Transfers

The editorial team hopes you will find this double issue of Transfers as generative to read as it was to put together. Juxtaposing two special sections that present, respectively, important new thinking on mobility and pedagogy and thoughtful reflections on the life and work of the groundbreaking mobility scholar John Urry, the issue aims to speak to both the head and heart of the student, teacher, and practitioner of mobility studies.

The past decade or so has seen a proliferation of introductions, handbooks, and companions to mobilities studies, all of which have played a crucial role in defining and developing the field.¹ These overviews have proved especially important in maintaining the purpose and integrity of mobilities scholarship as it has expanded into a multidisciplinary phenomenon whose status (“paradigm”? “subject area”? “field”?) has become increasingly hard to pin down.² Over time, these multiple applications and interventions have added ever more depth and complexity to what mobilities—as an interpretative framework—can achieve, but its popularization has not been without risk. For example, there has been a tendency within (some) humanities research for “mobility” to be understood merely as a synonym for movement (e.g., transport, travel, migration, etc.) rather than the complex system of power- inscribed social, discursive, and political mobile practices envisaged by Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey (albeit in slightly different ways).³ Handbooks, encyclopedias, and special issues are thus invaluable in keeping the principles that first informed mobilities scholarship in view to new generations of scholars, and it is our hope that this double issue—on mobilities and/as pedagogy—will make a distinctive contribution to these ongoing debates. As every teacher knows, the “classroom” (broadly conceived) is the one place where it is impossible to “fudge” what a concept—or body of knowledge—means and why it matters, and we believe the nine articles gathered together here make an excellent case for why attention to pedagogy is a sure means of maintaining the rigor, as well as the innovation, of mobilities scholarship. Although the second decade of mobilities research gave rise to several important publications on “mobile methods” more widely, this is the first publication to focus specifically on pedagogy, even though most of us who conduct research in the field also incorporate it into our teaching and public engagement work.

A dozen scholars of mobilities studies traveled to Waterloo (Canada) in 2018 for Mobilities Pedagogies: A Symposium on Theories, Practices, and Networks. Discussion questions focused on pedagogies for mobilities studies, mobilities as pedagogies, and mobilizing pedagogies. This article synthesizes participants’ written responses to these questions and our subsequent in-person conversations. It describes our critical pedagogies and how they are inspired by the mobile ontology of theories and methods for mobilities studies and by the project of critical pedagogy as means for justice, community, hope, and compassion. Walking and other journeys together emerge as core pedagogical strategies from among other mobile encounters, collaborations, and creative ruptures for encouraging critical engagement and reflexivity. Concluding remarks broach how our critical pedagogies might intersect with movements for mobility justice and for decolonization in postsecondary education.

This article reflects on the practice of teaching and learning cultural studies in the context of South Africa. It reflects on the curriculum design and teaching experiences of the “Cultural Studies in Practice” module of the Bachelor of Social Sciences Honors in Culture, Communication and Media Studies offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The module is centered around a compulsory three-day field trip to the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields Route in South Africa. While the battlefields visited are commemorations of past military mobilities, this article reflects on how mobilities is central to the curriculum design, pedagogies, and practices of the cultural studies module through (1) the field trip and (2) the mobile pedagogy of walking.

This article reflects on teaching and learning practices in a second-year human geography module “Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa” to consider the role of pedagogies of emplacement in the teaching of mobilities. Reflecting on the use of student-developed mobile diaries and digital stories over a five-year period, this article builds on the concept of “emplacement” in teaching practices to demonstrate how actively emplacing students’ everyday experience of mobility through reflective and embodied learning provides an opportunity for students to generate knowledge; to understand a range of mobility practices, spaces, and subjectivities; and more importantly, to illustrate the potential that epistemic disobedience may offer to mobilities pedagogy and theory.

The teaching of geography has long incorporated mobilities through the practice of fieldwork and field trips as part of teaching. Geographers and child educators have highlighted the importance for children to explore their local area in order to experience “the world” and to engage with their communities. However, mobile methods are usually not integrated in such lessons. Based on primary teachers’ in-service training in Fribourg, Switzerland, and on a collaborative research project on fieldwork-based geography teaching involving primary teachers, the paper aims to discuss the (potential) role of mobile teaching/learning methods in primary school. Our argument also draws from geography curricula in Switzerland and from the scholarly literature on mobile research methods. The article addresses the ways engaging with mobile methods could help pupils/students and teachers to follow mobile processes, to discuss mobilities, to experience places, and to incorporate sensory and corporeal approaches for a more engaging and enlivened learning experience.

This article offers a perspective on how mobilities and landscape intertwine outside the academic debate, in the context of learning practices concerned with landscape, sustainability, and citizenship education. The article is based on the analysis of two personal research-action experiences conducted in Italy from 2017 onward in two different contexts: school education and informal education. The first experience concerns a project on promoting sustainable mobility that involved secondary school students, while the second addresses the informal learning activities of urban walking groups. These different experiences are connected and analyzed by adopting the notions of enskillment and friction as interpretive tools to help trace some of the multiple and unpredictable ways in which movement interacts with landscape in pedagogical contexts.

John Urry has been one of the prominent visionaries of futural social and material worlds as a nexus of mobilities in the social sciences and beyond. His work developed in spaces of collaboration and exchange with colleagues, among whom are the contributors to this special section. In this introductory article I provide a brief genealogy of the “new mobilities paradigm,” outlining its relationship to social ontologies of belonging that inform and are informed epistemologically by new spatial and temporal configurations of life. Its formation and development have always been a collaborative international venture of scholars, activists, and policymakers, wishing to map the ways cultures and societies race to the future. From these groups I introduce the section's contributors as prominent academic examples.

This article traces the enduring legacy of metaphorical thinking in John Urry's work. It begins with a reflection on metaphorical thinking as a mobile epistemology and then details the impact of three key metaphors Urry proposed in his work: the tourist gaze, nomads, and dwelling-in-mobility. The article focuses on the way these metaphors have informed my own research on mobile lifestyles, but also discusses the broader impact of Urry's metaphorical thinking on the current and future field of mobilities studies.

John Urry's legacy is rich and reaches beyond the sociology of mobility. This article follows up on Urry's interest in exploring possible mobile futures by connecting the field of mobilities research to design. “Mobilities design” has emerged as a subbranch of mobilities research during the last decade. By looking into the critical-creative ways in which designers explore potential futures, mobilities research may indeed learn fruitful lessons of future imagination. Specifically, the article illustrates how such “designerly ways of thinking” add new insight when exploring “what the future is,” which Urry set out to do as the last thing of his career.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, two interrelated themes emerged across art, activism, and academia related to the fate of humans on Earth. The first being the demise of “the future” and the prominence of dystopian scenarios for thinking of social futures. The other being the “emergence of the planet” in social science and the humanities. John Urry explored both themes, especially in his later work on the complex interrelationships of carbon-based mobility systems in the shadow of climate change and ecological disaster. In this article I will seek to trace these two themes out, exploring how that the planetary turn also resonates with changes in “the structures of feeling” and how this may invite for reimagining social futures from a more-than-human perspective.

This article puts John Urry's thought on the mobilities turn into conversation with Caribbean critical theory, which was in fact the starting point for my collaborations with Urry on the new mobilities paradigm twenty or more years ago. It describes the relation between my work on the Caribbean and the emergence of the new mobilities paradigm at Lancaster University between about 1999 and 2006. Then it considers the influence of Urry's work on thinking more widely about climate mobilities and carbon form. Finally, it seeks to “pluralize” mobilities research by showing how decolonial and indigenous critiques of the ongoing relations between mobility/immobility, energy production/consumption, and the “coloniality of climate” are necessary to dismantle the powerful racialized mobility regimes that work in the interest of kinetic elites.

Paul Beatty, The Sellout (New York: Picador, 2015), 304 pp., $17 (paperback).

Han Kang, The White Book (Edinburgh: Portobello Books, 2017), £10 (paper- back)

V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 318 pp., £4.95 (paperback)

Patrick Bixby, License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).

Tammy S. Gordon, The Mass Production of Memory: Travel and Personal Archiving in the Age of the Kodak (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).

Yajun Mo, Touring China: A History of Travel Culture, 1912–1949 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).

Blake C. Scott, Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).

Andrew Grant Wood, ed., The Business of Leisure: Tourism History in Latin America and the Caribbean (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

Birgit Englert, Barbara Gföllner and Sigrid Thomsen, eds., Cultural Mobilities between Africa and the Caribbean (London: Routledge, 2021), 226 pp., 18 b/w illus., £29.59 (paperback).

Robert Braun and Richard Randell, Post-automobility Futures: Technology, Power, and Imaginaries (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), 226 pp., $105 (hardback).

This article presents a concept in motion that we call mobility edges. It is developed by combining and comparing insights from different academic fields such as ecology, economic geography, and citizenship studies, and addressing the importance of (disciplinary) edges as spaces of transition. Analogously, mobility edges can be seen as the transition zones, hybridities, overlaps, and porous boundaries between seemingly different types of mobility. Through the concept of mobility edges, we seek to enrich discussion around the politics of mobility. We shift our attention from unpacking particular types of mobility by its composite elements to “transitional zones” and relational politics that (re)produce mobilities in tandem. Edge-thinking, so we argue, not only shakes up the puzzling academic separation of mobilities studies and migration studies but also helps us understand how mobilities are shared and unshared across difference. In our conclusion, we reflect on how “edge” is a hopeful alternative for the terminology of borders that is so dominantly present in Europe (and elsewhere) today.