---
title: "Mobilities"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilities"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:58:08.316784+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Mobilities often links science and social science to the humanities.
Mobilities often links across different scales of movement, while traditional transportation geography tends to focus on particular forms of movement at only one scale (such as local traffic studies or household travel surveys).
Mobilities encompasses the movement of people, objects, and ideas, rather than narrowly focusing on areas like passenger modal shift or freight logistics.
Mobilities considers both motion and "stopping, stillness and relative immobility."
Mobilities incorporates mobile theorization and methodologies to avoid the privileging of "notions of boundedness and the sedentary."
Mobilities often embraces the political and differential politics of mobility, as opposed to the apolitical, "objective" stance often sought by researchers associated with engineering disciplines
Mobilities can be seen as a postmodern descendant of modernist transportation studies, with the influence of the spatial turn corresponding to a "post-structuralist agnosticism about both naturalistic and universal explanations and about single-voiced historical narratives, and to the concomitant recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge" (Cosgrove, 1999, 7; Warf and Arias, 2009).
Despite these ontological and epistemological differences, Shaw and Hesse (2010, 207) have argued that mobilities and transport geography represent points on a continuum rather than incompatible extremes. Indeed, traditional transport geography has not been wholly quantitative any more than mobilities is wholly qualitative. Sociological explorations of mobility can incorporate empirical techniques, while model-based inquiries can be tempered with richer understandings of the meanings, representations and assumptions inherently embedded in models.
Shaw and Sidaway (2010, 505) argue that even as research in the mobilities paradigm has attempted to reengage transportation and the social sciences, mobilities shares a fate similar to traditional transportation geography in still remaining outside the mainstream of the broader academic geographic community.

== Theoretical underpinnings of mobilities ==
Sheller and Urry (2006, 215-217) presented six bodies of theory underpinning the mobilities paradigm:
The prime theoretical foundation of mobilities is the work of early 20th-century sociologist Georg Simmel, who identified a uniquely human "will to connection," and provided a theoretical connection between mobility and materiality. Simmel focused on the increased tempo of urban life, that "drives not only its social, economic, and infrastructural formations, but also the psychic forms of the urban dweller." Along with this tempo comes a need for precision in timing and location in order to prevent chaos, which results in complex and novel systems of relationships.
A second body of theory comes from the science and technology studies which look at mobile sociotechnical systems that incorporate hybrid geographies of human and nonhuman components. Automobile, rail or air transport systems involve complex transport networks that affect society and are affected by society. These networks can have dynamic and enduring parts. Non-transport information networks can also have unpredictable effects on encouraging or suppressing physical mobility (Pellegrino 2012).
A third body of theory comes from the postmodern conception of spatiality, with the substance of places being constantly in motion and subject to constant reassembly and reconfiguration (Thrift 1996).
A fourth body of theory is a "recentring of the corporeal body as an affective vehicle through which we sense place and movement, and construct emotional geographies". For example, the car is "experienced through a combination of senses and sensed through multiple registers of motion and emotion″ (Sheller and Urry 2006, 216).
A fifth body of theory incorporates how topologies of social networks relate to how complex patterns form and change. Contemporary information technologies and ways of life often create broad but weak social ties across time and space, with social life incorporating fewer chance meetings and more networked connections.
Finally, the last body of theory is the analysis of complex transportation systems that are "neither perfectly ordered nor anarchic." For example, the rigid spatial coupling, operational timings, and historical bindings of rail contrast with unpredictable environmental conditions and ever-shifting political winds. And, yet, "change through the accumulation of small repetitions...could conceivably tip the car system into the postcar system."

== Mobilities methodologies ==
Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2006, 217-219) presented seven methodological areas often covered in mobilities research:

Analysis of the patterning, timing and causation of face-to-face co-presence
Mobile ethnography - participation in patterns of movement while conducting ethnographic research
Time-space diaries - subjects record what they are doing, at what times and in what places
Cyber-research - exploration of virtual mobilities through various forms of electronic connectivity
Study of experiences and feelings
Study of memory and private worlds via photographs, letters, images and souvenirs
Study of in-between places and transfer points like lounges, waiting rooms, cafes, amusement arcades, parks, hotels, airports, stations, motels, harbors

== See also ==
Bicycle
Congestion
Home care
Hypermobility (travel)
Pedestrian
Public transport
Private transport
Transportation engineering

== References ==