Mobilities

This theme links to a wider network of researchers interested in all aspects of mobility in its broadest sense: movements of people, objects and ideas; online lives and communication technologies. We are interested in the meanings attached to this array of movements and the ways in which they shape society.

Researchers from a number of disciplines including sociology, psychology, social policy, geography, architecture, arts and media, architecture and anthropology, across four faculties of the university, explore these intersecting aspects of everyday life. The intention is that the network orients around active research, research dissemination and new research development by establishing connections between people with common or overlapping research interests. 

Shaping mobilities

Mobilities are central to contemporary society, from the everyday movements of people, objects and ideas to the global movements of migrants, policy and capital. The world is said to be hypermobile. But at the same time, a significant number of people do not have access to these mobilities in a world of uneven mobilities and mobility injustices.

We engage critically with existing research on mobilities, whilst developing ideas for future research using a range of methods that develop our understanding of the interplay between mobilities, culture, identity and society. We have strong links with researchers from a range of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, which provides a dynamic forum for research exchange, discussion and theory-building. It is in this diversity that robust and innovative ideas about mobilities arise. Recent areas of work include:

  • Transport and mobilities
  • Sensory mobilities
  • Therapeutic mobilities
  • Intergenerational mobilities

MRM-SS-Shaping-mobilities

Transport and mobilities

We need to change our travel habits and practices radically if we are to reduce carbon emissions from transport to meet government and international targets. We need to rethink our travel practices (how, why and where we travel) and our transport policies. Assumptions that travel practices are stable and that it is extremely difficult to change both people’s travel choices and policy makers’ existing ways of thinking are challenged when disruption occurs. Disruption forces individuals to find alternatives and organisations to reconsider how they operate.

Our research examines the potential to harness these opportunities and explore more permanent carbon-reducing changes. We are contributing to a three-year research project funded by the Research Councils UK Energy Programme. Collaborating with seven other universities, Disruption is an in-depth study of the way we travel and the assumptions we make, how this changes when our lives are disrupted and how the more positive changes can be embedded in everyday life, in organisations and in policy-making.

Sensory mobilities

Research explores the sensory and embodied experiences of being mobile. Dr Lesley Murray worked with Sue Robertson from the College of Arts and Humanities on a collaborative, trans-disciplinary study looking at the ways in which multi-sensory engagements with space can be researched. City centres can be spaces where the speeding up of everyday life leads to a desensitised, blurred, and generalised urban experience. In these spaces although experiences are multi-sensory, the acceleration, and consequent density, of interactions make the embodied engagement with urbanity difficult to explore. In contrast, ‘shared space’ allows for the slowing down and freezing of urban movement, producing and revealing a set of embodied relationships with social space that are more readily visible and open to investigation.

The shared space scheme in New Road, Brighton, is a good example of an area where good street design has had a significant impact on how people use and appreciate the space as a destination rather than a thoroughfare. By radically redesigning the road surface, removing clutter and installing extensive new public seating and LED lighting, people have been encouraged to slow down, linger and use the space.

An analysis of multi-sensory interactions with the space and its occupants was produced, exploring mediations of emotional and sensory experiences of people in the street. These explorations go beyond the visual and take account of emotional responses in relation to the interplay between anticipation, memory and immediacy of the sensual experiences, including kinaesthetics. Capturing and communicating these responses were explored through image making including animation, abstraction and gestural drawing to allow for non-verbal, evocative and more open interpretation.

This project involved researchers and students in Arts and Architecture and Applied Social Science, as well as collaboration with Cardiff University.

Sound 

A significant but often overlooked element of spatial experience is that of sound. Cities today are permeated by music. There are buskers on the streets, and recorded music playing in shops, restaurants and cafes. Music is a significant element in the constitution of urban space and has a strong impact on how we move, act, think and feel in different places. Sound in the city has the potential to affect the practices and movements of those who live in, or visit, the city and can function both to include and exclude people in public places.

Research conducted by Dr Karoline Doughty with Dr Maja Lagerqvist from Stockholm University explores the tensions in how music is encountered and experienced in public urban space, and the effects it has on urban movements and emotional engagements with places. In doing so, it opens the possibilities of addressing issues of social justice and access to space.

Therapeutic mobilities

Mobilities and movements can have a significant relationship to wellbeing, where even everyday mobilities can be experienced as therapeutic. The health geographical concept of ‘therapeutic landscape’ has tended to overlook the mobile dimension of engagements with places that are culturally framed as beneficial for health and wellbeing, such as green natural landscapes or coastal landscapes.

To address this gap, Dr Karolina Doughty’s research considers the mobile dimension of the constitution of therapeutic geographies, and the therapeutic landscape concept is used as a framework to explore embodied processes and movements that unfold in a historical and cultural context.

Intergenerational mobilities 

With the proportion of people living in the world's cities set to rise to 70 per cent by 2050, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the ways in which mobile urban spaces are co-produced by people of different ages.

Collaborating with researchers from across the university, we are working towards understanding this concept from an intergenerational perspective. Contributing scholars include: Dr Kanwal Mand, Dr Lesley Murray and Sue Robertson (School of Art, Design and Media) and Dr Vicky Johnson (School of Education). Researchers are examining the mobilities of people at the margins of age: on age-friendly cities and children’s mobilities, with an understanding of the intersectionality of mobilities with issues of race, ethnicity and gender.

Research projects

Disruption: unlocking low carbon travel

A three-year project examining travel practices, assumptions and whether disruption can bring about positive changes in behaviour and policy-making

Underground tales, overground lives: negotiating a post-retirement identity

A pilot project to understand retirement identities by bringing together mobile methodologies and media methodologies

Research team

Dr Michael Cahill

Dr Karolina Doughty

Dr Nichola Khan

Dr Kanwal Mand

Dr Lesley Murray

Researchers outside School of applied social science

Dr Frauke Behrendt, Senior Lecturer, Art, Design and Media

Professor Andrew Church, Professor of Human Geography

Dr Leila Dawney, Senior Lecturer, School of Environment and Technology

Dr Rebecca Elmhirst, Principal Lecturer in Human Geography, School of Environment and Technology

Professor Marina Novelli, Reader in Tourism Development and Management

Sue Robertson, Senior Lecturer, Art, Design and Media.

Output

Selected publications

Doughty, K. and Lagerqvist, M. (forthcoming) Exploring the musical spaces of migrant buskers: the affective tensions in the intersections between sound, place and belonging. Emotion, Space and Society.

Murray, L. and Upstone, S. (Eds.) Representations of Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters. London: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming July 2014)

Doughty, K. and Murray, L. (under revision) Discourses of mobility: institutions, everyday lives and embodiment. Mobilities.

Doughty, K. and Lagerqvist, M. (2014) The pan flute musicians at Sergels torg: between global flows and specificities of place. In: Representations of Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters. London: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming July 2014)

Murray, L. (2014) Reading the mobile city through street art: Belfast’s murals. In: Murray, L. and Upstone, S. Representations of Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters. London: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming July 2014)

Murray, L and Vincent, H. (2014) Are women still moving dangerously? Literary representations of women in London. In: Murray, L. and Upstone, S. Representations of Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters. London: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming July 2014)

Khan, N. (2014) ‘Early view’ The taste of freedom: commensality, liminality and return amongst Afghan transnational migrants in the UK and Pakistan. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(3)

Khan, N. (2014) ‘From refugees to the world stage’: Sport, civilisation and modernity in Out of the Ashes and the UK Afghan diaspora. In: Sport and South Asian Diasporas: Playing through Time and Space (Ed.) S. Thangaraj, D. Burdsey and R. Dudrah. Oxon, New York: Routledge. (forthcoming)

Doughty, K. (2013) Walking together: The embodied and mobile production of a therapeutic landscape. Health and Place 24: pp. 140-146

Khan, N. (2013) A moving heart: querying a singular problem of ‘immobility’ in Afghan migration to the UK. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 32(6) pp. 518-534.

Murray, L. and Mand, K. (2013) Travelling near and far: placing children's mobile emotions. Emotion, Space and Society 9 pp. 72-79

Cahill, Michael (2012) In: Alcock, Pete, May, Margaret and Rowlingson, Karen, eds. The Student's Companion To Social Policy. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

Gardner, K. and Mand, K. (2012) "My away is here": place, emplacement and mobility amongst British Bengali children. In: Gardner, K and Mand, K (Eds.) Through Children's Eyes: Transnational Migration Reconsidered. Journal of Ethnic and Migration, 38(6) pp.969-986.

Mand, K. (2012) Capturing and reproducing marriages: transnationalism, materiality and the wedding video in Charsley, K (ed.) Transnationalism, Migration and Marriage. Oxon: Routledge.

Zeitlyn, B and Mand, K. (2012) Researching transnational childhoods in Gardner, K and Mand, K (eds.) Through children’s eyes: transnational migration reconsidered.  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (6): 953-968. 

Cahill, M, Aldred, R. and Macgregor, S. (2011) SAGE Publications.

Cahill, M. (2011) In: Fitzpatrick, Tony, ed. Understanding The Environment And Social Policy. The Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 227-244. ISBN 9781847423795 

Mand, K. (2011) Innovative methods and creative research with children in transnational families in The International Journal of Social Research Methods 15(2): 149-160.

Mand, K. (2011) Reflections on the use of multi-sites for research on Punjabi Sikh women's transnational lives in Von Hellerman, P and Coleman, S (eds) Multi-Sited Ethnography: Problems and possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods. London: Routledge.

Mand, K. (2010) ”I’ve got two houses, one in Bangladesh, one in London. Everybody has!” Home, locality and belonging(s) in the east End in Bushin, N et al.(eds.) Childhood. A Journal of Global Child Research, 17: 273-287.

Conference presentations

Murray, L (2013) Independence and children. Global challenges in transport, Oxford Leadership Programme, Continuing professional development (CPD) course on Health, Wellbeing and Urban Mobility, Transport Studies Unit, Oxford University, 4 December 2013

Nordic Geographers Meeting, Reykjavik, Iceland, June 2013.

Doughty, K and Dawney, L. Session: Feeling in Common: Making and Enacting Convivial Spaces.

Doughty, K and Murray, L. Paper: Discourses of mobility

Murray, L. Paper: Placing murals in Belfast: community, negotiation and change

Murray, L. Poster presentation: Disruption: unlocking low carbon mobilities

4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, July 2013.

Doughty, K and Lagerqvist M. Session: Sound and emotion

Murray, L. Paper: Re-Imaging and Re-Imagining: Murals and Emotions in a City Divided 

Murray, L, Robertson, S, Raglyte, B (student) and Bowles, E (student) Paper: Sensing inner city ‘shared’ spaces

Sources/links

Disruption Facebook

Collaborations

Aberdeen University

CEMORE Lancaster University

Cardiff University

Concordia University, Montreal

Glasgow University

University of Chile, Chile

University of East London

University of Leeds

Roskilde University, Denmark

University of West of England

Funding

RCUK Energy Programme £231,000
Brighton and Hove Council – consultancy on research with very young children £1,200
School of Applied Social Science Research Development Fund £1,200

Awards, recognition, impact

Karolina Doughty was awarded a Faculty of Health and Social Science postdoctoral award

Lesley Murray gave a lecture on 'Independence and children at the Global challenges in transport', Oxford Leadership Programme, Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course on Health, Wellbeing and Urban Mobility, Transport Studies Unit, Oxford University, 4 December 2013.

Lesley Murray has been invited to present a paper on Gendered and generational representations of mobilities in urban fiction at theCeMoRe Mobility Cultures Colloquium: Lancaster University Conference Centre, 5 September 2014.

Lesley Murray has been invited to give a ‘Guest lecture’ on ‘children’s mobilities’ at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany, May 2014

Lesley Murray and Sue Robertson have organised a session on ‘Intergenerational mobilities’ at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, August 2014

Nichola Khan presented ‘Anthropology of Mobility Keyword: Immobility’. Panel on Critical Anthropological Engagements with Mobility. 112th Annual Meeting, American Anthropological Association. Chicago, November 2013.