Critical geographies of transport and mobility: Studying power relations through practice, academia, and activism

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been increasing interest among geographers in a critical perspective on studies of transportation and mobility, or studies that take into account the power relations within systems of transportation that produce space, place, mobility, and/or identity. This ever‐growing body of work includes people who might not consider themselves as transportation geographers per se, but nevertheless are expanding geographies of transportation beyond the traditional focus on vehicles, infrastructure, and economics. In this article, we review such work from three different perspectives: critical studies of professional practice, the interdisciplinary approach of Caribbean Studies, and the work of activists and scholar‐activists to connect environmental justice with mobility justice.

Opposing powers at the helm and the immobilities of passenger‐ferry governance in Vieques, Puerto Rico

“…These questions about unsettling transportation knowledges and practices have not engaged significantly with the infrastructural landscapes of the Caribbean (Cidell et al, 2021). I turn to the scholarship of Mimi Sheller as a starting point to understand the colonialities of governance in Puerto Rican transportation infrastructures.…”

The (COVID)-19 Pandemic in the Cyclades: Patterns and Prospects in Cultural Tourism

“…Theoretical background Mobility, including tourism, is an ever-changing area of knowledge, co-constituted by perspectives and practices involving geographers and other social scientists, alongside other stakeholders and agents at various geographical scales (Cresswell, 2014;Cresswell & Merriman, 2011;Kwan & Schwanen, 2016). Over the past few decades, there has been increasing research interest in the social sciences in studies of tourism, transportation, and mobility, through increasingly nuanced, critical, hermeneutic, ethical, more-thanrepresentational perspectives (Cidell et al, 2021;Kwan & Schwanen, 2016;Lorimer, 2007;Prince, 2018;Prince & Ioannides, 2017;Sheller & Urry, 2006). Often, attributed to the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller & Urry, 2006), the moral and/or critical encounters in tourism (Bianchi, 2009;Caton, 2012;Scheyvens, 2012), the performance turn in tourism geography (Edensor, 2001), and various other advances in this scientific field, the study of mobility has acquired key ontological status in geography and other social sciences (Kwan & Schwanen, 2016).…”

Informalities in urban transport: Mobilities at the heart of contestations over (in)formalisation processes

“…In these fields, binary conceptions of formality and informality prevail, economistic readings of transport remain influential, and engagement with recent social science thinking on informalities has occurred only to a limited extent. In the mobilities turn (Cresswell, 2006;Jensen et al, 2020;Sheller & Urry, 2006 and critical urban transport research (Cidell et al, 2021;Kębłowski et al, 2019;Kębłowski & Bassens, 2018) the focus has predominantly been on Northern cities. As a result, both bodies of scholarship have paid much less attention to informality in, and of, the Global East or South.…”