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Mobility can involve many barriers that make it challenging for individuals with disabilities to travel. When it is a child who has a disability, the whole family's mobility practices can be affected by those barriers since families' mobilities are often intertwined. This paper is based on time-use diaries and interviews with parents of wheelchair-using children living in Sweden. A time-geographical framework is used in the paper, especially focusing on the concept of coupling constraints, which can emerge when individuals need to be together to perform an activity, such as mobility. The main focus is on how coupling constraints between parents and the disabled child affect mobilities, but the findings show that couplings also exist with authorities and things and these can increase coupling constraints within the family. However, if being eligible for personal assistance and special transport service the coupling constraints within the family can decrease, indicating that such support systems are fundamental for these families' mobilities. This paper also shows that time geography can be useful for disability studies and add new dimensions to the relational perspective on disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have altered mobility flows worldwide and caused people to adopt new ways of being and moving in public space. These changes have been considerably pronounced across modes of public transportation. This paper explores the experiences of individuals who continued riding and working in public transport throughout the pandemic to yield insight into changing mobility meanings and grounded realities of urban mobility processes in the context of COVID-19 and beyond. Through the combined analysis of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observations and interviews, the paper unpacks lived experiences of riding and working in public transport in the city of Amsterdam during lockdown by addressing the changed nature of embodied encounters and mobile sociability in public transit. Findings denote that COVID-19 has altered the conditions of mobile sociability in spaces of public transport, and has produced complex experiences of daily travel with others involving mutually negative and positive impressions. As a result, we argue that when challenged by COVID-19 related restrictions, mobile sociability and fleeting encounters on the move significantly shape the experience of traveling with others in ways that call into question how we think of public transport as a social space in cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case of the mobile preschool we focus on how children's prosthetic citizenship is constructed in relation to notions of mobility and place in the accounts of Swedish mobile preschool professionals. Mobile preschools are preschools in buses that visit different places in and around the city on an everyday basis. Analysis of interviews and workshop discussions with mobile preschool professionals shows how three different conceptualisations of children's 'proper' citizenship operate in parallel in these accounts – children as 'not-yet-citizens', children as 'not-here-citizens' and children as 'here-and-now-citizens'. These different conceptualisations are constructed in relation to the everyday mobility of the mobile preschool and notions of places as more or less beneficial for children's proper future and Swedish citizenship, and reveal how mobility is not only a consequence of citizenship relations but also constitutive of them. This paper contributes to knowledge on how mobility and notions of place constitute ideas on citizenship, and how forms and geographies of mobility produce subjects as more or less citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to transport for older people is inherently related to the right to lead an independent life and to participate in social and cultural life with dignity. Yet often transport planning strategies prioritise the smooth flow of urban commuters, while people over the age of 60 are at risk of experiencing marginalisation and inequality. In this paper, we consider the mobility patterns of a group of seniors who regularly travel by public transport to Sydney, Australia for more than an hour a day. We argue that geographical perspectives are important for understanding how disincentivising seniors from travelling at rush hour may result in a range of negative health and social outcomes. In this research we consider how seniors in fact may benefit from travelling in rush hour materially, socially, and emotionally. Drawing on the optic of mobility justice we examine the felt intensities of using public transport and the inequalities that manifest in corporeal density. This serves to highlight how agency enables people to go against policy aims to reduce senior travel at peak times and how mobility justice is a useful heuristic to dispute power dynamics in specific transport modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[...] Leaving that house was really emotional ... because it's the ... that's the thing it's the boys' childhood and Grace's childhood all wrapped up in that house. Keywords: Material culture; mobility; anchor; home; moving house; storage; Cultura material; movilidad; ancla; hogar; mudanza; almacenamiento; Culture matérielle; mobilité; attache; foyer; déménagement; entreposage EN Material culture mobility anchor home moving house storage ES Cultura material movilidad ancla hogar mudanza almacenamiento FR Culture matérielle mobilité attache foyer déménagement entreposage 990 1006 17 09/09/22 20220901 NES 220901 Introduction Moving home is a significant moment experienced by most over the course of their life, and the practices of sorting through and packing household possessions in order to move and remake home are central to the experience. Gill's experience of moving house involved the stress of renovating their new house and was inflected by her changing family dynamics as her children grew up and the "family home" changed its meaning. Mobility, anchor, home, moving house, Material culture, storage. [Extracted from the article]

Research on mental health geographies and housing has focused on pattern and distribution, rather than social and cultural constructions of home. Here we attempt to understand meanings and roles of home for individuals with mental illness in the UK within the context of a deep-seated housing crisis. The discussion is sharpened by the notion of the ambiguous home, ranging from a place for retreat, separation or even isolation from the world, with experiences of recovery, stability or wellness, to home as something more negative, in which distress or illness flourished, and in which people became entrapped or from which they sought relief. Three themes crosscut this range of experiences: home as material object; home as relational; and home as rhythm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study critically examines how development interventions are imagined for singular places and subjects through a political process of product scripting that reconfigures the socio-technical meaning of second-hand objects from unwanted commodities to solutions that are appropriate for sub-Saharan Africa. Tracing the flow of second-hand goods demonstrates how development subjects are imagined to be adult, economically productive, rural beings. The paper finds that the second-hand mountain bicycle is inserted into an imagined place with a predetermined purpose that does not attend to alternative and heterogeneous urban and rural identities and needs. The paper highlights the compromises undertaken in designing development interventions as they are entangled with processes of waste recycling, commodification and philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the narratives of two Venezuelan migrants who have engaged in multi-stage migration practices in order to optimise their long-term living options in Australia. I show how they deploy a range of tactics to negotiate risk and uncertainty under the spatial, temporal and institutional conditions of temporary migration programs by moving to regional areas, drawing on friendship networks and continuously responding to shifting immigration policy. I argue that time spent on temporary visas is actively and intentionally used by migrants in order to create future migration possibilities and security for themselves in contexts where migration outcomes can be unpredictable. As temporary migrants they are subject to policies designed to meet the needs of global capital and skills shortages but they are also reasoning individuals who tactically pursue opportunities, put down roots and continually evaluate and readjust their plans and fall back positions, even within a relatively limited range of choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The banality of movement and the fascination with mobility meet at the very locations of arrival and departure. This contribution highlights social practices within and discourses about train stations which are interpreted as constitutive moments in the production of gender, sexuality and space. Train stations host the crossing between different spatial and social contexts, the negotiation of scales and between life cycles. Focusing on the historical moment of the early twentieth century we look at Swiss train stations as sites of heightened public concern which served to implement regulatory instruments to govern the social order of modernity. Narratives of the city as danger delineated train stations as critical turning points in the life-journey of young people, particularly for 'impressionable' young women. What is of interest here is how sexualities are discursively and metaphorically constructed and governed by social purity groups within the train station at the turn of the century. The way in which Station Assistance agents 'received', counselled and controlled the arrival of young people in the cities contributed to reiterating and (re)constructing gender and sexuality beyond national boundaries. The resulting protective and prescriptive constructions of sexuality reveal much about the complex perceptions and regulations of rural and urban sexualities and gender systems in their spatial nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates in social and cultural geography on the inclusionary/exclusionary nature of space have brought our attention to the 'everywhere different' nature of racism across cities. Among these debates have been calls to interrogate the socio-spatial dimensions of new forms of racism, like Islamophobia as they evolve. This paper draws on the findings of an online survey conducted from September 2016 to April 2017 with young Muslim American residents of the Bay Area, California. It provides empirical material on the way young Muslims map 'the geography of Islamophobia' across this region to uncover how the racialization of Muslims has translated into perceptions of racism across city spaces. The findings indicate that Islamophobia occurs in various public spheres, particularly on public transport and in airports. There is a spatial concentration of Islamophobic spaces in the Bay Area, focussed in the North and Outer-East Bay regions – relatively rural parts of the region with a less significant Muslim population. Conversely, areas with larger Muslim populations were associated with lower levels of perceived Islamophobia. This paper highlights the need for more localised, socio-spatial engagements in racism that capture the evolving nature of the American racisms, and how they are spatialised across cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent 'elemental' materialities. Such 'matters' matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and 'elementary' aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists' experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air's force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such 'elemental' matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the Israeli state investing considerable efforts in the alleviation of unprecedentedly high inter-regional inequalities. Improved transportation networks intended to better connect peripheral residents to centrally located opportunities have been at the heart of this policy known as 'periphery cancellation'. In this article, we study strategies deployed by young peripherals as they engage with the statist call for enhanced mobility between regions. Drawing on qualitative research conducted at 'A Center for the Young' in a small town in the predominantly rural Upper Galilee, we examine the extent to which young adults negotiate the recent state-led mobility turn. Taking a critical nobilities approach, we argue that statist aspirations of mobilizing peripherals to central hubs collide with socio-spatial constraints faced by many young residents. The official call for mobility is frequently met by a sense of spatial (im)mobility articulated by young agents who deploy instead alternative strategies to achieve socio-spatial mobility. Termed refusal, circulation, and refuge, these strategies draw on notions of peripheral stagnation, attributed to both state policies that have long marginalized the area as well as rooted conventions about the social and cultural inertia of peripheral residents. These strategies, we contend, widen existing inequalities between central haves and peripheral have nots while solidifying a sense of socio-spatial disenfranchisement among many of its young inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings a new perspective to music geography by focusing on how a particular mainstream musician helped to construct, subvert, and circulate meanings associated with travel. It asserts that Frank Sinatra, via his music and actions, engaged with travel in ways that frequently ran counter to how it has commonly been enacted in American music and popular culture. Particular attention is paid to the singer's travel-themed album, Come Fly With Me. By the time of its release in 1958, Sinatra, via a public persona that encompassed performer, 'playboy' and businessman, was a central figure in promoting an alignment of leisured mobility with postwar economic success. The paper interrogates how Sinatra's celebrity allowed him to embody travel in certain real and imagined ways. It also examines what the resulting representations revealed about performances of gender, ethnicity, and status, and the expected modes of behavior that were associated with them, in America's postwar consumer-driven society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tehran's subway, the most affordable means of public transportation in the city, offers a useful context to study the relationship between women's spatial mobility, the construction of self, and social production of space. This study focuses on Line 1 of Tehran's subway that connects Tehran's Bala Shahr (Northern Tehran) and Paeen Shahr (Southern Tehran) neighborhoods. This study draws upon 46 semi-structured interviews with women who were using subway Line 1 in the fall and winter of 2012. The average hour-long interviews examine how women's emotional states as well as their perceptions of self and space vary as they traverse the city on Line 1. Representing a cultural as well as a spatial transect through the city, the perceptions of women on subway's Line 1 convey the repudiation of the state's attempt to promote a singular Muslim female identity. The findings suggest that similar to women's perception of space, their gendered identities are constantly changing through the enhanced mobility that is facilitated by Tehran's subway system. In contrast to what is presumed in the West, with a simple change in their hijab style or make-up, Iranian women innovatively negotiate contrasting spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the recent debate on austerity as a starting point, this paper discusses contradictions in current processes of neoliberalisation using the marketisation of elderly care in Switzerland as an example. Just as in other countries, an austerity rationality in public spending and the neoliberal restructuring of public health services paved the way for the emergence of private suppliers of 24 hours home care. These new agencies hire migrant women from Eastern European countries and sell packaged care services to the elderly. In so doing, they play a key role in reconfiguring care according to a market logic. They shape the working conditions of live-in migrant care workers and the definition of care itself as a marketable good. In our paper, we analyse the strategies of these new corporate intermediaries based on a market analysis and on interviews with their representatives. We argue that the marketisation of elderly care in Switzerland is illustrative of today's neoliberalism in that it combines progressive and regressive aspects and owes its emergence to its ambiguous entanglement with many other discourses. The paper illustrates how the transformation of the home into a new space of commercialised care relies on the production and economic valorisation of social and mobility differentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the global south where care services are sparse and familial care remains practically and socially important, end of life care often occurs within families. Furthermore, in health care related policy development, care is often assumed to be ensured by ‘traditional’ norms of extended family relationships. In this context, the demands of providing care may require care providers to relocate, as well as reorganize their everyday responsibilities. This article contributes to geographies of care by offering an examination of the mobility constraints experienced by married and externally-resident daughters seeking to provide end of life care to a parent in northern Ghana. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine how particular familial relationships are embedded with socially constructed labour obligations, leading to conflicting responsibilities at a parent’s end of life. I then consider how a woman as a daughter works to overcome these constraints to provide end of life care. I conclude that understanding the mobility of care providers can contribute to avoiding potentially damaging assumptions of ‘traditional’ norms of care and is an important consideration towards understanding the geographies of care in the rural global south. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The uniqueness of this article is that it deals withlong-distance bike commuting in pro-cycling Copenhagen and its environs. Informed by practice theory and sensuous studies of urban and sport practices, I discuss the ‘things and environments’, ‘meanings’ and ‘competences and biological bodies’ that typify long-distance commuter cycling. This article develops cycling literature and the ‘mobilities paradigm’ in the following ways: by outlining a practice approach to cycling; challenging the idea that commuter cycling is only for short distances; undermining the distinction between utility and sport cycling; and lastly by connecting the ‘mobilities paradigm’ with literature on active travel and sport studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within writing on walking practices, walking has often been presented as pleasurable, relaxing, and even liberatory. Research using walking interviews has recognised that different kinds of bodies can be excluded from mobile methods, impacting upon place-based knowledge production. However, the social and cultural politics of the walking interview remains underplayed, an omission that is acutely apparent in a context of urban diversity. This article investigates the ways in which walking practices intersect with social difference, particularly in relation to faith, ethnicity and gender. It argues for the need to pluralise mobile methods in order to more subtly address social distinctions, and further offers empirical observations on the embodied experiences and socio-spatial practices of Muslim women in the city of Birmingham, U.K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an initiative to increase cycling, bike to work (BTW) events emphasize a pragmatic approach in which people learn through sensory experience. Pragmatism contends that the lived experience of the commuter within fluid geographies of social and physical conditions informs commuting knowledge and behavior. I researched how bicyclists participate in the 2012 BTW event in Lake Tahoe (USA) and how these experiences facilitate the process of becoming bicycle commuters. My study included participant observations, interviews, video observations, and route mapping. I analyzed this data with thematic and narrative analyses. I find that the BTW event illuminates bicycling, a normally invisible practice in a car world, and creates temporary bicycle-friendly spaces that provide the embodied experience and knowledge of bicycle commuting within context. Through this lived experience, participants can break free from unconscious car-based patterns and becomeembodied bicycle commuterswho engage in active renegotiations of their commuting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the everyday geographies of mobile pedagogy by exploring Children's Traffic City, a model traffic area for 5- to 10-year-olds that is operated by the Youth Department of Helsinki, Finland. Drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the article elaborates the notion ofpedagogical assemblageto unsettle a series of problematic assumptions about children's mobility in present Euro-American settings, among them the idea that children are inherently unable to understand traffic environments and that these are exclusively dangerous spaces. Rather than conforming to prior pedagogical ideals, the instructors and pupils of Children's Traffic City are playing with alternative styles of learning and teaching mobilities by collaboratively reassembling essential components of traffic, including the multiple rhythms of moving bodies and the shifting materialities of infrastructures. Apart from offering insight into new ways of fostering children's participation in traffic environments, the article argues that such doings point to the role that mobile pedagogy can have in the making and unmaking of mundane habits and practices of movement and transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions related to contemporary religious diversity in urban contexts often presume that people who form part of the public life of cities are citizens or have the right to move and dwell in the city. This article reminds us that when asking how certain religious movements become public in European cities, we also need to ask how possibilities of becoming public are tied to exclusionary citizenship regimes. By way of research among undocumented Brazilian migrants who attend Pentecostal churches, this article argues that contemporary European transformations of citizenship regimes influence religious perceptions of dwelling and movement within Europe and current experiences of urban space. The opportunities for undocumented Brazilians that allow them to move or to stay somewhere are dependent on legislation, the functioning of state institutions, the family's origins, and on contingency. In the experience of Brazilian Pentecostal adherents, acquiring legal status, to dwell or to be able to remain mobile within this assemblage of processes is dependent on their relationship with God. This article contributes to discussions in mobility studies and the geography of religion that highlight the need for more attention on mobility and stasis in relation to state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young people's everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young people's friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on children's independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns how claims to public space are negotiated between differently embodied subjects, and how forms of bodily articulation shape capacities for sharing space. Drawing on a study of outdoor access practices, entailing mobile video ethnographies with walkers and cyclists, it explores the corporeal mechanisms through which the entitlements of differently mobile subjects are asserted, resisted, circumscribed or accepted in the time-spaces of bodily encounter. How the signalling of ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ conduct influences how bodies are allowed to move in relation to other bodies is the focus. Mobilisations of speed, affective and sensory attunement, and techniques of bodily articulation, were found to be a key in the disciplining of cycling and walking bodies. This paper highlights the central role of attunement to, and concession of, hybrid subjectivity in the choreography of encounters, and, moreover, how related burdens of orchestrating coexistence are shared and struggled over amongst different publics. It demonstrates that whilst greater attunement can enable differently mobile subjects to develop a reciprocal choreography, expectations of such attunement can also undermine the ability to share space if not met. This paper thus raises the dilemma of when to accept or extend the limits of attunement in facilitating coexistence in public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers of childhood have variously accounted for the experiences of mobile children. Less has been said about the practices of becoming mobile, including the acquisition of skills, engagement with travel technologies and the shifting child-parent relations implicated in the process. This article explores the making of mobile children through ethnographic research with 7-12-year-olds practising the journey between home and school in Helsinki, Finland. Elaborating on the work of psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, it argues that families enact flexible spatial arrangements-transitional spaces-to experiment with their attachments to urban environments. Transitional spaces foreground the diverse relations between children, parents and the world, allowing the replacement of standard notions about growing up with situated accounts of how families make space for children's expanding mobilities. Against a cultural atmosphere stressing the risks and uncertainties of childhood, this view opens an affirmative approach to children's geographies-one that emphasises the trust, play and collaboration between adults, children and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses in-depth interview data from Cambridge, England, to discuss the concept of the 'cycling citizen', exploring how, within heavily-motorised countries, the practice of cycling might affect perceptions of the self in relation to natural and social environments. Participants portrayed cycling as a practice traversing independence and interdependence, its mix of benefits for the individual and the collective making it an appropriate response to contemporary social problems. In this paper I describe how this can be interpreted as based on a specific notion of cycling citizenship rooted in the embodied practice of cycling in Cambridge (a relatively high cycling enclave within the low-cycling UK). This notion of cycling citizenship does not dictate political persuasion, but carries a distinctive perspective on the proper relation of the individual to their environment, privileging views 'from outside' the motor-car. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Africa, young people are engaging with a globalised world of flows and movements but are coming of age in environments characterised by uncertainty, economic hardship and unemployment. Drawing upon research conducted in Madina, a suburb of Accra, a social navigation perspective is adopted to explore young people's everyday mobility and their aspirations for future mobility. By drawing attention to the meanings young people ascribe to movement, and by analysing their movements as tactics of social navigation, the importance of spatial mobility to young people's everyday well-being and their processes of social becoming are illustrated. Young people find that their mobility is bounded by a range of factors including labour market characteristics, gender and generational relations, and their spatial location on the outskirts of the city and the margins of the world. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial imagination is restricted to Madina; real or imagined travel takes them to other parts of the city, into rural areas and across the nation's borders. Through illustrating how significant mobility can be for everyday survival, this paper contributes to 'the mobility turn' in the social sciences which has overlooked the importance of mobility for livelihoods in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I discuss the mobilities of forced displacement. I analyse the politics of mobility by connecting the multiple scales of experienced mobility with the representational and non-representational strategies of sense of place. The aim of this article is twofold: to illustrate the different collective cultural narratives of displacement, and the ontological bodily memories. Three narratives of Karelian displacement are discussed. To capture the bodily memories, I also apply the philosopher Jacques Derrida's (1995) ideas on khora. Khora originates in Plato's Timaeus. Derrida's one interpretation of khora is a half-way-place, which is midway between space and time. I argue that khora as a non-topological concept deepens the understanding of existential place relations and also provides a fresh conceptual basis for the analysis of non-representational aspects of experiential place. Empirically, I focus on the commemoration of Karelian evacuation in Finland. I argue that the festivity called the Trail of the Displaced consists of several culturally representational and embodied non-representational mobilities which explain the complexities of spatial belonging among displaced communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers theoretically-informed empirical insights into queer migration in the contemporary West. Understanding the rationales, patterns and outcomes of migration is important for scholars researching the life experiences of gay men, lesbians and other non-heterosexuals. This paper advances knowledge of queer migration by interpreting interview data from thirty-seven gay and lesbian Australians. The analysis is prompted by a qualitative and narrative turn in migration studies, and the urgings of new mobility studies to account for the embodied and emotional dimensions of migration. Interrogating gay and lesbian Australians' migration narratives over the life course, I scrutinise the emotionally embodied nature of queer migration. I focus on the body as a vector of displacement, and explore how emotions, desires and intimate attachments shape queer mobilities. Respondents particularly emphasised the roles of 'comfort' and 'love' in relocation decisions. I found that these feelings interleaved with three patterns of emotionally embodied queer migration in the data—coming out, gravitational and relationship migrations. The embodied affects of comfort played a key role in coming out and gravitational migrations, while the exigencies of love underpinned relationship migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, states have sought to repress the nomadic way of life, as evidenced by various policies that seek to displace, criminalize, or assimilate them. This practice continues today, as the situation of Gypsies and Travelers in Ireland and Britain attests to. This paper examines how Gypsies and Travelers are repeatedly denied the right to practice a nomadic way of life. This occurs through various measures, each corresponding to a particular understanding of how culture operates. I identify two dominant discourses: 'culture as choice' and 'culture as nature.' The former seeks to assimilate and sedentarize while the latter wishes to prevent Gypsies and Travelers from 'settling down' as it does not see any option but for nomadism to continue. Both are similar, however, in that they misunderstand nomadic practices and wish to erase Gypsy and Traveler ways of life. I then delineate how a cultural politics of mobility avoids the pitfalls of seeing culture as a choice or as essential and unchanging, as well as not ignoring culture as acultural approaches do, but instead recognizes how Gypsies and Travelers themselves utilize cultural discourses to navigate through legal constraints and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages debates on emotional geography and non-representational theory by considering fear as a distinctly mobile engagement with our environment. Parkour, or freerunning, has exploded into public consciousness through commercial media representations and films. It is depicted as a spectacular urban sport that either can or cannot be done. Through ethnographic research with groups of parkour practitioners I consider what has been excluded from these representations: the emotions involved in trying, experimenting, and gradually learning to be in places differently. In parkour places are 'done' or mobilised in tentative, unsure, ungainly and unfinished ways which can be characterised by a kind of play with architecture. I argue that this play is contingent upon an array of fears, which, rather than being entirely negative, are an important way in which practitioners engage with place. Here fears can manifest differently, not only restricting mobility, but in some cases encouraging imaginative and playful forms of movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a burgeoning literature on the role of ICT in the creation of new forms of social networks, dubbed on-line communities, much less attention has been paid to the complex set of relationships which are emerging between some off-line communities and the internet, and in particular to some of the new spatialities that are emerging as a result of community-based ICT practices. This paper develops this work by focusing on the example of 'the Deaf community'. In reflecting on the implications of the communication possibilities offered by the internet for the production of Deaf space we begin by outlining the history of development of the off-line Deaf community in the UK and by reflecting on the concept of 'community'. The paper then goes on to explore how Deaf people are using the internet to communicate with each other and, in doing so, to reflect upon how the internet is contributing to the re-spatialisation and scaling-up of this community while also having other unanticipated effects on Deaf people's mobilities and the space of the Deaf club. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The banality of movement and the fascination with mobility meet at the very locations of arrival and departure. This contribution highlights social practices within and discourses about train stations which are interpreted as constitutive moments in the production of gender, sexuality and space. Train stations host the crossing between different spatial and social contexts, the negotiation of scales and between life cycles. Focusing on the historical moment of the early twentieth century we look at Swiss train stations as sites of heightened public concern which served to implement regulatory instruments to govern the social order of modernity. Narratives of the city as danger delineated train stations as critical turning points in the life-journey of young people, particularly for 'impressionable' young women. What is of interest here is how sexualities are discursively and metaphorically constructed and governed by social purity groups within the train station at the turn of the century. The way in which Station Assistance agents 'received', counselled and controlled the arrival of young people in the cities contributed to reiterating and (re)constructing gender and sexuality beyond national boundaries. The resulting protective and prescriptive constructions of sexuality reveal much about the complex perceptions and regulations of rural and urban sexualities and gender systems in their spatial nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some popular texts have associated airports with a lack of identity. It is supposed that people are alienated from these ahistorical and interstitial spaces (Augé 1995; Castells 1996). Other approaches have tended to ignore their sociality, exploring their role within transport networks rather than what goes on within. Through a discussion of the early beginnings of British airport development and the construction of Liverpool Airport at Speke, I attempt to show how there are other contextual geographies to airports. By using the concept of air-mindedness—a moral geographical concept that promoted the belief in the possibilities of aircraft mobility, this paper discusses how social identities became bound to flight, forming the context to the development of the airport and both local and national belonging. This examination will reveal the embeddedness of airports within the times, spaces and uses from which they are produced and consumed. Archival research provides the material for this discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different visions of community and mobility may influence the ability of community computer network organizations to promote social change. Community networks successfully generate instrumental mobility, the literal movement of information across space, but have difficulty creating successful online spaces that promote communicative mobility, the metaphorical movement of people towards common understandings of a shared situation. Interviews with community networking activists explore the ways that community networks generate instrumental mobility online as well as barriers that community networks face in creating online spaces for communicative mobility. Ironically, given their technological focus, community networks have little difficulty generating communicative mobility in face-to-face situations. Differentiating between instrumental and communicative mobility allows this research to move beyond a simple discussion of the geography of the conduits of communication to consider the geography of communication itself. It therefore contributes a more detailed understanding of the role of electronic communication in social and political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]