The new ‘mobilities turn’ has become a powerful perspective in social theory. John Urry’s oeuvre has been very influential in the emergence of this new field and has had lasting impacts on many scholars. This collection presents originally commissioned essays from leading scholars in the field who reflect on how Urry’s writing influenced the course of their research and theorizing. This volume gathers contributions in relation to John Urry’s path-breaking work. The new ‘mobilities turn’ made a strong imprint in European social theory and is beginning to make an impact in the Americas and Asia as well. It challenges mainstream theoretical and empirical approaches that were grounded in a sedentary and bounded view of states. It propels innovative thinking about social and media ecologies, complex systems and social change. It bridges many disciplines and methodologies, leading to new approaches to existing problems while also resonating with questions about both history and the future. Mobilities research marks the rise of academic and intellectual cooperation and collaboration ‘beyond societies’, as nations around the world face the ecological limits of contemporary mobility and energy systems. The contributors represent several national contexts, including England, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Taiwan, Brazil, Canada, Australia and the USA. This book collects personal essays and gives insight into a vivid network of scientists who have connections of various degrees to the late John Urry as an academic figure, an author and a person.

The new ‘mobilities turn’ has become a powerful perspective in social theory. John Urry’s oeuvre has been very influential in the emergence of this new field and has had lasting impacts on many scholars. This collection presents originally commissioned essays from leading scholars in the field who reflect on how Urry’s writing influenced the course of their research and theorizing. This volume gathers contributions in relation to John Urry’s path-breaking work. The new ‘mobilities turn’ made a strong imprint in European social theory and is beginning to make an impact in the Americas and Asia as well. It challenges mainstream theoretical and empirical approaches that were grounded in a sedentary and bounded view of states. It propels innovative thinking about social and media ecologies, complex systems and social change. It bridges many disciplines and methodologies, leading to new approaches to existing problems while also resonating with questions about both history and the future. Mobilities research marks the rise of academic and intellectual cooperation and collaboration ‘beyond societies’, as nations around the world face the ecological limits of contemporary mobility and energy systems. The contributors represent several national contexts, including England, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Taiwan, Brazil, Canada, Australia and the USA. This book collects personal essays and gives insight into a vivid network of scientists who have connections of various degrees to the late John Urry as an academic figure, an author and a person.

Bringing together the leading authors currently working at the intersection of social science and transport science, this volume provides a companion to the well-established and extensive international Transport and Society series. Each chapter, and the volume as a whole, offers closer and richer consideration of the issues, practices and structures of multiple mobilities which shape the current world but which have typically been overlooked or minimised. What this approach seeks to do is not only draw attention to many new areas of research and investigation relating to mobile lives, but also to point to new theories and methods by which such lives have to be researched and examined. Such new theories and methods are relevant both to rethinking 'transport' studies as such but are also recasting 'societal' studies as 'transport' so that it comes out of the ghetto and enters mainstream social science.

Being mobile in today's world is influenced by many aspects including transnational ties, increased ease of access to transport, growing accessibility to technology, knowledge and information and changing socio-cultural outlooks and values. These factors can all engender a (re)formation of our everyday life and moving - as and for lifestyle - has, in many ways, become both easier and much more complex. This book highlights the crossroads between concepts of lifestyle and the growing body of work on 'mobilities'. The study of lifestyle offers a lens through which to study the kinds of moorings, dwellings, repetitions and routines around which mobilities become socially, culturally and politically meaningful. Bringing together scholars from geography, sociology, tourism, history and beyond, the authors illustrate the breadth and richness of mobilities research through the concept of lifestyle. Organised into four sections, the book begins by dealing with aspects of bodily performance through lifestyle mobility. Section two then looks at how we can use mobile methods within social research, whilst section three explores issues surrounding ideas of mobility, immobility and belonging. Finally, section four draws together a number of chapters that focus on the complexities of identity within mobility. Often drawing on ethnographic research, contributors all share one common feature: they are at the forefront of research into lifestyle mobilities.

Pushing forward research on emerging literacies and theoretical orientations, this book follows students from different tracks of high school English in a "failing" U.S. public school through their first two years in universities, colleges, and jobs. Analytical and methodological tools from new literacy and mobility studies are employed to investigate relations among patterns of movement and literacy practices across educational institutions, neighborhoods, cultures, and national borders. By following research participants’ trajectories in and across scenes of literacy in school, college, home, online, in transit, and elsewhere, the work illustrates how students help constitute and connect one scene of literacy with others in their daily lives; how their mobile literacies produce, maintain, and disrupt social relations and identities with respect to race, gender, class, language, and nationality; and how they draw upon multiple literacies and linguistic resources to accommodate, resist, and transform dominant discourses.

Brazilian Mobilities presents an overview of the diversity of mobility studies developed in Brazil. It builds a picture of a strong Latin-American perspective emerging in the field of mobilities research, which provides unique insight into the complex dynamics of mobilities in the emerging countries from the Global South. Addressing such different areas as tourism, urbanization, media studies, social inequalities, marketing and mega-events, transport and technology, among others, the contributors use the new mobilities paradigm, or NMP (Sheller & Urry, 2006) as a starting point to reflect about the social changes experienced in the country and they also engage with newer literature on mobilities, including work done by Brazilian and Latin-American authors depending on the subject of each individual chapter. Illustrating to scholars the uniqueness and complexity of the Brazilian social-political and economic context, the book was organized in order to be a representative sample of the studies carried out in Brazil, as well as to contribute to other academic investigations on (im)mobilities and different social realities in emerging countries.

The subject of transnational lives has only recently gained importance in historical research. With its transnational approach to “mobility and biography,” this volume brings together research on aspects of mobility and biography across different times and spaces to open up new interdisciplinary perspectives. Networks, movements and the capacity to become socially or spatially mobile in and across Europe are not only analysed as structural factors, but rather seen as connected to concrete practices of mobility among different groups in the spheres of business, politics and the arts: from Jewish merchants via legal and financial advisors all the way to musicians.

This book seeks to bring together different philosophical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the study of human mobility within the discipline of geography. With five thematic sections – conceptualizing and analyzing mobility, inequalities of mobility, politics of mobility, decentering mobility, and qualifying abstraction – and 27 substantive chapters by leading researchers in the field, it provides a comprehensive overview of the latest thinking about human mobility and related issues. The contributors discuss mobility issues as diverse as everyday mobilities of young people, migrants and refugees, and sex workers; the relationships between citizenship and mobility; and the potential and pitfalls of big data for understanding mobility. This, coupled with a broad international focus, means that Geographies of Mobility will not only encourage and enrich dialogue on a theme that is of major importance to varied geographic research communities, but will also be of great interest to students and researchers across the wider social sciences. This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the book advocates a multidimensional view of African societies, in which social positions consist of a variety of intersecting social powers - or ‘capitals’ – including wealth, education, social relationships, religion, ethnicity, and others. Accordingly, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a one-dimensional social ladder, for social moves cannot always be apprehended through the binaries of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’.

This text is about the fact that mobility is more than movement between point A and B. It concerns how the movement of people, goods, information, and signs influences human understandings of self, other and the built environment.