In this article, I discuss immobility as both an analytical concept and a lived experience. I review contemporary scholarly understandings of immobility and disentangle the unavoidable relational dynamics with its positive linguistic opposite, mobility. Concrete illustrations from migration studies and the global coronavirus crisis illustrate how immobility, at various scales of analysis and experience, is not only theoretically but also socially, economically, and politically relevant. Together with the in-depth review of existing scholarship, these examples confirm that the conceptual distinction made between immobility and mobility is often purely heuristic. In the messiness of people’s lives, mobility and immobility are not mutually exclusive categories but, rather, two dynamic sides of the same coin.
...More
Article
Mimi Sheller;
(March 2020)
Ten Years of Transfers: Mobility Studies and Social Change during a Pandemic
(/isis/citation/CBB858953936/)
Article
Kristrún Gunnarsdóttir;
Kjetil Rommetveit;
(2017)
The Biometric Imaginary: (dis)trust in a Policy Vacuum
(/isis/citation/CBB939896615/)
Article
Mathieu Flonneau;
(March 2020)
The Transfers/T2M Duo and the Evolution of the Reflection on Mobilities: The Textbook Case of the Historical Representations of the Paris Beltway
(/isis/citation/CBB358668229/)
Article
Georgine Clarsen;
(March 2020)
On Growing a Journal: A View from the South
(/isis/citation/CBB826437150/)
Article
Jolien Tegenbos;
Karen Büscher;
(June 2017)
Moving Onward? Secondary Movers on the Fringes of Refugee Mobility in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya
(/isis/citation/CBB204824211/)
Book
Gordon Mathews;
Yang, Yang;
Linessa Dan Lin;
(2017)
The World in Guangzhou: Africans and other foreigners in south China's global marketplace
(/isis/citation/CBB122420294/)
Article
Godfrey Baldacchino;
(2021)
Forced Immobility: Undocumented Migrants, Boats, Brussels, and Islands
(/isis/citation/CBB464738879/)
Book
Nathan Riley Carpenter;
Lawrance, Benjamin Nicholas;
(2018)
Africans in Exile: Mobility, law, and identity
(/isis/citation/CBB248109382/)
Article
Tina Montenegro;
(December 2021)
Atlantics: The Ocean as Another Place (film review)
(/isis/citation/CBB713682710/)
Article
Corinna Land;
(June 2021)
Desperate Aspirations among Paraguayan Youths: The Renegotiation of Migration and Rural Futures
(/isis/citation/CBB102506511/)
Article
Ellen Bal;
Hosna J. Shewly;
Runa Laila;
(June 2021)
Aspiration and Desperation Traps in Trajectories of Physical and Social Mobility-Immobility: Young Female Migrants in the City
(/isis/citation/CBB253308474/)
Book
Cajetan Nwabueze Iheka;
Taylor, Jack;
(2018)
African migration narratives : politics, race, and space
(/isis/citation/CBB920540324/)
Article
Supurna Banerjee;
Eva Gerharz;
(June 2021)
Introduction: Interrogating Aspirations through Migratory Mobilities
(/isis/citation/CBB475567161/)
Article
Syntia Hasenöhrl;
(December 2019)
Mobilizing Malian-Diasporic Identities: How Southern News Websites Facilitate Non-sedentarist Discourses on African Migration
(/isis/citation/CBB175886252/)
Article
Susan E. Bell;
Kathy Davis;
(June 2017)
Museum Review: Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo Encountering the Current Refugee Crisis with Ai Weiwei
(/isis/citation/CBB181062759/)
Article
Raili Nugin;
(June 2018)
Mobile Lives, Immobile Representations
(/isis/citation/CBB165260516/)
Article
Supurna Banerjee;
(June 2021)
“Who Leaves Home If There is a Choice?”: Migration Decisions of Women Workers on Tea Plantations in India
(/isis/citation/CBB769389505/)
Article
Gijs Mom;
(March 2020)
Trending Transfers: A Decade of New Mobility Studies through the Lens of Transmodality, Transnationalism, and Transdisciplinarity
(/isis/citation/CBB953513330/)
Article
Veronika Zuskáčová;
(December 2020)
How We Understand Aeromobility: Mapping the Evolution of a New Term in Mobility Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB648164093/)
Article
Julia M. Hildebrand;
Stephanie Sodero;
(March 2021)
Pandemic Drones: Promises and Perils
(/isis/citation/CBB383774280/)
Be the first to comment!