ABSTRACT
The temptation is to hold down and dissect these phenomena to study them – but this would destroy them. In this book we address some problems and opportunities of doing research which respond to these challenges by trying to move with, and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic. It is especially through engaging with what we and others term the mobilities turn that purchase can be gained on these important aspects of the social world. The book seeks to enable and to reinforce new forms of social science inquiry, explanation and engagement. It not only remedies the academic neglect of various movements, of people, objects, information and ideas. It also gathers new empirical sensitivities, analytical orientations and methods to examine
social phenomena that are especially important in the contemporary world with many living ‘mobile lives’ or at least being affected by the mobile lives of others (Elliott and Urry 2010). This chapter reviews various ‘mobile methods’ for studying (im)mobilities which the authors of the subsequent chapters design, develop and deploy. We discuss some of the new entities that these methods come to enact and explore important implications for the relationships between the empirical world, theory, critique and engagement. But we end with a cautionary tale: that the development here of productive methods has an urgency in that there are other social forces also developing powerful mobile computerbased methods and these may win out in part because of their interconnections with forms and forces of monitoring and surveillance. Through investigations of movement, blocked movement, potential movement and immobility, dwelling and place-making, social scientists are showing how various kinds of ‘moves’ make social and material realities. Attention to the fluid, fleeting, yet powerful performativity of various everyday (im)mobilities transforms conceptions of social science inquiry, explanation and critique. We take it that there is no research and no social science without theory, but at the same time we argue that the mobilities turn folds analysis into the empirical in ways that open up different ways of understanding the relationship between theory, observation and engagement. It engenders new kinds of researchable entities, a new or rediscovered realm of the empirical and new avenues for critique. Especially significant in the development of this new paradigm were the varied writings of Simmel developed in the heyday of the railway journey and the letter and postcard (see Gillen and Hall, in Chapter 2 of this volume, on the huge growth in postal services in late-nineteenth-century Britain). Simmel, especially, analyses the fragmentation and diversity of modern life and shows how motion, the diversity of stimuli and the visual appropriation of place are centrally important features of new modern urban experience. Moreover, because of the effect of money, with its colourlessness and indifference, and its twin, the modern city, a new precision becomes necessary in social life. Agreements and arrangements need to demonstrate unambiguousness in timing and location. Life in the mobile onrushing city presupposes punctuality and this is reflected in the ‘universal diffusion of pocket watches’ (Simmel 1997: 177). The watch a century ago was as symbolic of the ‘modern’ as the ubiquitous mobile phone is today (see some contemporary uses of mobile phones in Chapters 8-11 below). Simmel argues that the ‘relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos’ (Simmel 1997: 177; Urry 2007: ch. 2). Some of Simmel’s ideas were developed within the Chicago School which in the first half of the twentieth century provided a range of post-Simmelian mobility studies especially concerned with the itinerant (mobile) lives of hoboes, gangs, prostitutes and migrants, with what would now be characterised as the ‘underclass’ (see, for example, Park 1970). However, this development was cut
short in its tracks as many structural or static theories took over, including structural functionalism, positivist analysis of ‘variables’, structural Marxism and so on. Meanwhile, the study of mobilities was turned into the professional examination of ‘transport’ and to a lesser extent of ‘tourism’, which were taken to be specific domains to be researched far away from the provocative promptings of Simmel’s essays on metropolitan life. But over the past decade or so, influential new initiatives such as those examined in this book have begun to reappropriate Simmel’s work, directly or more indirectly. This has developed through research within various domains, symbolic interactionism, cultural studies, science and technology studies, ethnomethodology, material culture, cultural geography, (participatory) design and others, as reflected in various books and journals, including Mobilities. This work is developing what may become a distinct mobilities paradigm. We delineate some of the premises, promises and risks of these developments. But we do not try to reconcile the conflicts between the theoretical orientations we see contributing to such a paradigm. Some differences are irreconcilable and there are incompatibilities that challenge as well as shape mobilities research. Nevertheless, there is a powerful transformative and ‘therapeutic’ potential for social science in the interferences generated where these studies meet and gather emergent empirical sensitivities, analytical orientations, methods and instruments to examine crucial social and material phenomena. This analysis of mobilities and especially of multiple and intersecting mobility systems, where each is in an adaptive and evolving relationship with each other, is an example of ‘post-human’ analysis (Hayles 1999). However, arguing that there is a substantive shift from the human to the post-human presupposes that there was a previous era where the world was ‘human’ and principally constituted through disembodied and dematerialised cognition. This Enlightenment view presumes what Ingold terms a primacy of head over heels, mind over body, humans separate from and productive of society and culture, and a neglect of the mobile practices of walking (2004). A mobilities turn is part of the critique of such a humanism that posits a disembodied cogito and especially human subjects able to think and act independently of their material worlds (Latour 1993). This book is based around the claim that the powers of ‘humans’ are co-constituted with/by various material agencies of clothing, tools, objects, paths, footwear, buildings, machines, paper and so on. And thus we have never been simply ‘human’, nor simply ‘social’. Following Marx we might indeed claim that there are not only the relations of life but also the forces of life, encountering, clashing with, realising, enlisting or suppressing the creative power of the material world. Life and matter come to matter and are made meaningful as people, objects, information and ideas move and are (im)mobilised (see Barad 2007). People, objects, information and ideas may be:
• held in place (prisoner, clamped car, poster, rhetoric figure); • fixed in place (agoraphobic, building, a sense of place);
• temporarily stationary (visitor, car in garage, graffiti, a presentation); • portable (baby, laptop, souvenir); • part of a mobile body (foetus, iPod, ID card, designer label); • prosthetic (disability assistant, contact lenses, name badge, gender); • constitutive of a mobility system (Highway Code, timetable, speed); • consisting of code (cyborg, BlackBerry, digital document, computer virus).
