ABSTRACT
In the burgeoning field of mobilities studies, the seas and all that moves in, on, across and through them, have not been embraced with the same enthusiasm as mobilities ashore. While trains (Verstraete 2002), planes (Adey 2010) and automobiles (Merriman 2007) have received sustained attention, alongside walking subjects (Middleton 2009), wired networks (Graham 2002) and mobile ideas (Law 1986); the ship (a prime figure in seaborne movement) has, for some time, been quietly bobbing in the background (Peters 2010, 1243). It is important to note that the work of the mobilities paradigm has not omitted the politics of sea-based movements entirely (see, for example, recent entries in this journal; Ashmore 2013; Stanley 2008; Straughan and Dixon 2013), but it remains true that mobilities ‘at sea’ are a vastly underexplored area, with more comprehensive incursions only just beginning to emerge (Anderson and Peters 2014; Birtchnell, Sativsky, and Urry forthcoming; Vannini 2012). This work has helped set in motion a shift towards the seas, following a more general oceanic reorientation within the humanities (see Blum 2010), bringing the rhythms and movements of people, objects, materials, ideas – all manner of things and stuff – into focus through the lens of mobilities thinking. The following special issue has been inspired by this changing tide, rising off the
back of a series of events that have sought to bring the water-world and its manifold maritime mobilities into view. A thumbnail genealogy will illustrate. In 2010, the editors of this collection organised a session at the Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG), entitled ‘Geographies of Ships’ which sought to explore the spaces, places, times and scales of the ship and the journeys it made possible, in the past and present. This was followed in 2011 by a ‘Maritime Roundtable’ workshop held collaboratively between Royal Holloway University of London and the University of Glasgow. Here the effort to expand an empirical and conceptual understanding of the mobilities of the ship was extended with the presentation of more specialised and focused papers
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concerning a range of shipped movements. This was further developed in 2013 with a session explicitly entitled ‘Maritime Mobilities’ at the RGS-IBG, headed by Emma Spence with a discussant session led by Kimberley Peters. During these workshops and conferences, discussion drifted between notions of ships’ mobilities and shipped mobilities; the former being a focus on the movements of sea-going vessels and the latter being an interest in what is moved by ships in particular circumstances; from the movement of goods, to flows of capital, to the transmission of ideas. The ship as a moving thing and mover of things, could not easily be separated. Accordingly, in what follows we introduce this special issue by paying attention
to these categories; what we are calling the ‘mobilities of ships’ and ‘shipped mobilities’. We begin by positioning the ship, examining a few instances where studies have attended to notions of mobility in this context, before outlining the long standing omission of ships from the raft of work situated under the rubric of ‘mobilities research’. We turn next to the potential of engaging the ship in this field of research, presenting possible avenues of enquiry for future studies of maritime mobilities. Here we focus on the ways in which the mobilities of ships and the mobilities facilitated by ships may be explored, highlighting where such research furthers the ambitions of mobilities scholarship more generally. We conclude this introduction by surveying the papers that make up this special issue.
