ABSTRACT
Mobilities research is now an established field of academic enquiry (Faulconbridge and Hui, 2016). In the decade since the publication of two seminal papers that positioned mobilities as ‘centre stage’ in social science research agendas (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 208; Hannam et al., 2006), a proliferation of wide-ranging work on the politics underscoring the movements of people and objects has emerged. As is well documented elsewhere (Adey et al., 2014; Cresswell and Merriman, 2011), this has ranged from a study of technologies of motion (airplanes, trains, buses, cars, and bicycles) to the infrastructures that enable/disable mobility (roads, rails, airports, data centres); the subjects made mobile or immobile by regimes of regulation and control (including commuters, tourists, migrants, military personnel, and so on); and the materialities that shape and are shaped by mobilities (food distribution, fossil fuels, passports, and so forth). What ‘mobilities thinking’ has come to achieve, therefore, is a critical consideration of a world that is ever ‘on the move’ (Cresswell, 2006). But with the ‘maturity’ (Faulconbridge and Hui, 2016: 8) of the ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006: 207), how might the study of mobilities move forwards? For Faulconbridge and Hui, the future of mobilities research relies on the study of movement – and the politics of movement – remaining ‘vibrant, creative and generative’ (2016: 1). It relies on a recognition that ‘mobilities research is itself on the move’; drawing in new spaces, subjects, events, occurrences, and temporalities to examine through a mobilities framework (Falconbridge and Hui, 2016: 1). This movement, we argue, has motioned scholars towards the study of carceral mobilities.
