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Mobilities, Crises, and Turns: Some Comments on Dissensus, Comparative Studies, and
Spatial Histories
Peter Merriman, Aberystwyth University
Published as:
Merriman, P. (2015) ‘Mobilities, crises and turns: some comments on dissensus, comparative
studies, and spatial histories’, Mobility in History, 6(1), pp.20-34. ISSN: 2296-0503
Merriman, P. (2015) ‘Mobilities, crises and turns: some comments on dissensus, comparative
studies, and spatial histories’, in K. Shelton, G. Mom, D.Z. Singh and C. Katz (eds) Mobility
in History: The Yearbook of the International Association for the History of Transport,
Traffic and Mobility, Oxford: Berghahn, pp.20-34. ISBN: 978-1-78238-814-2
Mobilities, Crises, and Turns: Some Comments on Dissensus, Comparative Studies, and
Spatial Histories
Peter Merriman, Aberystwyth University
Introduction
In their highly influential article on “the new mobilities paradigm,” Mimi Sheller and John
Urry announced the emergence of what seemed to be a new paradigm of research on mobility
within the social sciences,1 while elsewhere (with Kevin Hannam) they referred to “a
mobility turn” in the social sciences.2 Their bold labeling of this emergent body of research
was and perhaps still is quite contentious, and as Tim Cresswell has inferred, a number of
academics have had problems with the phrase due to the suggestion that it is “new,” about
something called “mobility,” and refers to a “paradigm”!3 As Mimi Sheller, writing with
colleagues elsewhere, has remarked, “this provocative labelling was quite knowing,”4 and it
was clearly successful, achieving manifesto-like status and having received over 1,200
citations on Google Scholar (as of July 2014). So, what are some of the criticisms that have
been leveled at the idea of a “new mobilities paradigm” or of a “mobilities turn”?
First, some have found the phrase and its emphasis to be unclear. Is it referring to a
new paradigm of mobility studies, a paradigm of research on new kinds of mobility, or both?5
Second, some scholars have expressed concern about the use of a Kuhnian language and
epistemology of “paradigms” and “turns”—although mobility and transport historians have
been guilty of using a similar language.6 In relation to the “mobilities turn,” was there a
widespread or even partial turn within the social sciences? How extensive has the influence
of this research been? Has mobilities research permeated mainstream debates and disciplines
in the social sciences and humanities? Or is mobilities research the focus of a new inter- or
multidisciplinary field?
Third, critics have asked whether mobilities research is really that new or different.
For some, the announcement of a “new mobilities paradigm” failed to recognize the many
traditions of research on communications, transport, and mobility that clearly preceded (and
arguably underpin) this new interdisciplinary field. Do researchers associated with this new
paradigm pay sufficient attention to earlier research undertaken in mainstream social science
disciplines, as well as fields such as transport geography, the history of travel writing,
transport history, tourism studies, and migration studies? Should mobility scholars make
more of an effort to examine parallel research in these fields, or are they simply adopting new
theories, methods, and approaches with very different aims, as well as studying new forms of
mobility that have received little attention within fields such as transport history? There are
no simple or singular answers to these questions, but what is clear to me is that mobilities
research has perhaps all too readily been identified as a branch of social scientific research
rather than as a theme that cuts across the arts and humanities, social sciences, and indeed the
sciences.7 What is more, in terms of the time periods examined, mobilities research agendas
have largely been positioned as ones that can advance present and future mobilities,
generating a dialogue with transport policy makers and transport studies academics, rather
than focusing on past mobilities or advancing dialogues with mobility and transport
historians.8 That said, a lot has changed since the publication of “The New Mobilities
Paradigm” in 2006, and over the past few years there have been an increasing number of
events and publications where dialogues have been opened up between scholars examining
mobility and transport from across the social sciences and humanities.9 While there can
clearly be challenges and problems with trying to position the research of individuals in
disciplinary camps, I would suggest that the research of an increasing number of scholars
(including, for example, Tim Cresswell and Mimi Sheller) spans both the humanities and
social sciences.
In this article I want to build upon some of these opening thoughts and questions in
order to make a series of critical observations about the future trajectories of transport history
and mobility history, focusing on some of the concerns expressed by Gijs Mom in his
previous article, “The Crisis of Transport History.” I suggest that common questions, a
wholesale cultural turn, and comparative approaches may not be as desirable as Mom
suggests, arguing that nationally focused (if not nationalist) histories have their place within
studies of transport and mobility. In the final section, I suggest that comparative approaches
may jar with attempts to write spatial and highly contextual histories, and I provide a few
responses to Mom’s remarks on my book Mobility, Space and Culture.
Commonalities, crises, and turns
Academic disciplines and debates have long been characterized by critical interventions
fueled by a modernist desire to enact change, find singular answers or solutions, and bring
about more or less radical/modest transformations in academic conventions and
understandings—for a whole variety of personal, political, philosophical, and institutional
reasons. During the 1980s, a broad array of scholars drew upon ideas from cultural studies,
social theory, and contemporary philosophy (particularly poststructuralist philosophy),
ushering in what has commonly been referred to as a “cultural turn” in many social science
and humanities disciplines.10 In my own discipline of geography, the rise of cultural
geography—in part marked by the transformation (in the U.K.) of the Institute of British
Geographers’ Social Geography Study Group into the Social and Cultural Geography Study
Group in 1988—led to extensive debate (and some consternation) about the impact of this
“turn” on the direction of research agendas,11 and I suggest that the nature of this turn in
geography might hold some valuable lessons for mobility and transport historians. Calls,
manifestos, and “road maps” for a cultural turn in mobility history may inspire some scholars
to engage with new and perhaps exciting debates, theories, and sources,12 but it is
questionable whether one can “force” a turn to happen, will it into existence, or persuade all
or perhaps many scholars to “turn.” In “The Crisis in Transport History,” Gijs Mom appears
to lament the lack of will among transport historians to “look over the fence into . . . adjacent
subfields,” resulting in a “half-hearted” cultural turn in mobility history. For me, Mom’s
provocative but insightful remarks spark a broad range of additional questions. Does it matter
if transport history does not undertake a cultural turn? Would a wholesale turn or consensus
really be that desirable? Can “turns,” “influences,” and “transformations” ever be anything
but partial and incremental—especially given the often slow transformation of disciplinary
fields and debates, and the ways in which academics frequently adopt epistemological and
ontological positions from which they are reluctant to shift? Finally, is the “fragmentation” of
transport and mobility history that Mom associates with “the inability or unwillingness to
formulate a set of common questions” necessarily a problem, or something that can be
avoided?13 Maybe dissensus and disagreement—accompanied by civil dialogue and
respect—is a positive state of affairs, being productive rather than a sign of crisis?
I must admit that as an academic who largely self-identifies as a cultural and historical
geographer I probably have only one foot in the field of mobility or transport history, but I
suspect that disagreements between scholars working on mobility history may reflect power
struggles, philosophical differences, and disagreements about future trajectories that are not
dissimilar to those that sparked tensions between Anglophone economic geographers,
political geographers, social geographers, and cultural geographers in the 1980s and 1990s.14
While “fragmentation” without dialogue can clearly be problematic, the tensions created by
differing perspectives, approaches, methods, and theoretical standpoints can also be
productive, preventing stagnancy and complacency. “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”15
Dissensus, plurality, fragmentation, and multiplicity, then, can be healthy, productive, and
creative. Fragmentation does not necessarily mean incoherence or a lack of discipline, and
likewise I hold reservations about Mom’s call to “formulate a set of common questions that
drive mobility historians’ research.” While academic politics, economies, and cultures
encourage scholars to be innovative, push boundaries, transform debates, and to try and lead
discussions, such modernist impulses inevitably lead to a situation where some voices prevail
(and others are lost) in the formulation of common questions or the codification of research
agendas. Is there a danger that such a common agenda would simply reinforce Western
perspectives, amplifying Western voices and research agendas, which is a position that Gijs
Mom and the editorial team of Transfers wish to avoid?16 Would these “common questions”
largely reflect the passions, theoretical predilections, and academic cultures and networks of
European and North American academics? Of course, attempts to facilitate international
dialogue and coproduce multiple research agendas do entail a degree of ordering,
disciplining, and leadership, but surely coproduction, self-organizing, and self-disciplining
are inevitable outcomes of academic inquiry, with Mom’s “big questions” not necessarily
being listed or codified in manifestos but emerging in unfolding debates on a continual and
contingent basis. Mom’s desire for “big questions” and “common questions” is partly driven
by an egalitarian politics of pluralism, inclusion, comparison, and transnationalism that seeks
to decenter dominant (particularly Western) perspectives, a political move that I welcome.17
However, a commitment to open and inclusive agendas does not necessarily require a close
disciplining or overall consensus, and neither would a celebration of dissensus, multiple
evolving agendas, or unformulated open ambitions equate to an absence of political
perspective or a postmodern nihilism.18
On being trans: National, transnational, and comparative histories
At the heart of Mom’s article is a call for transmodal, transdisciplinary, and transnational
mobility histories, and of course the common root of all of these terms also lies at the heart of
the field of transport history—the Latin preposition trans, referring to a spanning or shuttling
relationship across, over, and between.19 Trans denotes a relation, process, action, and
perhaps a state of being, acknowledging the dynamic unfolding of events, the openness of
places, and flows of people, things, and ideas across geographical and geopolitical
boundaries.20 Transdisciplinarity arguably lies at the heart of “the mobilities turn” and “the
new mobilities paradigm,” although Mom suggests that “the scholarly fields of transport and
communications/media studies have drifted apart,” neglecting their common links. Mom is
also critical of monomodal studies, but it is his call for transnational and comparative
mobility histories—and his suggestion that it “makes . . . ever less sense to limit such
discussions to the national realm”—upon which I wish to focus.
Mom critiques what he terms “the national approach” to history on the basis that
many of the events, mobilities, and technologies under investigation are either transnational
or multinational in character, while present-day problems such as climate change are global
in nature, requiring multinational cooperation and solutions. Mom acknowledges that the
history of infrastructure planning and construction has, at various times, been closely aligned
with the geopolitical and economic ambitions of nation-states and used in the formulation of
national identities, but he seems to be concerned that academic examinations of national
infrastructures, systems, and contexts will be used to either wittingly or unwittingly reinforce
nationalist narratives—guided by what is present in specific national archives, and ignoring
absences and transnational dialogues. In addition, Mom calls for academics to decenter their
national studies by undertaking comparative (as well as transnational) studies, arguing for the
importance of “cross-country comparisons” and of including research on mobilities in nonWestern contexts. For me, these points articulate a number of distinct but related issues.
First, Mom quite rightly suggests that global issues such as climate change require a
transnational approach and international cooperation, dialogue, and diplomacy, but the
prevailing global geopolitical (dis)order is closely linked to actions and dialogue between
nation-states, at times facilitated by international nongovernmental organizations. Not only
are national economic, political, environmental, and energy agendas central to their political
positions, but nations can also have very different attitudes to mobility, as well as possessing
different capacities to shape agendas and respond and adapt to climate change.21 National
political, economic, cultural, and geographical contexts are often vital, not to mention local
and regional contexts and cultural practices, and it is not a case of problems, events, or
infrastructures being local or global, international or national, or regional or national. As
many geographers (especially poststructuralist geographers) writing on scale have
emphasized, relational and networked approaches to scale (where global and transnational
infrastructures are frequently seen to be embedded in national, regional, and local contexts
and spaces) move us away from understandings of scales as nested hierarchies.22 The global
or transnational is not “up there,” floating in the ether, but is reproduced, reworked, and
embedded in local, regional, and national sites and situations. The global and local (globallocal) are closely entwined, as, of course, are the national and global.
Second, I am not convinced by Mom’s claims that “historians themselves have
undermined the national approach” through their studies of international and transnational
infrastructures and enterprises and their examinations of “the fundamental international
character of car manufacturing, car engineering, and car use.” In the first place, the idea that
transnational, international, or transborder projects denigrate the influence of the national or a
national approach is paradoxical, as the very notion of trans implies a connecting, shuttling
action, or a relation between, and a bridging and surpassing of borders, while these
transnational and transborder infrastructures could themselves be seen to be rooted in
particular national, regional, and local spaces and contexts. Likewise, comparisons between
national contexts frequently present “the nation,” a priori, as the unit of comparison and
difference, perhaps foregrounding the nation in a rather uncritical or artificial way—rather
than framing how “the national” and national differences emerge and circulate through
discourses. Following from this, I assume that Mom’s observation that car use and
manufacturing is international is an attempt to highlight the globalization of mobility
systems, infrastructures, and practices, but important lessons can be learned here from
anthropological, geographical, and sociological research on globalization and mobility.23 Is
Mom implying that the globalization of car production and consumption leads to a
standardization in consumption and production practices? Putting aside differences in
manufacturing techniques, labor practices, road construction, and cultures of repair and
maintenance,24 scholars have demonstrated the very different cultural contexts and national
practices associated with, for example, car use and driving—whether in India and Trinidad,
Italy and the U.K., or among the Pitjantjatjara in Australia.25 It is not simply a case of the
manufacturing and marketing companies producing globalized objects and brands, which are
consumed by motorists in standardized, uniform, or passive ways. Consumers actively
produce cultural meanings—reworking or destabilizing them—while interacting with objects
and environments in diverse ways, whether modifying them,26 working them into tribal or
religious ceremonies, or building distinctive mysticisms and mythologies around them.27
Third, I think it is important to recognize the difference between nationally focused
histories that rather uncritically construct a national story and frame the national as the scale
of understanding—perhaps as a result of an uncritical reliance on official government
narratives—and those historians who write contextual histories of infrastructural projects in
which research subjects themselves (e.g., politicians or engineers) construct them as
nationally significant enterprises. Recognizing that particular infrastructures, technologies,
and practices are used to reinforce narratives of national cohesion, political unity, and
national identity does not mean that those academics themselves necessarily support
exclusionary or jingoistic celebrations of the nation, as critical studies by the likes of Michael
Billig, James C. Scott, and others attest.28 What’s more, nationhood, the maintenance of
national territories, and senses of national identity are not necessarily negative or
exclusionary, frequently being sustained and performed on an ongoing, incremental, and
everyday basis through all manner of architectures, infrastructures, events, and practices,
which may be interpreted by some as jarring or “hot” reminders of the territorial control and
power of state authorities, and by others as inclusive or homely banal presences in their
everyday landscape.29
Finally, while accepting the importance of decentering the authority of Western
narratives, examining transnational flows and mobilities, and exploring alternative modes of
transport and mobility, I am not convinced by the justification for comparative international
analyses. Like some critics of comparative history, I wonder whether such an imperative is
simply “a relic of structural history, incompatible with the new questions raised by cultural
historians and poststructuralist analysis.”30 Of course, one’s views on this are likely to depend
on one’s philosophical and methodological approach to archival research, contextualization,
and history writing, but what is the motivation for undertaking multinational comparisons
where, for example, the mobilities one is studying are largely characterized by local, regional,
and national sociopolitical and spatial networks and relations—albeit ones that may be tied
into broader international networks such as fuel extraction and distribution, or
manufacturing? Is it to fulfill a modernist desire to write comprehensive, total, or world
histories? Is it an attempt to decenter Western narratives or Euro-American narratives, in
which case, would an acknowledgment of positionality and partiality suffice? Or is it to avoid
the exclusionary or xenophobic undercurrents of some nationalist rhetorics? As Deborah
Cohen has astutely observed, “comparative histories owe much to national shame,”31 but
critical explanations of nation-state formation and the constitution of dominant subject
positions are required alongside critical explorations of the marginalization of subject
positions within mainstream discourses.
Useful lessons could perhaps be taken here from a body of work that will be familiar
to many mobility historians, namely, the symmetrical sociologies of association and
networking developed by Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law, and a large number of
geographers, sociologists, and historians of science and technology. In “following actors,”
tracing associations, and examining the evolution of hybrid social, economic, political, and
material networks, scholars are not constrained by (national) political boundaries and
territories, but neither do they ignore them. The work of John Law, in particular, reveals how
in certain situations and contexts, national economic, political, and cultural imperatives, and
international relations and differences, do matter to (and shape the actions of) the individuals
and organizations they study.32
Mobility, spatiality, ontology
I suspect that my wariness of transnational comparative histories has something to do with
my academic background as a geographer, as well as my focus on automobility (rather than,
say, air travel). While I understand Mom’s desire to decenter dominant Western narratives,
there is a danger that comparative approaches to historical contextualization assume that
histories need to provide a comprehensive “slice” through space—describing situations in
different locations in the same time periods, as if freezing events. For me, such an approach
tends to present a rather crude and simplistic geographical patternation, where the
geographies of, say, automobility in a particular time period are reduced to descriptive
comparisons of different locations and physical and knowledge flows between locations. If,
however, we take academic writings on space and spatiality seriously, then space is not
simply a physical, dimensioned container, or indeed a question of relative position, but a
dynamic and open construction (perhaps a relational tension) produced through social,
political, cultural, economic, and physical relations and forces.33 An attention to site,
situation, and space points to an important series of questions about how we live, move, and
dwell in the world in embodied ways. In focusing on questions of site, place, and space, and
in tracing the spatial relations of particular events, practices, and movements, geographers
have been concerned with exploring how economic, social, and political relations become
embedded in particular sites, as well as reconstructing the lively spatialities of spaces, places,
landscapes, and environments in the past.34 If one wants to study the historical geographies of
infrastructures, political decision making, economic processes, cultural values, physical
environments, and embodied practices, then what would a comparative, international study
actually enable one to conclude? Can one make useful comparisons while still foregrounding
the messy situated realities of geographical contexts? And are objects that are often taken to
be universal (i.e., “the car” or “the railway”) stable and comparable (even when the vehicle
itself is standardized and transportable)? Work by anthropologists, geographers, and
sociologists on technologies, consumption, commodities, and space and place suggest that
there is no simple or singular answer here.
This brings me to some of the observations and criticisms Mom makes about my own
book, Mobility, Space and Culture.35 In my writings over the past ten years I have attempted
to talk to different audiences—whether in sociology, cultural studies, geography,
contemporary archaeology, or mobility history—adapting my writing style and theoretical
inflections depending on what I feel is my main readership. While my earlier book on the
geographies and histories of England’s M1 motorway was in part written with a history
readership in mind,36 Mobility, Space and Culture was published in Routledge’s International
Library of Sociology book series edited by John Urry, and its arguments are primarily aimed
at a readership in geography and sociology. The first half of the book is a fairly dense
theoretical treatise on the way space, space-time, and place have been theorized in the social
sciences over the past forty or so years, and this reflects a degree of dissatisfaction I have
about “the a priori positioning of space and time as the primordial, ontological vectors,
grounds or measures of extension through and in relation to which movement, life and events
[are seen to] unfold.”37 The book and related articles were very consciously written as
somewhat experimental propositions or theoretical treatises, which seek to question farreaching Western ontological understandings of how we inhabit the world.38 In many senses,
then, Mobility, Space and Culture is not a history book or a book aimed at historians, and
neither is it a typical work of historical geography. Despite drawing upon some difficult and
dense theoretical works on space, spatiality, place, and movement, the book is actually quite
modest in its claims and conclusions. It is not a classically modernist monograph that claims
to be exhaustive or definitive. Its aim is to ask . . . what if? . . . and to suggest . . . maybe . . .
perhaps . . . The book is not intended to be a grand theoretical treatise—it is not, as Mom
suggests, “meant to be the mobility parallel of modernity theory”—but a modest proposal,
deconstructing existing grand theories of space, place, and movement, and suggesting that
particular ontologies associated with mobile practices are constituted in practice.
It is also a book of two halves—one examining theories of space, place, and
movement, and the other examining some of “the movements, sensations, affects,
materialities and political forces which emerged in relation to the practices of motoring and
driving in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.”39 After outlining a processual approach to
spacing, placing, and moving, I shift my attention to the early history of driving in Britain,
examining my proposition that “the embodied cultural practices of driving provide an
exemplary illustration of how people move through, inhabit and experience the world in ways
which do not appear to be characterised by the foregrounding of embodied apprehensions of
space-time.”40 As I go on to argue:
Driving entails a sensing, feeling and moving with and towards, and it gives rise to
“an ontology of everyday distraction”41 which is characterised by distinctive
engagements with the world that are underpinned not by prehensions of space-time
but by constantly shifting sensibilities and ontologies of moving-seeing, movingseeing-spacing, and movement-space.42
The difficulty, of course, is that when motorists become skilled drivers, the distinctive
phenomenology, ontology, and sensibility of driving appears to sink into the background,43
and motorists appear to drive in somewhat automatic, detached, distracted, or perhaps
unconscious or noncognitive ways.44 It is for this reason that I chose to examine the early
history of driving in Britain, at a time when motorists, politicians, civil servants, the police,
journalists, and social commentators actively discussed what might now seem to be fairly
mundane aspects of motoring. The book was not intended to be a comprehensive cultural,
social, or political history of early motoring in Britain;45 rather, I wanted to try to examine
three aspects of the spatial history of early motoring, including the sensations, sensibilities,
and ontologies associated with motoring in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the
gendered politics and practices, and attempts to govern and police motorists. At the heart of
the book is a sensitivity to the distinctive spaces and spatialities of motoring in this period—
including the spaces of the car, road, motoring club, motor magazine, police speed trap, and
so forth. In largely focusing on debates or experiences in Britain, I did not want to deny
parallels with events abroad, and neither was I seeking to unproblematically celebrate Britain
or British motoring—although it is important to remember that commentators in 1890s and
1900s Britain did not have the benefit of hindsight, relying upon reports in magazines, their
own continental experiences, and stories from other motorists about what was going on
abroad.
As a final comment, I would like to reply to Mom’s remarks about the sources and
methods I use, as well as clarifying some misunderstandings he appears to have about the
claims I am making. In actual fact, I do not connect the “anger of early motorists” with
contemporary road rage, only mentioning the latter in a review of contemporary sociological
and geographical literatures on the car.46 Likewise, in discussing debates about the conduct of
early motorists, I do not “side with them”—I can only think that my attempt to give voice to
the views of these motorists was taken as supporting their views. More significantly, Mom
suggests that I focus mainly on “trade journals,” which are “a highly biased source,” and that
through such sources “virtually anything can be ‘proven’ by the right selection of
quotations.” For me, Mom’s discussions of “bias” and “proof” appear to articulate a
distinctively structuralist approach to historical method in which it is assumed that we can get
beyond certain sources to “the truth.” In contrast, I would argue that the discourses and texts I
mobilized are all important in articulating the diversity of views on early motoring (and
constituting the multiple truths of early motoring)—but perhaps I should have been more
explicit about my methods and my approach to these sources. Far from being “simply trade
journals,” the motoring magazines I analyzed were actually quite diverse, ranging from trade
journals and cheap motoring magazines aimed at the “man of moderate means” (including
The Motor, priced one pence)47 to expensive titles such as The Car (Illustrated) (priced six
pence), which carried a mixture of motoring news, biographical articles, fiction, technical
pieces, fashion advice, and photographs, effectively functioning as a society magazine for
upper-class male and female motorists.48 While these magazines served a range of markets
and included a range of writing styles, they provide invaluable sources for the cultural
historian seeking to understand the breadth of discourses surrounding motoring, providing
important insights into the experiences of motorists and the views of cultural commentators.
Concluding remarks
In his article “The Crisis of Transport History,” Gijs Mom criticizes mobility historians for
failing to formulate “big questions” and for taking a “half-hearted” approach to the cultural
turn. In reply I have questioned whether consensus, big questions, and a wholesale cultural
turn would really be that desirable, suggesting that dissensus and plurality might be positive
outcomes of academic debate. Mobility histories are incredibly diverse in style, tone, sources,
theoretical standpoint, and disciplinary groundings, as well as their geographical and
temporal reach, and I believe that this multidisciplinary research area would be less
interesting and dynamic if we all addressed the same questions, adopted similar approaches,
or indeed all attempted to write “grand totalizing histories.” Comparative and transnational
studies may be enlightening, but some academic historians have expressed concerns about
such approaches, and I remain unconvinced that they are either essential or desirable for
cultural historians and scholars who take seriously the distinctive spatialities and
contextualities of particular practices, movements, infrastructures, and events.
Peter Merriman is a reader in human geography at Aberystwyth University in Wales. His
research focuses on the geographies and histories of mobility, the practices and spaces of
driving, and theoretical approaches to space, place, and landscape. He is an associate editor of
Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies and serves on the editorial board of
Mobilities. His books include Mobility, Space and Culture (Routledge, 2012), Driving Spaces
(Blackwell, 2007), and two coedited collections: Geographies of Mobilities (Ashgate, 2011)
and The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (Routledge, 2014).
Notes
1
Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A
38, no. 2 (2006): 207.
2
Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and
Moorings,” Mobilities 1, no. 1 (2006): 1–22.
3
Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 18.
4
Peter Adey et al., “Introduction,” in The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, ed. Peter Adey
et al. (London: Routledge, 2014), 2.
5
Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 18.
6
See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962). For criticisms of this language, see, e.g., David Matless’s comments in Peter
Merriman et al., “Landscape, Mobility and Practice,” Social and Cultural Geography 9, no. 2
(2008): 191–212; Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 18. Transport and mobility
historians have also been drawn to this language: Gijs Mom, Colin Divall, and Peter Lyth,
“Towards a Paradigm Shift? A Decade of Transport and Mobility History,” in Mobility in
History: The State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M Yearbook
2009), ed. Gijs Mom, Gordon Pirie, and Laurent Tissot (Neuchâtel: Alphil, 2009), 13–40.
7
Peter Merriman, “Rethinking Mobile Methods,” Mobilities 9, no. 2 (2014): 167–187.
8
Of course, mobility and transport historians have made similar moves, as is suggested by
Gijs Mom in his discussion of the “History Lab” idea, and by Colin Divall in his calls for “a
useable past.” See Colin Divall, “Transport History, the Usable Past and the Future of
Mobility,” in Mobilities: New Perspectives on Transport and Society, ed. Margaret Grieco
and John Urry (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011), 305–319; Peter Merriman et al., “Mobility:
Geographies, Histories, Sociologies,” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies
3, no. 1 (2013): 147–165.
9
See, e.g., Merriman et al., “Mobility”; Susanne Witzgall, Gerlinde Vogl, and Sven
Kesselring, eds., New Mobilities Regimes in Art and Social Sciences (Farnham, U.K.:
Ashgate, 2013).
10
This was, of course, famously discussed in the Journal of Transport History by Colin
Divall, George Revill, Michael Freeman, John Walton, and Gordon Pirie. See Colin Divall
and George Revill, “Cultures of Transport: Representation, Practice and Technology,”
Journal of Transport History 26, no. 1 (2005): 99–111; Michael Freeman, “‘You Turn If You
Want To’: A Comment on the ‘Cultural Turn’ in Divall and Revill’s ‘Cultures of Transport,’”
Journal of Transport History 27, no. 1 (2006): 138–143; Colin Divall and George Revill, “No
Turn Needed: A Reply to Michael Freeman,” Journal of Transport History 27, no. 1 (2006):
144–149; John Walton, “Transport, Travel, Tourism and Mobility: A Cultural Turn?,”
Journal of Transport History 27, no. 2 (2006): 129–134; Gordon Pirie, “Introduction:
Cultural Crossings,” Journal of Transport History 29, no. 1 (2008): 1–4; Mom, Divall, and
Lyth, “Towards a Paradigm Shift?”
11
The “cultural turn” had an impact on research undertaken across the wide spectrum of
subdisciplines making up human geography, notably historical geography, social geography,
political geography, and economic geography. Extensive debates centered around the impact
of the “cultural turn” on the politically and ethically driven subdiscipline of social geography
(much of which was underpinned by radical, Marxist, and feminist approaches), not least
because social and cultural geography were closely aligned in a number of institutional
settings and publishing forums. See Chris Philo, “Introduction, Acknowledgements and Brief
Thoughts on Older Words and Older Worlds,” in New Words, New Worlds:
Reconceptualising Social and Cultural Geography—Conference Proceedings, ed. Chris Philo
(Lampeter, U.K.: Social and Cultural Geography Study Group, 1991), 1–13; Clive Barnett,
“The Cultural Turn: Fashion or Progress in Human Geography,” Antipode 30, no. 4 (1998):
379–394; Lily Kong, “A ‘New’ Cultural Geography? Debates about Invention and
Reinvention,” Scottish Geographical Magazine 113, no. 3 (1997): 177–185; Gill Valentine,
“Whatever Happened to the Social? Reflections on the ‘Cultural Turn’ in British Human
Geography,” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift 55, no. 3 (2001): 166–172; Nicky Gregson,
“Reclaiming ‘the Social’ in Social and Cultural Geography,” in Handbook of Cultural
Geography, ed. Kay Anderson et al. (London: Sage, 2003), 43–57.
12
As was seen with Divall and Revill, “Cultures of Transport”; Pirie, “Introduction.”
13
Mom advanced a similar argument in 2008: Gijs Mom, “Editorial,” Journal of Transport
History 29, no. 1 (2008): iii–iv.
14
Evidence of these changing agendas and trajectories can be seen in the editorials of the
Journal of Transport History. See, e.g., Gijs Mom, “Editorial,” Journal of Transport History
27, no. 1 (2006): iii–v.
15
Chris Philo, “More Words, More Worlds: Reflections on the Cultural Turn in Human
Geography,” in Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography,
ed. Ian Cook et al. (Harlow, U.K.: Prentice Hall, 2000), 44. Philo is, of course, paraphrasing
the well-known saying, which is often seen to be derived from the Chinese Communist
Party’s “hundred flowers campaign” of the 1950s.
16
It is probably pertinent to mention here that I am an associate editor of Transfers:
Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, working underneath (in one sense) Gijs Mom,
the editor in chief. On the importance of including non-Western perspectives and voices, see
Gijs Mom and Nanny Kim, “Editorial,” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility
Studies 3, no. 3 (2013): 1–5.
17
See the reformulated mission of the journal Transfers in volume 3, issue 1 (Spring 2013):
Gijs Mom et al., “Editorial,” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 3, no. 1
(2013): 1–5.
18
For a reformulated left politics, see Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Arts of the Political: New
Openings for the Left (London: Duke University Press, 2013).
19
I am aware that the term “trans” is often used as a shortened colloquialism to describe
transgender or transsexual people, but here I seek to rework and broaden this term to explore
the ontological positions and relations of betweenness and becoming that we all in some
sense occupy.
20
There are long-established traditions of philosophical and geographical thinking that take a
processual and dynamic approach to places, mobility, and the unfolding of events. See, e.g.,
Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today, June (1991): 24–29; Doreen
Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005); Nigel Thrift, “Steps to an Ecology of Place,” in
Human Geography Today, ed. Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Phil Sarre (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1999), 295–322; Kevin Hetherington, “In Place of Geometry: The Materiality of
Place,” in Ideas of Difference: Social Spaces and the Labour of Division, ed. Kevin
Hetherington and Roland Munro (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review, 1997), 183–
199; Doreen Massey and Nigel Thrift, “The Passion of Place,” in A Century of British
Geography, ed. Ron Johnston and Michael Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 275–299; Peter Merriman, “Driving Places: Marc Augé, Non-places and the
Geographies of England’s M1 Motorway,” Theory, Culture, and Society 21, nos. 4–5 (2004):
145–167; Peter Merriman, “Marc Augé on Space, Place and Non-place,” Irish Journal of
French Studies 9 (2009): 9–29; Peter Merriman, “Human Geography without Time-Space,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37, no. 1 (2012): 13–27; Peter Merriman,
Mobility, Space and Culture (London: Routledge, 2012).
21
There is an extensive literature that examines the different political and geopolitical
contexts to mobilities, the importance of the nation as a scale of policy making, and how
(national) cultural differences are used to frame debates about mobility. One prominent
contemporary example would be the literatures on Chinese automobility. See, e.g., George
Martin, “Global Motorization, Social Ecology and China,” Area 39, no. 1 (2007): 66–73;
Cotten Seiler, “Welcoming China to Modernity: US Fantasies of Chinese Automobility,”
Public Culture 24, no. 2 (2012): 357–384; Rudi Volti, “A Car for the Great Asian Multitude,”
Technology and Culture 49, no. 4 (2008): 995–1001. See also Kingsley Dennis and John
Urry, After the Car (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Mathew Paterson, Automobile Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
22
See, e.g., Massey, “A Global Sense of Place”; Phil Crang, “Local-Global,” in Introducing
Human Geography, 2nd ed., ed. Paul Cloke, Phil Crang, and Mark Goodwin (London:
Hodder Arnold, 2005), 34–50; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harlow, U.K.:
Prentice Hall, 1993); Nigel Thrift, “A Hyperactive World,” in Geographies of Global
Change, ed. Ron Johnston, Peter Taylor, and Michael Watts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 18–
35; Sallie A. Marston, John-Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward, “Human Geography
without Scale,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 4 (2005): 416–
432.
23
See, e.g., Massey, “A Global Sense of Place”; Crang, “Local-Global”; Philip Crang,
“Consumption and its Geographies,” in An Introduction to Human Geography: Issues for the
21st Century, 3rd ed., ed. Peter Daniels et al. (Harlow, U.K.: Prentice Hall, 2008), 376–394;
Adam Tickell et al., eds., Globalization in Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
24
On cultures of construction, laboring, repair, and maintenance, see, e.g., Peter Merriman,
“‘Operation Motorway’: Landscapes of Construction on England’s M1 Motorway,” Journal
of Historical Geography 31, no. 1 (2005): 113–133; Peter Merriman, Driving Spaces: A
Cultural-Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007);
Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,”
Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1–25.
25
For anthropological perspectives on cars, roads, and driving, see Daniel Miller, “Driven
Societies,” in Car Cultures, ed. Daniel Miller (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 1–33; Diana Young,
“The Life and Death of Cars: Private Vehicles on the Pitjantjatjara Lands, South Australia,”
in Miller, Car Cultures, 35–57; Jojada Verrips and Birgit Meyer, “Kwaku’s Car: The
Struggles and Stories of a Ghanaian Long-Distance Taxi-Driver,” in Miller, Car Cultures,
153–184; Gertrude Stotz, “The Colonizing Vehicle,” in Miller, Car Cultures, 223–244;
Adeline Masquelier, “Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility, and the Historical Imagination
in Postcolonial Niger,” American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 829–856; Dimitris
Dalakoglou and Pennie Harvey, eds., “Roads and Anthropology,” Mobilities 7, no. 4 (2012):
459–586. For an account of national automobility practices and spaces that is more
influenced by cultural studies and sociology, see Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular
Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Tim Edensor, “Automobility and National
Identity: Representation, Geography and Driving Practice,” Theory, Culture and Society 21,
nos. 4–5 (2004): 101–120.
26
See Miller, “Driven Societies”; H. F. Moorhouse, Driving Ambitions: An Analysis of the
American Hot Rod Enthusiasm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Kathleen
Franz, Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Peter Merriman, “Automobility and the Geographies of the Car,”
Geography Compass 3, no. 2 (2009): 586–599; Karen Lumsden, Boy Racer Culture: Youth,
Masculinity and Deviance (London: Routledge, 2013).
27
See, e.g., Young, “The Life and Death of Cars”; Masquelier, “Road Mythographies.”
28
Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995); James C. Scott, Seeing like a
State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (London: Yale
University Press, 1998); Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Edensor, “Automobility and National
Identity”; Merriman, Driving Spaces.
29
Rhys Jones and Peter Merriman, “Hot, Banal and Everyday Nationalism: Bilingual Road
Signs in Wales,” Political Geography 28, no. 3 (2009): 164–173; Peter Merriman and Rhys
Jones, “‘Symbols of Justice’: The Welsh Language Society’s Campaign for Bilingual Road
Signs in Wales, 1967–1980,” Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 2 (2009): 350–375;
Rhys Jones and Peter Merriman, “Network Nation,” Environment and Planning A 45, no. 4
(2012): 937–953.
30
Deborah Cohen, “Comparative History: Buyer Beware,” German Historical Institute
Bulletin 29 (Fall 2001): 24, paraphrasing the views of Michel Espagne.
31
Ibid., 23.
32
John Law, Organizing Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); John Law, Aircraft Stories:
Decentering the Object in Technoscience (London: Duke University Press, 2002). See also
Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology (London: Harvard University Press, 1996).
33
See, e.g., Massey, For Space; Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture.
34
I would add that some transport historians—especially those with geographical
backgrounds—do explore the spatialities of mobile practices. See, e.g., Pirie, “Introduction,”
4.
35
Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture.
36
See Merriman, Driving Spaces.
37
Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture, 2.
38
See also Merriman, “Human Geography without Time-Space”; Peter Merriman,
“Unpicking Space-Time: Towards New Apprehensions of Movement-Space,” in Perspectives
on Mobility, ed. Ingo Berensmeyer and Christoph Ehland (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 177–
192.
39
Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture, 18.
40
Ibid., 63.
41
Margaret Morse, Virtualities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 99.
42
Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture, 63.
43
Nigel Thrift, “Driving in the City,” Theory, Culture, and Society 21, nos. 4–5 (2004): 41–
59; Eric Laurier, “Driving: Pre-cognition and Driving,” in Geographies of Mobilities:
Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate,
2011), 69–81.
44
David Seamon, “Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place-Ballets,” in The Human
Experience of Space and Place, ed. Anne Buttimer and David Seamon (London: Croom
Helm, 1980), 148–165; Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and
Modern Culture (London: MIT Press, 1999); Thrift, “Driving in the City”; Laurier, “Driving:
Pre-cognition and Driving”; Morse, Virtualities.
45
Indeed, other studies attempt to provide a much more comprehensive examination of the
social and political histories of early British motoring: S. O’Connell, The Car and British
Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1998); W. Plowden, The Motor Car and Politics 1896–1970 (London: Bodley Head, 1971);
David Jeremiah, Representations of British Motoring (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2007).
46
Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture, 65.
47
On the “man of moderate means,” see Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture, 97; Craig
Horner, “‘Modest Motoring’ and the Emergence of Automobility in the United Kingdom,”
Transfers 2, no. 3 (2012): 56–75.