Abstract
This first chapter serves as an introduction to the two main topics of mobility and possibility and their relation. It reviews, briefly, the literature on mobilities and connects it to the one on human possibility. It makes the overall argument that mobility begets possibility and discusses the structure of the book in light of it.
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Notes
- 1.
For details and outcomes see Jovchelovitch et al. (2013).
- 2.
What we aimed with this study was to ‘trouble’ Piagetian and linear views of the development of intelligence that typically assume that children move, as they grow, from ‘less’ to ‘more’ knowledge of the world and especially more accurate or logical knowledge. We were interested in how culture comes to disturb this neat assumption and how growing up in different communities and countries around the world necessarily exposes children to different values and patterns of interaction. And it is through social interaction that intelligence and knowledge actually develop and are channelled towards particular situations and events. Our coding frame for drawings thus included categories such as ‘subjective’ (self and family), ‘objective’ (the outside world without any trace of self or family) and ‘intersubjective’ (including elements from both).
- 3.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535–c. 475 BC.
- 4.
Georg Simmel in his seminal essay ‘Bridge and door’, originally written in 1909, notes that: ‘The people who first built a path between two places performed one of the greatest human achievements. No matter how often they might have gone back and forth between the two and thus connected them subjectively, so to speak, it was only in visibly impressing the path into the surface of the earth that the places were objectively connected. The will to connect had become a shaping of things, a shaping that was available to the will at every repetition, without still being dependent on its frequency or rarity. Path-building, one could say, is specifically human achievement; the animal too continuously overcomes a separation and often in the cleverest and most ingenious ways, but its beginning and end remain unconnected, it does not accomplish the miracle of the road: freezing movement into a solid structure that commences from it and in which it terminates’ (Simmel 1994, p. 6).
- 5.
See Khan (2016).
- 6.
See Glăveanu (2020).
- 7.
- 8.
Macková and Kysučan (2016).
- 9.
Ohnmacht et al. (2009).
- 10.
Adey et al. (2014).
- 11.
“Mobility can indeed lead to heightened tolerance of difference and an intensified awareness of the mingled inheritances that constitute even the most tradition-bound cultural stance, but it can also lead to an anxious, defensive, and on occasion violent policing of the boundaries. The crucial first task for scholars is simply to recognize and to track the movements that provoke both intense pleasure and intense anxiety” (Greenblatt 2010, pp. 6–7).
- 12.
Urry (2010, p. 348).
- 13.
Sheller and Urry (2006).
- 14.
For example, Mobilities started in 2006 and Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies in 2011.
- 15.
See Urry (2000).
- 16.
Urry (2000, p. 3).
- 17.
‘As the new century unfolds, it has become increasingly clear that the bodies of the deceased have refused to stay buried: those who thought to have bid farewell once and for all to the heavily guarded borders of the nation-state and to the atavistic passions of religious and ethnic identity find themselves confronting a global political landscape in which neither nationalism nor identity politics shows any intention of disappearing. While the older conceptions of rootedness and autochthony seem intellectually bankrupt, the heady theories of creative metissage have run aground upon the rocks of contemporary reality’ (Greenblatt 2010, p. 1).
- 18.
For details, see Urry (2000, p. 5).
- 19.
Urry (2000, p. 6).
- 20.
- 21.
“Scapes are the networks of machines, technologies, organisations, texts and actors that constitute various interconnected nodes along which the flows can be relayed” (Urry 2000, p. 35).
- 22.
See the book edited by Canzler et al. (2008).
- 23.
For details see Jensen (2013).
- 24.
See Sheller and Urry (2006).
- 25.
- 26.
Salazar (2010).
- 27.
Heitz and Stapfer (2017).
- 28.
Knappett and Kiriatzi (2016).
- 29.
Except for sociocultural psychological approaches, see Zittoun (2020).
- 30.
First and foremost, the way in which it changed and continues to change the social sciences. ‘Social science has largely ignored or trivialised the importance of the systematic movements of people for work and family life, for leisure and pleasure, and for politics and protest. The paradigm challenges the ways in which much social science research has been “a-mobile”. Even while it has increasingly introduced spatial analysis the social sciences have still failed to examine how the spatialities of social life presuppose (and frequently involve conflict over) both the actual and the imagined movement of people from place to place, person to person, event to event. Travel has been for the social sciences seen as a black box, a neutral set of technologies and processes predominantly permitting forms of economic, social, and political life that are seen as explicable in terms of other, more causally powerful processes. As we shall argue, however, accounting for mobilities in the fullest sense challenges social science to change both the objects of its inquiries and the methodologies for research’ (Sheller and Urry 2006, p. 208).
- 31.
This understanding has a pragmatist origin, particularly in the work of George Herbert Mead (1934).
- 32.
‘A perspective is an orientation to an environment that is associated with acting within that environment. Perspectives both emerge out of activity and enable increasingly complex forms of activity. All perspectives reflect relationships between individuals and the world. Because the human world is a social world, all perspectives arise and are employed within interpersonal interactivity’ (Martin 2005, p. 234).
- 33.
Gillespie (2006).
- 34.
For details about Position Exchage Theory see Gillespie and Martin (2014). In their words: ‘Position exchange, we suggest, is a general developmental principle operating across the lifespan (Martin and Gillespie 2010). Infants are moved from one context of interaction to the next. Toddlers begin to move themselves from one context to another. Young children explore social positions in play, games, and discourse. (…) Children become adults, parents become grandparents, and employees become employers. But equally, at a micro resolution, within the course of a single day, people alternate between talking/listening, asking/helping, giving/getting, buying/selling, leading/following, winning/losing, teaching/learning, reading/writing, and so on’ (Gillespie and Martin 2014, p. 74).
- 35.
See, for example, the recent special issue ‘Exploring the interplay between (im)mobility and imagination’, published in Culture & Psychology and co-edited by Flavia Cangià and Tania Zittoun.
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Glăveanu, V.P. (2020). Mobility and Possibility. In: Mobilities and Human Possibility. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52082-3_1
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