ABSTRACT
“Life on the move,” we agreed, seemed simpler, more apt for everyday talk. It was to be our preferred descriptor for capturing how complex mobility systems restructure and reorganize the activities of everyday life – what we went on to call “mobile lives”. Mobilities restructure the deepest links between the personal and the global, selfhood and society – discernible in everything from the rise of discount budget air travel or the wholesale spread of fly-in fly-out contract workers to the veritable explosion in enforced migration arising from political conflicts in various hot-spots across the globe. Mobility of the self is an increasingly prized asset in the global electronic economy. Immobility of self, by contrast, comes to represent a kind of symbolic death. The trend towards individualized mobility routinely implicates personal life in a complex web of social, cultural and economic networks that can span the globe, or at least certain nodes across parts of the globe.
