian war in Ukraine reveals the limits of migration frameworks that dichotomize movement and stasis. Drawing on nine gender-homogeneous focus groups with Ukrainians who stayed, were internally displaced, or sought refuge in Germany (March-May 2025), this study examines how structural conditions, emotions, and moral reasoning intersect in wartime decision-making. The analysis identifies diverse trajectories of (im)mobility-ranging from involuntary mobility to voluntary immobility and temporary return-as lived responses within a shared moral and structural field. Similar determinants, such as danger, dependents, and attachment to home, produce contrasting outcomes depending on how individuals interpret duty, care, and risk. This article contributes to current debates on wartime (im)mobilities and migration decision-making by showing that decisions to move, stay, or return in wartime Ukraine are not only structured by legal restrictions, danger, and resources, but also shaped by moral responsibility, affect, and gendered interpretations of care.
Drawing on scholarship in emotional geography on queer mobility and Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology, this article explores the relationships between gay Chinese Canadian men's spatial experiences, bodily desires, homing, and mobility in The Better Mother (2012), a novel by Chinese Canadian writer Jen Sookfong Lee. This article argues that gay Chinese Canadian men, in wrestling with corporeal experiences of familiarity from within the original 'homes' and marginalization outside of them, physically, emotionally, and aesthetically, engage in a nomadic mode of homing as a challenge to the entrenched heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy.
Amid a growing global trend of involuntary immobility, this study examines how state-imposed border restrictions reshape family life. Using a transnational lens and semi-structured interviews, we explore the experiences of Moroccan cross-border domestic workers trapped in the Spanish city of Melilla following the 2020 Spanish-Moroccan border closure. The findings highlight: immobility and physical separation of families driven by state policies and intersecting structural inequalities such as gender and labor informality; the emergence of long-distance survival strategies that sustain transnational ties while only partially challenging traditional gender roles; and the chronicization of uncertainty due to prolonged legal limbo and economic instability. Women's decisions - to return, settle, or live transnationally - emerge as complex, ongoing negotiations shaped by shifting legal, economic, and familial conditions. This study contributes to broader debates on migration decision-making and the lived consequences of mobility regimes in border regions.
Georgia has developed into a global surrogacy hub, driven by affordable services and an accessible regulatory environment that offers legal certainty for intended parents. With rising international demand exceeding the availability of local surrogates, clinics increasingly rely on women from Central Asia, who turn to surrogacy as a means of economic survival in the context of limited opportunities at home. This article examines Georgia's surrogacy sector as an affective migration infrastructure that produces and contains the reproductive mobility of Central Asian surrogates. I argue that intermediaries sustain this infrastructure through emotional labor: managing surrogates' affective states and balancing care with control amid cultural tensions and interpersonal conflicts. The article also highlights the social dynamics of surrogates' communal living arrangements, where solidarity and competition are intensified by surveillance policies that reward mutual monitoring. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Georgia and Kazakhstan, this study contributes to broader debates on reproductive labor and mobility by foregrounding affective governance and mediation in the global surrogacy industry.
The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally challenged digital nomadism, as lockdown restrictions appeared to undermine its very foundations-holistic freedom and physical travel. Yet, digital nomads continued pursuing their self-actualisation projects. Using the pandemic as a case, this exploratory study examines how they sustained their lifestyle during disruption by focusing on three dimensions: mobility, digital technologies, and identity. Based on a mixed-methods design including a digital survey, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation in both online and offline communities, the findings reveal that digital nomads upheld their identities through adaptation, persistence, and reconfiguration. This suggests that the notion of 'lifestyle', which is inherently transitory and contingent, can no longer capture the full scope of digital nomadism. We argue that it should instead be understood as a 'form-of-life': a more fundamental mode of conduct that is rooted in historical context, shaped by informal norms, and capable of adapting over time. This reconceptualisation offers a renewed lens for understanding how digital nomadism persists and transforms under disruptive conditions through adaptive coping strategies.
This paper builds on Latin American Marxist feminist and decolonial feminist thought to rethink the study of urban cycling mobilities through the lens of video mobile ethnography. It examines how territorialities are constructed through daily bicycle commutes and the development of social practices and care strategies. We draw on two case studies, one in Quito and the other in Bogot & aacute;, where we conducted separate ethnographic research between 2020 and 2021 among cyclists. We focus on the case of women cycling activists. Our study employs an accompaniment method that provides access to participants' travel conditions and daily route choices. The collaborative ride is complemented by qualitative interviews conducted before and after the ride. The concept of 'cuerpo-territorio' is applied to our cases to show how relationships between the body and territory are constructed through cycling. We detail four major aspects of this relationship: cuerpo-territorio, familiarity, signs and signalling, and accompaniment. The article contributes to debates on cycling mobilities by highlighting the need to situate academic knowledge within the Global South from a perspective that views the body as an object of feminist reclaiming and cycling as an appropriation of lived space.
