Mimi Sheller

Worcester Polytechnic Institute | WPI · The Global School

Public transport is a contested political terrain and an arena of micro-political struggle: it is always kinopolitical. This reflection on the articles gathered in the special issue on Public Transport as Public Space discusses their connections to prior work in the field and what we can learn from these new studies of public transport as a public...

Infrastructure has an inherently uneven capacity to connect and to provide for some people certain goods and particular flows of information, while at the same time disenfranchising and dehumanizing other people through the very processes of (dis)connecting elements of the urban condition. Infrastructural injustices shape times, time horizons and l...

This article puts John Urry's thought on the mobilities turn into conversation with Caribbean critical theory, which was in fact the starting point for my collaborations with Urry on the new mobilities paradigm twenty or more years ago. It describes the relation between my work on the Caribbean and the emergence of the new mobilities paradigm at La...

The future of airports and aeromobilities looked much different before Covid-19. Being a global growth-sector with a problematic environmental impact, the sector showed little inclination to radically re-think its potential futures. However, the advent of Covid-19 dramatically changed this. This paper is based on a research project related to Airpo...

This conceptual article argues for linking the concept of mobility justice to an analysis of climate coloniality and then seeks to build on recent feminist, Indigenous and Black studies of climate ethics. More just, equitable, and sustainable futures call for more than decarbonization or low carbon transitions. Situating the climate crisis within d...

Our paper: This paper examines the effect of the pandemic in the generation of simultaneous global, regional, and local processes as they materialize in realities and the potential for post-pandemic mobile commons. The paper theorizes the matter drawing on studies in the triangle of Cyprus-Greece-Turkey i.e., the south-eastern border of Europe/EU....

Over the last two decades, the concept of ‘the commons’ has been rediscovered as a powerful organizing principle in social movements, radical political thought, and critical theory. The concept of commoning has also been adopted within discussions of migration and critical mobilities research. This article will first trace some of these emerging id...

Initiatives to build juridically autonomous cities based on libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideals have proliferated in the last decade. These include seasteading, charter cities, and “free private cities.” These ventures are part of a movement to build so-called “start-up societies,” which proposes developing experimental, small-scale communiti...

The discussion on the relation between human mobility and climate change has moved beyond linear and exceptional terms. Building on these debates, this article, and the Special Issue on Climate Mobilities: Migration, im/mobilities and mobilities regimes in a changing climate that it introduces, conceptualises this relation in terms of climate mobil...

Covid-19 has made self-evident the insidious effects of infrastructural splintering, especially in the United States, which are the outcome of the very processes first identified by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin 20 years ago. Splintered infrastructures have left behind unequal access to safe streets, public transit, urban green space, social dist...

This chapter focuses on how the coronavirus pandemic disrupted ‘normal’ academic life and travel through an analysis of my own travel history over the past decade. After contextualising the ways in which quarantines and confinement radically decreased travel, the chapter has three parts. In the first part, I document my own curriculum vitae of acad...

The collapse of travel demand due to the coronavirus pandemic-related closure of borders has severely disrupted tourism around the world at a time of already existing concerns over climate change, over-tourism, pollution, and the general sustainability of existing modes of tourism. In these circumstances, this article addresses how we might begin t...

Drawing on research carried out in Haiti from 2010 to 2013, this chapter considers how mobile communication infrastructures and locational technologies are enrolled into uneven global assemblages of power that may have more, or less, democratizing effects depending on how they are performed. The takeoff of digital humanitarianism using platforms su...

After the rapid rise of digital networking in the 2000s and 2010s, we are now seeing a rise of interest in how people can disentangle their lives from the increasingly pervasive networks of digital communications. This edited volume contributes to the turn toward digital disconnection research by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of auth...

This essay reviews Aaron Kamugisha’s reading of the works of C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter in his 2019 book Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. Kamugisha issues a resounding call to reenergize the radical Caribbean intellectual tradition, saving us from our own alienation, colonization, and ambiva...

David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh’s ((2021) Anthropocene islands: there are only islands after the end of the world. Dialogues in Human Geography.) ambitious undertaking is to understand how islands have not only become emblematic sites within a wide range of Anthropocene scholarship, but also ‘generative forces’ at the center of Anthropocene thinki...

Este artigo, de caráter ensaístico, tem por objetivos apresentar e discutir elementos essenciais para o estudo do turismo e das mobilidades, tendo por referência o paradigma das novas mobilidades. O argumento central do trabalho – que tem por base a tradução e ampliação de capítulo inicial do livro Tourism Mobilities: places do play, places in play...

Several noteworthy artworks are starting to critically and creatively engage with LIDAR technology. One example is Where the City Can’t See from 2016, said to be the first fiction film shot entirely with the LIDAR laser scanning technology. Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by author and journalist Tim Maughan, the short film...

Caribbean islands that are highly dependent on tourism are facing compounding crises from climate-related disasters to the Covid-19 pandemic travel disruption. The rebuilding of tourism infrastructure has often been one of the main aims of international development aid and regional government responses to natural disasters. This article seeks to id...

In a brief reflection on the multiple disruptions of mobilities imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this article shows the significance of the scholarship published in Transfers over the last ten years for thinking about the future. Clearly the encounter with a novel and deadly virus—transferred between people, traveling rapidly across geographical r...

Through a reading of the articles gathered in this special issue, this commentary seeks to assess how critical research on reproductive processes, spatialities, temporalities, and assemblages can push mobilities theory towards rethinking the politics of (im)mobilities, which can also give us a new lens on the reproduction of reproduction. It begins...

The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica has generally been interpreted as a struggle between the post-emancipation Black peasantry and the white colonial government, which led to a violent confrontation, military suppression, and the demise of the Jamaican House of Assembly in favor of direct Crown Colony rule. Yet, the archival record shows other...

What mobilizes people to take up reproductive options, directions, and trajectories in ways that generate the possibilities and practices of mobilities? People’s desires for procreation or to resolve fertility challenges or partake in sperm donation, egg freezing, or surrogacy; the need for abortion services; and forced evacuation for childbirth ca...

The devastating impacts of Hurricanes Irma and Maria across the northeastern Caribbean not only bring closer a world of immediate climate disaster and halting recovery, but also cast a long shadow of slow disasters and impossible futures for small island states in the face of significantly unstable and unpredictable climate patterns. In contrast to...

The devastating impacts of Hurricanes Irma and Maria across the Caribbean (especially in Barbuda, Dominica, Puerto Rico, St Martin/St Maarten, and parts of the British and US Virgin Islands) are haunting harbingers of a world of climate disaster, halting recovery, and impossible futures. Being at the leading edge of the global capitalist exploitati...

This Afterword to the Current Sociology Monograph on ‘Migrant Temporalities: Rethinking Migrant Trajectories and Transnational Lifestyles in the Asian Context’ reflects on how this issue adds fundamental insights to our understanding not only of migration, but also of time itself. Through these articles we gain a new appreciation of time in a multi...

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day, when the entire world faces the urgent question of how to make the transition to more environmentally sustainable and socially just mobilities. All around the planet urban, regional, and international governing bodies are grappling with a series of crises related to how...

The imagination of automated automobility puts into question the control of the vehicle by a masculine driver and potentially disturbs feelings of safety, power, security, and freedom. Given that systems of automobility and communication technology are already gendered and racialized in particular ways, this article explores how recent “premediated...

The articles in this special issue show how a theoretical approach informed by the mobilities turn can reveal new facets of the history of dangerous mobility. Th is afterword draws together some of these lessons concerning materialities, bodily sensations, and performativity, and then considers how we might study these aspects of danger and mobilit...

Crossing Borders examines how translocal, transnational, and internal borders of various kinds distribute uneven capabilities for moving, dwelling, and circulating. The contributors offer nuanced understandings of the politics of mobility across various kinds of borders and forms of cultural circulation, showing how people experience and practice c...

This article reflects on the contributions of the late John Urry to sociology and to its spatial turn especially by developing the new mobilities paradigm. The proposition of this monograph issue of Current Sociology is that space has not yet been appropriately incorporated into sociology. But although partially true, Urry argued that this misses t...

Despite a surge of multidisciplinary interest in transition studies on low carbon mobilities, there has been little evaluation of the current state of the field, and the contributions of different approaches such as the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), theories of practice, or the new mobilities paradigm. As a step in this direction, this paper bring...

This CARGC Paper drew on Sheller’s Distinguished Lecture and presented a project in collaboration with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and French curator Guillaume Logé. For many refugees, smartphones have become their most valuable asset. While theories of migration have long spoken of the “double absence” of migrants (both from their country of origin a...

This article introduces a special electronic collection of many of the key works published by the late British sociologist John Urry (1946–2016) in the journals Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society. It serves both to commemorate and to continue Urry’s profound contributions as a social theorist, as a network builder, and as a public intelle...

This special issue seeks to deepen conversations at the intersections between mobilities research and a number of adjacent fields. Contributions explore how mobilities research has emerged and travelled along with a range of approaches concerned with the lived production of socio-material orders, such as science and technology studies, non-represen...

Aluminum Ore: The Political Economy of the Global Bauxite Industry. Edited by Robin S. Gendron , Mats Ingulstad , and Espen Storli . Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013. xii + 387 pp. Illustrations, maps, figures, tables, index. Cloth, $95.00. ISBN: 978-0-7748-2532-0. - Volume 90 Issue 2 - Mimi Sheller

This special issue on Mobility and Race has invited contributors to rethink how unequal relations of power inherent in both mobility and race shape a racialized mobility politics. The articles that follow examine what Cotten Seiler has called the “racialization of mobility" meaning the ways in which “the modern practices and institutions of mobilit...

Drawing on research in postearthquake Haiti, with reference to other postdisaster situations, this article examines how uneven mobility and communication systems often reinforce unequal distributions of network capital and thereby reproduce uneven physical and informational space. The reflexive mobile methodology highlights how postdisaster humanit...

The paper offers a review of mobilities' research in classical sociology and at its disciplinary borders. Differentiation of the new mobilities paradigm from prior approaches to globalization, nomadism, and flows is demonstrated, key spheres of research - mobilities system, mobilities capital, mobilities justice, space-movement are outlined. The pa...

This transdisciplinary experiment in speculative fiction, painting, and geohumanities arose through ongoing conversations between a social theorist and an artist, in which we took inspiration from each other’s work and developed a hybrid collaborative practice engaging painting and fiction. Thematically the work concerns the place of the analog, th...

This assessment of past and future directions in mobility research calls for a Foucauldian approach to better understand the apparatus of uneven mobility illustrated via three examples: tourism mobilities and racialized space, geo-ecologies of elite secession, and disease mobilities and quarantine. Building upon an ‘archaeological’ and ‘geneaologic...

This article adopts a "capabilities" approach to climate justice to examine a globally unique phenomenon: a decade of unprecedented surface area growth in Lake Azuéi (the largest lake in Haiti) and Lake Enriquillo in the Dominican Republic (the largest lake in the Caribbean region). The objective was to explore how two neighbouring communities and...

This chapter explores the history of Caribbean bauxite mining and its relation to global aluminium production in the twentieth century in order to envision alternative ways of thinking about and empirically researching globalization in the Americas. Drawing on critical mobilities research, it proposes a transnational and transhuman Caribbean studie...

This book explores the relations between globalization and the Caribbean since 1492, when Columbus first arrived in the region, to the present day. It aims to help change prevalent ways of thinking, not only about the Caribbean archipelago as a complex field of historical enquiry and cultural production, but also about the nature of globalization....

National level statistics show a decade-long decline in the use of cars in the United States as well as other developed countries. This transition has been connected to growth in more sustainable forms of urban transport such as walking, bicycling, and increased use of transit, as well as changes in urban spatial planning. This article examines the...

Poised between violent repetitions of state power and hopes for poststate alternative futures, in our dual role as historical actors and historical narrators, what do we do with the past today, with which past(s) and for whom? This essay asks about the ethical/political stakes in reflecting on where we are speaking from, but also when we are speaki...

This article explores how mobile consumption practices afforded by new mobile media have transformed the spatialities and temporalities of news media through processes such as proliferation, participation, personalization, cross-platform flow, geolocation, and mapping. Expanding journalism studies to encompass digital social media and the interdisc...

Mobility is not just a theme running throughout Caribbean history, but describes a conceptual approach and theoretical framework for better understanding the region. This review seeks to situate the history of Caribbean tourism in relation to a wider field of mobility studies in the region and highlights recent research in this area.

This article addresses the affective, emotional, and familial dimensions of urban everyday mobility. Drawing on theoretical inspiration from phenomenology, non-representational theory, and mobilities research on the relational mobilities of children and families, the paper explores the everyday mobility of 11 households with children in the multi-m...

Participatory engineering has been called for after major catastrophes, yet is often bypassed due to countervailing implementation of ?quick fixes?. While immediate expert-driven solutions may be attractive, in the long-term they may be ineffective and inconsistent with the goals and capacities of local stakeholders. This article discusses the find...

This article offers an overview of the field of mobilities research, tracing the theoretical antecedents to the study of mobilities both within the classical sociological tradition and at its borders with other disciplines or theoretical schools. It examines how ‘the new mobilities paradigm’ differs from earlier approaches to globalization, nomadis...

Following aluminum as part of a material culture of speed and lightness, this article examines how assemblages of energy and metals connect built environments, ways of life, and ideologies of acceleration. Aluminum can be theorized as a circulatory matrix that forms an energy culture. Through a discussion of speed and social justice, the history of...

This article considers the significance of new ontological approaches to vibrant materialities and to mobilities research for re-thinking the globality of the Atlantic world. It does so through a study of bauxite mining and aluminum smelting as an agent of globalization and a mobile materialization of uneven global modernities. Aluminum can be thou...

Aluminum shaped the twentieth century. It enabled high-speed travel and gravity-defying flight. It was the material of a streamlined aesthetic that came to represent modernity. And it became an essential ingredient in industrial and domestic products that ranged from airplanes and cars to designer chairs and artificial Christmas trees. It entered m...

Background Though the benefits of centralized water systems (e.g. improved publichealth, environmental protection, streamlined operations, economy of scale, reliability) are well known, these systems are not always feasible or appropriate. In developing world settings there has been growing interest by infrastructure experts,researchers, and intern...

Borderlands studies, diaspora studies, Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean studies, and especially Caribbean studies have all brought transnational spaces and interwoven cultural histories into the foreground of what were once national historiographies. Caribbean studies in particular has revealed the transoceanic spaces of African, Asian, European...

Mobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic and political practices. Especially as mobile media become seamlessly integrated into transportation networks, navigating urban spaces, and connecting with social networks while on the move, researchers need new approaches and methods to br...