Toward an expanded approach on Black mobilities

Abstract

Mobilities scholars have shown how injustices may arise from forced movement or stillness. However, with notable exceptions, these studies tend to collapse analyses of race into a simplistic binary of immobility as an inherent characteristic of non-white people and the possibility of movement as only granted to white people. In this article, I call for an expanded approach that is inclusive of both the controlling forces of white supremacy and life-affirming resistance against and despite these constraints. Drawing from Black studies and Black Geographies, I argue for a more unified Black mobilities research agenda.

Making Smart Things Strange Again: Using Walking as a Method for Studying Subjective Experiences of Smart City Surveillance

“…First, employing walking methods requires consideration of the ways that the possibilities and limitations of walking through urban space itself are influenced by people's embodied subjectivities. As feminist scholars have shown, one's gender expressions, physical abilities, skin color, and religious conduct are but a few dimensions of embodied subjectivity that significantly enable or constrain movement through or occupation of specific urban spaces (e.g., Wilson 1992;Nairn 1999;Hinger 2022;Warren 2021). While our study assumed participants who were physically and emotionally able to join our walks, we believe other, potentially less mobile embodied subjectivities can be accommodated in adaptations of our method.…”

Living digitally like a migrant: Everyday smartphone practices and the (Re)mediation of hostile state-affects

“…These two pathways, intersecting more often than not, outline how we might conceptualise the affective, imaginative and material geographies of everyday (digital) life and, furthermore, how the specific governance effect of hostility is (re)mediated through this interaction with the smartphone. Hostility and other affective mediations of the everyday must be held in tension with one another: not collapsed into the binary mode of thought that is often characteristic of geographic knowledge (Hinger, 2022; Pinelli, 2018; Pain, 2015). Both the affective experience of hostility and its (re)mediations work together in experiences of the everyday – blending into various modes of living (debilitated, suspended and affirmative) for the subject.…”