Search

In this paper I reflect upon my own micro-mobilities and embodied mobile practices living and working under COVID-19 government restrictions in Wales in mid-2020 I use the opportunity to reflect upon the past ten years of Transfers and to think about future research in the field of mobility studies, arguing that an attention to seemingly ordinary embodied movements and mobilities provides one avenue by which mobility scholars could move beyond the mobility/immobility binary and approach mobility as being more than transport, migration, and communication Mobility is, I suggest, ubiquitous—even during government lockdowns—and I explain how Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the "molar" and "molecular" can be useful for understanding how some movements become perceptible and others imperceptible, and why scholars frequently draw a clear distinction between mobility and immobility [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Transfers is the property of Berghahn Books and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

Focused both on how commuting is transforming cities and on ‘how to think commuting differently’, in this eloquent and thoughtful book, David invites the reader to consider the power inherent in the question how itself – a power that enables radical open-endedness. Thus, David asks us to think about commuting and cities as transactional and transformational, quotidian and extraordinary, intimate and global. Even though Sydney, Australia, is the epicentre of David’s work, Transit Life is multiscalar and accounts for varied rhythms and times. Its approach to understanding is deeply empathic, and touches on people’s bodies, their homes, streets, rail-lines, cars, bus shelters, tramcars, offices and other sites, paths and nodes ... the list is exhaustive, never tiresome.

This paper argues that practices and technologies of relational governance are central to the everyday and mundane ways in which local and national governments try to reshape the behaviour, habits,...

With our eighth volume of this journal, the Transfers editorial team celebrates our achievements under our outgoing editor, Gijs Mom. This article outlines our priorities under our new editor, Dagmar Schäfer, and reaffirms our commitment to the burgeoning field of new mobility studies. The presentations by Mimi Sheller and Peter Merriman, fellow members of the editorial team, at our journal’s panel at the recent T2M conference, “Vistas of Future Mobility Studies: Transfers and Transformations” is summed up for the convenience of those who were not able to attend. This journal will continue to encourage and publish work that places mobilities at the center of our scholarship, with special emphasis on the humanities. Our commitment is to good, innovative, activist scholarship that can help us move toward alternative mobility futures.

In this short editorial, we outline some of the reasons why we think books and book reviews remain important for the field of cultural geography.

Whilst historians and historical geographers have offered much to scholarship concerning military geographies, rarely have military mobilities been at the forefront of these enquiries. Where scholars have considered the movements that underscore military activities (within and beyond the theatre of war) movement is frequently taken to be the straightforward motion of people, equipment, vehicles and so on, from point A to B. This paper opens the special issue on ‘Military mobilities in an age of global war, 1870–1945’ by outlining the role that scholarship on mobility can play in understanding military operations and activities. It focuses on a number of military mobilities, examining how different technologies, knowledges, infrastructures and mobile embodied practices have been vital to military operations. Centred around four themes – military ‘moorings’ and ‘hubs’; military movement spaces; the work of military geographers on movement; and the movement of military bodies – this paper demonstrates how mobilities literature and historical geographies may intersect and inform one another. The paper closes by introducing the four papers which focus on the increasing mechanisation and mobilisation of military forces between 1870 and 1945.

Mobility and movement are central to military actions and military life, and yet despite an increasing concern with military geographies and the geographies of mobility, little consideration has been given by scholars to the political geographies of military mobilities and movements, past or present. In these interventions, we examine how these different bodies of work might intersect, focusing on social media, methods for tracing military mobilities, the role of military technologies in facilitating everyday mobilities, and the more-than-human dimensions of military mobilities.

Transdisciplinary exchanges and interdisciplinary debates have always lain at the heart of Transfers, but such movements generate challenges and unanswered questions as well as productive tensions. Has a new amorphous multidisciplinary field called “mobility studies” emerged, or do disciplinary debates and imperatives still underscore mobilities scholarship? How do “mobility studies,” “transport studies,” “mobility history,” “transport history,” “media history,” “migration studies,” and other fields intersect, differ, or interact with one another? Do the variations among different strands of mobilities research reflect distinct differences in method, approach, and style in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, or do they generate interesting questions that cross disciplines? How are different journals—Transfers, Mobilities, The Journal of Transport History, and Applied Mobilities—(re)positioning themselves, and what makes them distinct and different? Should we stop forming camps or drawing boundaries around subdisciplines, and stop asking questions like those framed above? There are no easy or correct answers to any of these questions, but I would suggest that Transfers occupies a privileged position at the intersection of the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

In this paper we demonstrate how writings on affect, materiality and relationality necessitate a rethinking of theories of the nation, focusing on the intermittent emergence and flickering presence of nation-ness and national identity. In moving beyond Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’, we argue that the presencing/absencing, foregrounding/backgrounding, and individualizing/collectivizing of feelings results from the differential capacities for bodies to affect or be affected and the assembling of particular configurations of bodies and materials. We demonstrate this through a discussion of how national feelings and affects have gathered around two infrastructures in Wales, the A470 road and the Severn Bridge.

In this final report on mobilities, I discuss research published between late 2014 and early 2016, focusing upon three key themes. I examine how recent work on medical bodies and race advances long-standing concerns with the mobile body. I then trace emerging philosophical and political writings on the themes of speed and ‘accelerationism’, before examining the contributions of mobility historians and transport historians to academic work on mobility. I conclude with some thoughts about the multi-disciplinary nature of contemporary mobilities research and the current state of the field.

Youth organizations have long played significant roles in promoting particular forms of nationalism among young people in the UK. To date, however, academic studies of UK youth organizations have been Anglocentric, focusing on youth organizations associated with a hegemonic British state and imperial project. This paper seeks to show how youth organizations have also been used to promote alternative forms of nationalism in the UK, which have sought to challenge a British state and imperial project. Focusing explicitly on Wales, it examines how Urdd Gobaith Cymru – the Welsh League of Youth – has played a significant role over the past 90 years in promoting a Welsh and Welsh-speaking citizenship amongst Welsh youth. Drawing on documentary and archival research, the paper discusses how the organization has fostered particular practices and identities among its members and the way in which these have been challenged in recent years; most notably as a result of a decline in the numbers of Welsh speake...

This paper builds upon recent research on mobility infrastructures to question the usefulness of the mobility/moorings binary and suggest that scholars should examine the practices of infrastructuring by which mobile subjects, affects and environments emerge. The paper outlines recent work on the affective qualities of mobility infrastructures before examining some of the diverse discourses, feelings and atmospheres which have gathered around the humble British car park over the past 50 years. It examines how the affective and experiential qualities of car parks and parking became commodified by car park designers, urban redevelopers and landscape architects, as new techniques and technologies were adopted to prevent wasteful ‘space-searching’ and design secure, safe, pleasant and aesthetically pleasing spaces. Finally, the paper examines some of the discourses and regulative practices which have gathered around the direct and indirect environmental impacts of parking provision and parking policie...

In this second report I discuss research published in 2014 and early 2015. I examine recent debates about elemental geographies, including research on the mobilities associated with air and water, and on how aluminium, steel and carbon facilitate movement. The report then highlights the vibrant materialities and mobilities underpinning events, examining different approaches to processual and molecular mobilities, including work which is critical of the suggestion that everything is moving. In the final section I examine the centrality of mobility to academic practices and biographies, and here I discuss the life and work of the influential cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall.

Roads may be represented in many different media and cultural forms, from planning documents and maps to postage stamps, children's books, and postcards. While there has been a tendency among some scholars to study representations for what they can tell us about the history of particular road schemes, this article argues that roads are constructed and consumed as much through paper plans, financial calculations, popular representations, and public imaginations as through concrete and steel on the ground. Representations of roads “matter,” and the article suggests that scholars should study the broad array of representations through which the meanings of roads are produced, circulated, and consumed.

This first report identifies key trends in mobilities research during late 2012 and 2013. Using the 150th anniversary of the London Underground as its launching point, the article explores a number of academic engagements with its history, as well as identifying the lack of research on underground or underwater mobilities. It then examines recent work which might be considered to provide creative or experimental engagements with and meditations on movement, including urban exploration, poetry, art and film. The final section examines recent work on mobility, politics, exclusion, marginalization and privilege, including work on forced, elite and family mobilities.

In this chapter I focus on England’s M1 motorway running between London, the Midlands, and Yorkshire.4 At first sight the motorway may appear to have a simple linear geography, forming a transport corridor between London and Leeds, but this linearity is punctuated and disturbed by the distinctly nodal geography of motorway junctions, which are positioned every 4 to 10 miles.5 In this chapter I examine these complex corridoring effects, focusing on the topological and spatial patterns associated with the linear, nodal, material, imaginative and discursive geographies of motorways. Of[…] the State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend onthe solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers. The hydraulic model of nomad science and the war machine, on theother hand, consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another.1

Over the past, few years a broad range of scholars have been emphasising the vital importance of methodological innovation and diversification to mobilities research. Whilst welcoming this pluralisation of research methods, this paper encourages a note of caution amongst researchers who wholly embrace the call for mobile methods, which are frequently justified by an assumption that ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ methods have failed. I outline some of the explanations that are given for the development of ‘mobile methods’ – including their inevitable emergence from a ‘new mobilities paradigm’, the importance of innovation and political relevance for social science methods, and their importance for apprehending elusive practices – before identifying a number of problems with this work: namely the assumption that mobilities research is necessarily a branch of social science research, the production of over-animated mobile subjects and objects, the prioritising of certain kinds of research methods an...

This article is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on “mobility studies“ which was held as part of a workshop on mobility and community at Aberystwyth University on September 3, 2012. In the article the five panelists reflect upon the recent resurgence of research on mobility in the social sciences and humanities, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary debates, and the ways in which established fields such as transport history, migration studies, and sociology are being reshaped by new research agendas. The panelists discuss the importance of engaging with issues of politics, justice, equality, global capital, secrecy, and representation, and they encourage researchers to focus on non-Western and non-hegemonic mobilities, as well as to produce “useable“ studies which engage policy-makers.

In the middle of last year, a large survey in the Netherlands revealed that the average Dutch person dedicates seven hours per day to “media consumption.” That is the gross value, the surveyors assure us. The net value is 5.5, meaning that 1.5 hours are spent multitasking, such as watching TV and surfing on the net, or “tweeting” (on Twitter) during a football match. Remarkably, using the cell phone while driving would not qualify as multitasking as the car is not considered to be a medium. Users know better, as we will see in this issue, and mobility researchers are devising conceptual frameworks that are adequate to the complex and multiple relations between diverse media.

Forsyth, I., Lorimer, H., Merriman, P. R., Robinson, J. (2013). What are surfaces?. Environment and Planning A, 45 (5), 1013-1020.

Academics have increasingly begun to question the significance of bounded understandings of space and place, preferring instead to approach places as open, dynamic, relational entities that are in-formation, and the ways in which different places are connected by flows of people, ideas, and material things. The aim of this paper is to focus on the implications of networked and relational ways of thinking for how we understand the notion of ‘territory’, the archetypal example of bounded space. We discuss the need to develop a greater dialogue between relational and territorial understandings of space by exploring recent work on national territories. We contend that (1) the discourses and embodied practices of actors and (2) a whole series of objects are actively involved in producing a national territory that is open, contingent, and contested. The paper focuses on empirical material relating to Welsh roads and road signs—in particular the campaign in favour of bilingual road signs in Wales during the late 1960s and 1970s—as a way of highlighting the significance of these two themes. We conclude by arguing that territories are not relics of a static world of nation-states but, rather, the contingent products of an ongoing series of connections between people, discourses, and objects. Keywords: nationalism, territory, relational space, networks, road signs, Wales