Applied Mobilities

With the digital revolution in the 21st century, the Information Technology (I.T.) industry in India has emerged with significant gendered trends and has created new knowledge and spaces to evolve culturally. As a natural corollary, gender rearrangements in the Indian social fabric and within the Indian I.T. industries over the decade have been reformed. Not surprisingly, such rearrangements have impacted gender constructions and social transitions in India but, in spite of new realignments, are quite at play and where symbolic capital negotiate and navigate a myriad of gender relations across multiple geo-social axes of differentiation. To complicate, since the early 2000s, a new paradigm in social sciences, popularly known as Mobility Studies, emerged and which reflects a new approach to gender's social interplay. Mobility Studies travels the continuum from the individual to the institutional, establishing new dynamics not only with intimate spheres such as the family but also within the community and society. Premised on the above, this paper brings in new insights on how individuals and inequalities are reconstructed through their mobility (or lack of it), by bringing in significant conversations between intersectionality and mobility studies, and by examining multiple connections, primarily focusing on the Indian I.T. industry.

Sakshi Shukla

Mayurakshi Chaudhuri

Intersectional Im/Mobilities: gender, family and information technology professionals in digital India

交叉的流动与停滞：数字印度中的性别、家庭与信息技术专业人员

The private use and ownership of cars is a major cause for the negative ecological and social effects of the transport sector. Systemic change of the "system of automobility" is opposed frequently, whereas changes on the level of everyday practices gain particular importance in bringing forward a mobility transition. This article presents non-commercial car-sharing as an example of how altered everyday practices can contribute to local change in the mobility system. I hereby apply re-embedding as an analytical concept on the level of everyday practices, where it takes shape in two interrelated processes: 1) re-embedding as contextualization and 2) re-embedding as counter-movement. In the case of non-commercial car-sharing presented, re-embedding occurs within a social and ecological dimension. Effectively, non-commercial car-sharers form a group that uses and owns cars collectively (re-embedding as counter-movement) with an outspoken focus on the ecological issues of the current dominance of the private car (re-embedding as contextualization). Thereby, through processes of re-embedding, non-commercial car-sharing contributes to shaping alternative everyday practices of mobility that point towards a social-ecological mobility transition.

Luca Nitschke

Processes of re-embedding in non-commercial car-sharing

非商业性汽车共享中的再嵌入过程

Mounting climate emissions pose critical questions for mobility and travel practices. Particularly problematic are the emissions caused by aviation. Consequently, an emerging theme of discussion has been rail travel as a more sustainable practice. This has coincided with the discourse of "flight shame" and the recent emergence of the youth climate movement. The article studies the travel practices of young climate activists in relation to the large-scale changes in mobility that they argue for and envision, and how the two are interconnected. Analysis is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and interviews (n = 18) conducted with young climate activists in Finland in 2020. The results reveal that the interviewees avoid flight travel and instead prefer travelling by ground. This has become a norm among climate activists, and they argue that it is not just a more sustainable form of travel but can be more meaningful, too. Furthermore, young climate activists argue for societal and cultural changes in mobility and travel and demand action from decision-makers. Mobility and travel are inseparable features of everyday life in the contemporary world. Thus, overland travel, and especially train travel, constitutes an "everyday utopia" – a shared transformative practice and an act of activism in itself.

Mikko Piispa

Travelling by ground – young climate activists and the everyday utopia of sustainable travel

地面旅行——年轻气候活动家与可持续旅行的日常乌托邦

In this dialogue the notion of “commoning mobility” is central. Anna Nikolaeva and Jan Duffhues both work on mobility issues in the city of Amsterdam – Anna as a mobility scholar at the University of Amsterdam and Jan as an innovation strategist at the municipality of Amsterdam. Each from their own professional perspective, they see the possibility of a new way of thinking about transitioning to more sustainable and inclusive mobilities. The notion of “commoning mobility” appears to capture that new way of thinking, yet many questions are open regarding its practical application. In this dialogue they together reflect on what “commoning mobility” might mean in practice, the role of different societal actors in it, the potential pitfalls of “commoning”, and the impact of the global pandemic on our relationship with mobility.

Anna Nikolaeva

Jan Duffhues

Commoning mobility in the age of COVID-19: a dialogue between Anna Nikolaeva and Jan Duffhues

COVID-19时代的共同流动性：安娜·尼古拉耶娃与扬·达夫胡斯的对话

This paper will unfold affordances of the material setting in the Copenhagen Metro and its role for passenger movements and “capacity issues”, zooming in on the role of platform escalators at the underground station of Nørreport. The analysis will focus particularly on “congestions” as causing friction for the vision of the Copenhagen Metro as a “travelator of continuous movement”. However, friction can be understood as equally an impeder and enabler of movement, and although the platform escalators are not innocent, they are also not determining congestions to happen on the platform in a top-down manner. Such situations are equally staged bottom-up by passengers’ embodied practices and their motivations, metro “literacy” and ways of managing the presence of others in the metro. However, the movement possibilities afforded by the material setting can be hard to negotiate for passengers with lesser able bodies or lesser metro literacy. Through empirical examples, the paper contributes with nuanced understandings of “capacity issues”: rather than a pure quantitative mismatch between the amount of platform sqm’s and the number of passengers, capacity issues reflect the multiple affordances of the material setting and how these are negotiated through the agency of human actors in mobile situations. Connecting these insights to design, this paper suggests a dual approach to “solving” capacity issues that simultaneously makes the Metro increasingly well-functioning by reducing the movement impeding friction from the physical setting, while allowing the friction of passengers’ embodied practices as a good accessible and inclusive public space.

Cecilie Breinholm Christensen

Congested metro materialities: how platform escalators afford “friction” in the Copenhagen Metro

拥挤地铁的物质性：哥本哈根地铁站台扶梯如何产生“摩擦”

Waiting in line (or queuing) is a mundane and wide-spread activity across the world. As an everyday phenomenon, this behavior features taken-for-granted dimensions that are rarely reflected upon and deserve further examination as they can shed light on the organization of social interaction and urban life. In this paper, we propose a research agenda for queuing practices that connects mobilities and design research while drawing on sociological thought. In line with the "mobilities turn", we first highlight that queuing is more than simply being immobile. Waiting in line is a complex practice that is governed or "staged from above" through formal rules, legal procedures, and administrative procedures. Simultaneously, it is "staged from below" through the complex interactional patterns of behavior in the everyday life of millions of people. Moreover, we connect the mobilities-inspired understanding of this queuing to themes and ideas within the design realm. The article demonstrates how the act of waiting in line is "afforded" by the material and spatial layout of the environment, thus positioning mundane situations of waiting and queuing as windows into the norms and ideas governing co-presence and propinquity. After thus proposing an analytical framework that focuses on the nexus between waiting bodies and material environs, we will illustrate the value and reach of this approach through three ethnographic vignettes (supermarkets, stadiums, and airports). We conclude by identifying future research avenues for a more detailed exploration of queuing (im)mobilities.

Christoph Schimkowsky

Ole B. Jensen

Max Frank

Queuing (im)mobilities: mobilizing the study of waiting in line

排队（非）流动性：推动排队等待研究

Several factors decrease metro riders' satisfaction, well-being, and willingness to use the metro. However, little attention has focused on the problems caused by social transgression and uncivilized behavior. Hence, the objectives of this study were to analyze the impact of norm transgression and uncivil behavior on coexistence among passengers and the emotional climate on the metro and to assess the social control exerted by passengers. We also explored whether the perception of social control changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample was composed of 357 passengers of the Buenos Aires metro. An online self-administered questionnaire was designed to collect the data. Path analysis results showed that beliefs about norms and the ease with which passengers break the norm of silence promote active social control. In contrast, the difficulty of breaking the norm of silence and the perception of public alienation lead to inactive social control.

Maite Regina Beramendi

Melissa Sánchez

Marcelo Montenegro

Lucía Di Leva

Somebody do something: coexisting with social transgression on the metro

有人做点什么：在地铁上与社会越轨行为共存

The high incidence of crime, gender-based violence, and flood disasters in the urban and suburban landscape, coupled with limited land and minimal urban planning budgets in Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have created an environment with inadequate implementation of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG). Given these shortcomings, this study analyzed walkability in a Caribbean SIDS environment in order to improve the human- and spatial environment-centric urban space embodied in many of the UNSDG. A questionnaire qualitatively assessed five components of walkability: security from criminal activity, protection from moving vehicles, thermal comfort, a physical walkable infrastructure, and accessibility for the differently abled persons. Of these five walkability criteria, respondents rated security from criminal activity, and accessibility for the differently abled as the least satisfactory. Through this walkability assessment, this research identified a gap between walkability principles applied globally in walkability studies and their feasibility in SIDS.

Nathan Laveau

Gabrielle Thongs

Assessing and improving the walkability of Caribbean SIDS: a case study

评估和改善加勒比海小岛屿发展中国家的步行性：一个案例研究

In this paper we reflect on insights concerning participation in and effects of a real-world laboratory designed to disrupt car dependency in everyday practices in an urban setting. After outlining the project and key findings, we critically reflect on design and achievements of this real-world laboratory more generally. In particular, we discuss the following questions: Who is it that we can address through transformative mobilities research in real-world laboratories? Who are the participants and what are their motives for taking part in the research? To contextualize the research findings within a real-world setting and research paradigm we extend the scope to a second set of questions: How can we conceptualise the relationship between participants and researchers and how do we account for opposing rationalities of interruption (research) and maintenance (participants) of the organisation of everyday life? How does this research enable transformative mobilities? And, finally, what can we say about the scope of our findings and reflections? In the thicket of doing transformative research encouraging and accompanying volunteers to become active in transformative mobility research becomes questions of language, educational background and time resources from the involved, but also being aware of institutionalized change actor networks, unchallenged hierarchies of superior "academic" research and being part of political struggles that require to look closely within and outside of the actual real-world-experiment especially in times of multiple crises. To design and research with those who want to contribute to change is legitimate. However, it is necessary to keep this selectivity in mind.

Martin Kohler

Katharina Manderscheid

Who do we mobilise? Applied transformative mobilities research in a real-world laboratory

我们动员谁？现实世界实验室中的应用转型移动性研究

Increasing cross-border mobilities for employment and livelihood opportunities has resulted in greater institutional and regulatory controls over migration. In this paper, through an analysis of the migration infrastructure for women between India and the United Arab Emirates, socio-spatial ruptures are discerned. The paper asserts that in addition to economic and political frameworks, social and cultural mores have been significant in shaping differentiated migration pathways for Indian women, which are conceptualised as, "gendered migration infrastructure". Gendered migration infrastructure for Indian women is founded on normative understandings of domesticity and femininity and consequently, has made migration for women restrictive, circuitous and cumbersome. The failure and interruptions of migration infrastructure has occurred across borders and the differentiated migration pathways thus created lie at the intersection of formal regulations and actors (migration laws, recruitment and skilling organisations, state agents, border controls, civil society and bureaucracy) and informal intermediaries and practices (subagents, bypassing emigration procedures, irregular channels and corruption). By drawing on the narratives of Indian migrant women, the paper highlights the negotiations undertaken by migrant women and the impact of gendered migration infrastructure on their (im)mobilities, migratory experiences, and outcomes. Further, socio-spatial ruptures due to the COVID-19 pandemic created cracks in the migration infrastructure, deepening the precarities faced by migrant women. Overall, the paper aims to contribute to the literature on gendered migration and transnationalism in addition to shedding light on the migration of Indian women across income and legal categories, an under-researched topic currently.

Shruti Gupta

Gendered migration infrastructure and socio-spatial rupture: Indian women’s migration experiences to the United Arab Emirates

性别化的移民基础设施与社会空间断裂：印度女性移居阿联酋的经历

ISSN	2380-0127, 2380-0135
h-index	15

Publication Information	Publisher: Routledge，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2016，Proportion of original research papers: ，Self Citation Rate:， Gold OA Rate:

Applied Mobilities

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