[SOUND] [CROSSTALK] [SOUND] >> Moving forward. >> It's about more than getting from a to b. This, to me, is the central idea of mobility research. And this is true of all kinds of ways of moving, whether you're walking, driving, flying, taking a train. All of them can be imagined as a line on a map, with one place at one end, one place iat another, your destination. But mobilities research is about figuring out what fills that line, what makes it significant or makes it socially important, rather than just something that you can measure. One way of thinking about it is like the relationship between a location, and for instance where we are now in Paris, you could give the coordinates, the longitude and latitude to somebody. That would be a location. And the place, once you know it's Paris, then you know all kinds of other things about it. You know that it's the city of light. You know that it's associated with romance. You know that it's associated with the French Revolution and its history. So a location that is simply a dot on a map, if you'd like, becomes a rich meaningful set of ideas, as well as a location and the architecture and landscape that Paris is. Now we can do the same thing with movements. So if you imagine movements is a line on a map, just like a location is a point on a map, then our task, as mobility scholars, is to figure out, what makes that line more interesting than just a line? What is its relationship to meaning? Mobility, travel, exploration, commuting, all of these forms of movement can be mapped, they can be quantified. We can do statistics about them, but they also come with histories. They come with a rich sense of different ways in which they've been practiced. They're political in all kinds of ways. And they fit in to narratives and stories in interesting kinds of ways. So I think mobilities research is about this, more than, it's more than getting from a to b. What is the more than? And that's what I'm interested in. How do you make a line on a map into something rich, socially significant, and interesting? So, I want to talk about three aspects of this line that make it richer. The first of these is the simple fact of movement. The second is meaning. And the third is practice. How is this line acted? How do we do it? How do we move? What is the experience of it? And so I take you to these in turn. So the first aspect of mobility is movement. And by movement, I mean this simple geographical displacement. Go in one place and then you're in another. Now that can be a simple line going from one place to another, or it could be a circle, it could be someone moving round in circles, it could be any kind of pattern you can think of. But the important thing here is it's something that you could theoretically at least, draw a map of. You could calculate the distance and the speed, which is traversed. You could do all kinds of statistical analysis on it. This is often the way mobility is dealt with by planners, by some kinds of social scientists who are more interested in the statistical and quantitative aspects of mobility. It's the way government often deals with mobility issues. How are people moving? Where are they moving to? Why are they moving there and not here? How many people are moving that way? How fast are they moving? The second is meaning. Now, meaning's important and it's often not dealt with well by government, by planners, by more technocratic ways of thinking. It's more often dealt by people in the arts or the humanities. And the question here is, what does this movement mean, both to the people who are doing it and to people around them, that are thinking about it? So we can take some examples of the kinds of mobility that I mentioned at the beginning, so, walking for instance. What does walking mean? It's an interesting question. Well, it meant a particular set of things, for instance Romantic poets who suddenly in the end of the 18th century and into the 19th century, started to think of walking as something that a solitary person could do, usually a ma. And it could be a way of getting in touch with nature. It became something that was morally valuable, whereas before that period, walking to most people was always a drudgery, work. Something you wanted to avoid doing. If you're walking it meant that you somehow had to get to somewhere you maybe didn't want to go, or it was hard work to get there. So, it had these two meanings. And then walking continued to mean different things to different people. So walking in Paris with the situation as artists would infer working across Paris to disturb the way that Paris was arranged spatially. To walk through places they weren't supposed to walk through to try and think about the ways in which they might through walking, start to question the plans of the powerful. So walking started to get this rebellious set of meanings associated with it. And of course walking also means different things depending on where you are. If you're walking now through Paris on a sunny day, then that's one thing. If you are living in Mali, and you have to leave your village to walk five miles to get water, then it means something entirely different. Meanings become all entangled into movements at this point, and we start to get ideologies, narratives, stories, all kinds of ways in which moving is about more than getting from a to b. Finally, you can think about a larger scale form of movement like immigration. Immigration is something very contentious, constantly contentious. Mobility's at the heart of it. We can have our lines on the map, we can draw things, we can count things, we can do our statistical analysis, but we all know that immigration comes with any number of meanings and narratives associated with it. In the United Kingdom there's a long history of people talking about immigration as swamping or flooding. These words seem simple and innocent. They're actually metaphors that carry with them a whole set of assumptions about what that might mean for the places where immigrants are arriving. On the other hand, activists trying to stop racism and xenophobia might argue that immigration is something that feeds a country. And uses the idea of nutrition as something that brings new blood into society and makes society more dynamic and interesting and cosmopolitan, and therefore is something that we should favor. So again, meaning becomes important. So, the third aspect of mobility I'm interested in is practice, which refers to how we move, how we experience movement. And sometimes, the way that we move and the way we experience it, can conform to The narratives and the meanings, so when we walk, we may experience it as freedom or we may experience it as toil, or travail in some way. When we drive a car, we may experience it as a moment of individualism, as a private space, as something that increases our sex appeal even if the advertisers are to believed. Or we can experience it as nerve wracking as something that we suddenly realize that we are in a metal box travelling at 60 miles an hour with other people around us. Or we can experience it as guilty if we've taken messages from environmental politics seriously, which indeed we should, so these things interact. Our practice interacts with the narrative. The way that we experience mobility is informed by the narratives and meanings that are around it, but doesn't always fit exactly together with it. Sometimes there's a difference between them. And many philosophers and thinkers and artists have used these experiences to make mobility into different things. Kierkegaard would walk around thinking in a particular way, made walking into a kind of experience of philosophy. Walking and thinking becoming the same thing. So all of these aspects of mobility, movement, meaning, and practice are combined in any particular moment of mobility. And they're also political, and it is very important. All of them are wrapped up in power, which is something I want to talk about next. So understanding mobility holistically means understanding it in relation to politics, in relation to power. Mobility's wrapped up in power in so many ways. It's like a resource that is deferentially distributed. Some people have it, some people don't. Some people have different kinds than other people. So one person's speed might be completely related to another person's slowness. Or one person may be able to move because another one is immobilized. So one example at the moment that has made headlines recently, particularly in the UK and in the US, is the school run. A school run is a name that's been given to the moment when people go either to school to drop their children off or to pick their children up. And usually we're talking about elementary school or primary school. And what happens is, stereotypically, is people, often mothers, arrive in large cars in US and in the UK. And there have been a number of cases in which children have been injured by these large cars. So there's become this panic around the school road. And often women are blamed all the time because it's seen as women who are driving these big cars they don't need to be driving. And more children should be walking so they don't become obese. And all of these get involved in a very complicated story with complex politics and morality involved. Morality about obesity, morality about who can drive and who should drive, whether they should drive big SUVs in London where it's unnecessary. And all of these issues are wrapped up. Pedestrians are threatened by the fact that other people are driving the large cars. And yet the cars make it easy for mothers who otherwise have very complicated lives to juggle time and space in ways that previously were unavailable to them. So there's not an easy story to tell, but it is a political story. It's a story about power. It's a story about movement. It's a story about the meanings wrapped up in movement. And this relationship of power and mobility goes back to the three ideas I discussed previously. So, movement, meaning in practice, are all political. Movement is political because who moves, who moves where, how fast do they move, how often do they move? These seemingly simple quantitative, scientific even, questions have a politics to them. And often we see maps appearing in our newspapers showing some kind of mobility and a scare story attached to it. Meaning is political, who constructs the narratives about mobility? Who decides if mobility means freedom, progress, modernity, citizenship? Or who decides that mobility suddenly means transgression, threat, disease, flooding? This is a political story, whose in control of the meaning that movement gets, is a political point? And then there's the politics of practice. Who gets to practice mobility in the ways that they do? The perfect model for this might be an airport, in an airplane. So you go into an airport. You can go through the fast lane. You can be stuck at customs. You can be stuck at immigration. You can be stuck even before you get on the plane, if you fail some set of norms that the people behind the desk have decided constitute good mobility as opposed to bad mobility. And then you get on the airplane, and of course it's divided into first class and business class and economy class. One of the few times in your life where you're sort of told what class you are and where you should sit. And the people at the front get more oxygen, better food, more toilets. People at the back have headaches because there's not enough oxygen, less toilets to use, less leg room, less everything. So there's a very clear sense in which the experience, the practice of mobility is differentiated. And we can also think about many other examples of this. I mean, people getting stopped regularly. Post 9/11, in Western cities, people that look Middle Eastern are frequently stopped for one reason or another. There's a phrase used in American cities, it's been written about by a number of people, called driving while black. The idea being that if you're a black person driving, particularly a car that looks like it's reasonably expensive, you're ten times more likely to get stopped than if you're white. The assumption being that you've stolen it or the money that you've used to buy it is from illegal means. So, movement, meaning, and practice are all parts of the politics of mobility. All wound up in power, all wound up in relationships of domination, oppression, and resistance, because people are able to use mobility to resist these forms of power as well. The last thing I really want to talk about here is the idea that these form what I call constellations of mobility. So, a constellation of mobility is a more or less, structured sense of the ways in which movements, meanings, and practices are related to each other. And my argument would be that these vary over history and geography. But if we think about Europe, in feudal times, we had this idea that mobility was really, in terms of long distance mobility, the privilege of a few people. So, if you were to map feudal mobilities, the vast majority of them would be within a sort of seven mile radius of where somewhere lives. There were always exceptions that upset the order. They were musicians, crusaders, monks, and vagrants, gradually, began to emerge who would upset this sense of feudal mobility. And the people that were in charge of mobility were essentially the king and the lords because of the way the authority was structured within European cultures at the time. As said, the people with the monopoly on the power to control and to regulate mobility was a very small number of people. And the vast majority of people were regulated, carefully controlled and weren't able to move great distances. What happens as we moved from the 14th century to the 16th century in particular, there was a gradual moving away from this idea. As agriculture changed, as laws changed and there was an emerging class of people who became known as vagabonds or vagrants. Who weren't attached to the land. Who had been removed from the bounds of serfdom. It became possible to go to a city in what is now Germany for instance, and stay there for a year and a day, and then you become free of your obligations as a serf or as a peasant. And this was where the expression, the city air makes men free, comes from. The idea that'd you become free, so mobility was very much attached to that. When you started to get 10, 20 or maybe than 100 people turning up in say, at end of the 14th century or the 15th century, in a small town. There was suddenly a new sense of how this had to be dealt with, which became dealt with in the nation state rather than in the local community. The people had being getting passes of one kind or another. So the passport has its origins in this period, not in the way we now know it as a modern national passport, but as a kind of more local passport. In Berne, in Switzerland, for instance, people were given passes if they lived there in the 15th century to show that they properly belonged there. And if you didn't have a pass, then you could be run out of town as a vagrant or vagabond. And if you came back and were caught again, then you could be branded with a star on your forehead. Almost like an early form of biometrics I like to think, a sort of sense of your body can locate your identity and your mobility can be controlled. As we moved into the modern period then, the nation state began to be the organization, the scale at which mobility was organized. The passport became an important thing to cross over borders. The police forces began to control mobility as a national issue, rather than a local issue. And population movements began to appear on much bigger scale in terms of the number of people and faster. Certainly as the Industrial Revolution happened, you started to get the infrastructure of the train system. You started to get labor. Migrant labor is moving seasonally. So in the South of France there would be people coming from all over Europe to pick grapes at a certain time and then leaving. And you started to get a bigger sense of strangers inside the nation. And you started also to get the emergence of new ideas in science. We no longer think we're the center of the universe, the earth is now moving around the sun, as it gives you a different sense of who you are. Theories in physics started to develop. Laws started to develop that defined the citizen as a figure. Somebody who could move within a nation-state and could move across borders between one nation-state and another. Someone who belongs. And then someone who wasn't the citizen was no longer the vagabond, but was the alien, was a foreigner. If you go back to the 14th century, a foreigner was simply someone from ten miles away. When the nation-state, by the 19th century become sedimented, you started to get this idea of the foreigner as someone from a different nation-state. And you started to get panics and moral panics about them. So you can look at, broadly speaking, a feudal constellation of mobility and then an early modern constellation of mobility. Into a modern constellation of mobility where mobility becomes equated with progress, with freedom, with technological advance. The train, the excitement of the Italian futurists, the possibility of speed and machinery and all of these things wrapped up in each other. So the question I suppose really is, what constellation of mobility are we now and where is it going? What are the meanings, practices and movements that have been entangled in the 21st century? We don't know the answer to that yet. We do know that, more and more, it's beyond the nation-state's ability to control. So we have super-national organizations, the United Nations, the Schengen Accord, the European Union. Various bodies of the United Nations all trying to regulate and talk about refugee mobilities and other mobilities in new ways. We also have increasing clampdowns, increasing panics, threats. Mobility seems to be both, the very lifeblood of the world we live in, and at the same time a virus, or it's portrayed as a virus that threatens to undo it all the time. Whether it's through immigration, whether it's through epidemics like SARS and bird flu, swine flu, as soon as these diseases happen we suddenly get lockdowns at airports. We get maps in newspapers, we get a panic spreading across the world, and it's mobility related. Where's it coming from? It's a question we always ask. [SOUND]
