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Being-in-motion: The everyday (gendered and classed) embodied mobilities for UK university students who commute
Abstract
This article makes the case for a more robust mobilities approach to student geographies in the UK, in order to problematise the enduring binary of [im]mobility (‘going away’ versus ‘staying local’) and to challenge the presumed linearity of educational (and mobility) transitions in higher education. Through a discussion of two UK-based studies, we make the case for considering the complex and multi-layered everyday mobilities of students who commute to illuminate a broader range of mobility practices that shape students’ experiences and identities, and which are embedded in multiple and intersecting embodiments of class, gender, age and ethnicity.
... By thinking about the processes that underpin and drive student mobilitiesor immobilitiesrecent literature has demonstrated how student mobilities involve a deal more than simply the movement of individuals or groups from one place to another, from 'home' to 'away', for example (Finn, 2017;Holton and Finn, 2018). Rather, by focusing on the other perhaps more subtle processes individuals are involved intheir movement between social fields, the social and spatial structures they imagine, and how they are positioned in relation to those structuresthe mobilities students undergo can be thought of not only as physical, but as the culmination of experiences, as related to their unique perspective from their particular place, and as a process not from one place to another, but of moving socially, culturally and figuratively. ...
... Leaving was often associated with finding something ( (Holton and Finn, 2018); they illuminate the students' reflections on the identity of their own place in relation to other places, as well as how everyday mobilities shape their orientations towards places in the future and their desire to leave their locality. ...
... In part, this was perhaps to do with the students' often limited mobility beyond their locality, which might act as a familiarising link to other places and to developing a self that feels more comfortable elsewhere (Jensen, 2009). It is this everyday 'micro' mobility (Holton and Finn, 2018) that can introduce the individual to new experiences and to social and cultural diversity, which the participants argued was lacking in their locality, and through which the habitus acquires new 'layers' through experience (Reay, 2004). ...
In an era of globalising and massified higher education (HE), this thesis presents a
novel approach to studying social inequalities in HE by foregrounding the spatial
processes underlying student mobilities and youth transitions. It does so by examining the perspectives of two groups of British young people – from a state school in South Yorkshire in northern England, and an elite international school in Singapore – whose trajectories are configured unevenly, shaped by their geographic im/mobilities, and their imaginaries of place, space and class.
Although much has been written on the perspectives of young people from different
social class backgrounds regarding where they ‘fit’ in relation to the social field of HE (Reay, 2017), research on how both social and spatial forces shape student mobilities and youth transitions has been somewhat limited. Using a qualitative mapping method and semi-structured interviews, this thesis incorporates these spatial elements, eliciting socio-spatial imaginaries, and presenting a nuanced and interdisciplinary approach to the study of student mobilities.
In the study, social and spatial processes mediate the young people’s imaginaries of
their current and future selves, albeit in starkly different ways and at different spatial
scales. Individuals are positioned inequitably in relation to socio-spatial geometries
structuring the social fields of HE. Furthermore, the globalisation and massification of HE systems have further entrenched inequalities between the two groups, diminishing the time-space between HE institutions in the global north and the globally mobile elite students in the study, while marginalising those in northern England.
... In an increasingly mobile world, an interest in the importance of student mobilities is rapidly gaining ground within the literature on higher education (e.g. Brooks and Waters 2017;Finn and Holton 2019;Holton and Finn 2018). In the UK, moving away from the family home to live in university residences has for many years been conceptualised as the "normal" route into university, and a ritualised rite of passage to adulthood (Clayton, Crozier, and Reay 2009;Holdsworth 2006;2009b). ...
... In a welcome move towards increasing our awareness of a more nuanced student experience, recent literature (e.g. Finn 2017; Finn and Holton 2019;Holton and Finn 2018) has problematised the dominance of this perspective, emphasising the importance of recognising students who experience mobilities in higher education in alternative and diverse ways. ...
... Despite a growth in the number of commuter students who demonstrate frequent mobilities (Holton and Finn 2018), in the UK, the majority of students still move away from home for university (over 80% in Britain in 2017-18;Whyte 2019), often desiring the "student experience" (Holton 2018). Students living away from home during university are assumed to experience several benefits. ...
The concept of a typical pathway to becoming a student is a pervasive narrative within higher education, with moving away from home to live at university framed as the “traditional student experience”. In response, recent literature has begun to trouble the thinking around student mobilities. Building on this work, this study draws upon semi-structured interviews with students who have moved away from home into university residences in order to surface the multiplicity and diversity of mobilities and transitions. Engaging concepts from posthumanist and poststructuralist theory, we propose a reconceptualisation of students’ mobilities and transitions as rhizomatic, and as ongoing becomings. Furthermore, we also surface the materiality of students’ experiences, acknowledging the role of the non-human within students’ mobilities. As a result, we extend the emerging work attending to more complex depictions of students’ mobilities, and examine the implications of acknowledging the heterogeneity, materiality and granularity of students’ experiences.
... Mobility in the context of higher education has tended to be reduced to spectacular -one-off events -thereby downplaying the importance of banal everyday encounters that constitute important affective experiences for students (Holton and Finn 2018). However, students in this paper make clear that the embodied, emotional and affective nature of their micro-mobilities are of great importance to their wellbeing, giving them the space and time to think, reflect, and form attachments and feelings of belonging with both people and spaces, and are thus deserving of scholarly attention. ...
... In so doing, this paper also responds to Holton and Finn's (2018) call for a micro-mobilities approach to student geographies in the UK. It achieves this through a discussion of research conducted at the micro-scale, which takes the reader into the everyday 'lifeworlds' of students, and in particular into their non-institutional spaces (such as streets and parks), which make up a significant part of their student experience (Holton and Riley 2013). ...
... This paper opened by highlighting that mobility in the context of higher education has tended to be reduced to spectacular -one-off events (Holton and Finn 2018). As a consequence, the importance of banal everyday encounters that constitute important affective experiences for students have been downplayed. ...
Mobility in the context of higher education is often privileged to large(r)- scale international movements, neglecting the everyday mobilities practiced by students. This is important, as banal mobilities constitute important affective experiences for students. In responding to calls for a micro-bodily mobilities approach to student geographies in the UK, we draw on semi-structured interviews conducted with university students aged 18–25 studying in Greater Manchester. Through discussing the complex, multilayered everyday walking mobilities of students, we illuminate how embodied, emotional and affective walking mobility practices shape students’ experiences and identities. Findings show that, for students in our study, moorings are often as important as mobilities to identity formation, and place attachment. Bringing to the fore the embodied, emotional and affective nature of student micro-mobilities is necessary, since various forms of movement and stillness are important to student wellbeing, enabling students to have space and time to think, reflect, and form attachments and belonging with people and spaces. This paper has implications for higher education and urban designers. We contend that it is crucial to draw attention to students’ experiences of walking and sitting in the city, which significantly contribute to constructing sense of place and belonging to the university city.
... Another key agenda when establishing this partnership was to involve students who were representative of the faculty's student body. Student engagement in quality assurance and enhancement mechanisms such as student representation, student surveys, and other projects have traditionally been undertaken voluntarily, but this can lead to issues on student cohort representation (Holdsworth, 2009;Holton, 2018;Thomas, 2017). As it was deemed essential that this SaP scheme enabled faculty students, regardless of the personal backgrounds/commitments, to become involved in the development of learning and teaching, we devised a new framework for working with our student body. ...
... Furthermore, the employment of SEC enabled the faculty to provide the opportunity for a wide range of students to become SEC, regardless of their personal circumstances. This has helped reduce the issue where particular student cohorts are less likely to engage with extracurricular schemes, risking graduating with reduced graduate employment experience (Holton, 2018;Thomas, 2017). ...
This article describes the implementation of a new student partnership across a large and diverse STEM faculty and the impact this four-year partnership had on enhancing students’ experience. This innovative partnership recruited and employed students, termed student experience champions (SEC), to inform and develop inclusive educational initiatives in response to their educational experiences. This partnership enabled the faculty to develop a dynamic and agile working relationship with their students, creating an environment where students informed the strategic direction of the student experience and leading faculty and departmental educational projects that resulted in institutional changes. The breadth of the SEC projects enabled the benefits of student partnerships to be appreciated across the faculty, leading to a culture change where SEC are now viewed as partners in programme enhancement.
... Therefore, we are influenced by the more recent mobility research, often referred to as the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller & Urry 2006), where mobility is understood as the movements of bodies in a social and physical world, instead of transportation in an abstract vacuum. Importantly, studies make clear that matters of gender, class, and ethnicity shape how people move through, and are fixed in, space, and their experiences in that respect (Hutchinson 2000;Cresswell 2006;Bissell 2016;Holton & Finn 2018), for example by adding weights and reliefs to everyday life (Lagerqvist 2019). This interest in the corporeal and social aspects of movement in everyday life has quite a lot in common with time geography's interest in the everyday spatial and temporal trajectories of moving (but always situated) human beings, although the new mobilities literature has less often been interested in historical analysis. ...
... We have shown how the financially disadvantaged often faced a stack of weights and a lack of reliefs, which shaped everyday life and further hampered the possibility of schooling. These findings add historical depth to what the literature on present-day mobilities often highlights: how people, old and young, move through space is shaped by economic and social conditions and positionings (e.g., Cresswell 2006;Holton & Finn 2018). ...
In Sweden, common elementary schools (folkskolan) were introduced in the 1840s. As a consequence, children started walking to and from school several days per week. The school route, as both place and practice, impacted society and families; it created new ways and needs in everyday life. From a time-geographic perspective, the article investigates children’s mobility in everyday life in order to understand what walking to school encompassed. Moreover, whereas the common narrative of school routes in the past emphasizes distances and challenges of the journeys it often omits the adult world’s comprehension and involvement. The aim of the article is to increase understandings of the school route as a phenomenon and its meanings in everyday life from a historical perspective. Through qualitative analysis of memoirs and societal discussions, the authors focus on the difficulties (conceptualized as “weights”) that the school routes could entail and how the adult world tried to manage them (conceptualized as “reliefs”). One conclusion is that society and families were aware of, and tried to deal with, those hardships, and a second is that the school route was more than a distance. In this regard, variations in families’ geographical and socioeconomic positions and the physical landscape played crucial roles.
... The second aspect captures representations (or 'shared meanings') of mobility (Cresswell 2010). This aspect invites us to focus on narratives attached to specific ways of being (im)mobile and to the technological artefacts used, and to analyse how such representations are tied to and reproduce social roles related to class, race, and gender identities (Holton and Finn 2018;Skeggs 2004). For example, automobility is often portrayed as a symbol of freedom and liberty (Kaufmann 2000;Urry 2004). ...
... Others felt forced to take the car despite the inconveniences it presented. Our findings in this regard mirror previous studies on gendered everyday mobilities (Holton and Finn 2018;McCarthy et al. 2019;McQuaid and Chen 2012): mainly women with childcare duties felt that their complicated schedules pressured them into car-based everyday mobilities. ...
Reducing the modal share of car travel in commuting implies challenging meanings of everyday mobility that tie commuting to driving. Existing research has focussed on describing ways in which everyday mobility is meaningful. However, why shifts in meanings occur remains largely unexplored. This article asks how meanings become ascribed to everyday mobility and identifies dynamics that play a role in shifts in those meanings. We analysed interviews with short distance commuters in two Swiss cities. Combining the analytical foci of the mobilities turn and practice theories, we developed a typology of four registers through which meaning is ascribed to everyday mobility (functional, hedonic, representative, habitual) and identified three sets of dynamics that play into shifts between these registers: i) dynamics related to the spatio-temporal complexity of everyday life, ii) dynamics emerging from different and changing social representations of mobility, and iii) dynamics tied to subjective experiences of everyday mobility. Our findings indicate that shifts in meanings and performances of everyday mobility must be analysed together, and that differences in how commuters ascribe meaning to everyday mobilities can reveal structural dynamics inhibiting the spread of pleasurable low-carbon everyday mobilities.
... In other words, despite the positive connotations that are generally ascribed to residential mobility, it seems that the actual spatial behaviour of young adults is not always as mobile as the current discourse suggests. In relation to this, we additionally draw on the findings from Holton and Finn (2018) showing that residential immobility does not equal everyday immobility. Although we acknowledge everyday mobility as multifaceted, our point of departure is residential immobility. ...
... The survey was conducted in 2016 (from October 6 to December 23) among bachelor's students at six comparable study programmes located in Esbjerg and Copenhagen. Sørensen and Thuesen (2017) Table 2). 1 In the typology, we draw on the findings from Holton and Finn (2018) emphasising the importance of distinguishing between residential and everyday mobility and immobility. 'Local stayers' represent the residentially immobile, whereas 'regional commuters' are residentially immobile but highly mobile from the perspective of everyday mobility. ...
In the youth mobility research, young people's geographical immobility is often associated with negative connotations. This paper challenges this discourse by analysing the location‐specific insider advantages (LSIAs) of geographically immobile young adults in higher education institutions (HEI). We use data from a survey of students in two locations in Denmark: the peripheral city of Esbjerg and the metropolis of Copenhagen. We categorise students with diverse geographical mobility backgrounds into four (im)mobility types: ‘local stayers’, ‘regional commuters’, ‘regional in‐movers’, and ‘distant in‐movers’. The paper explores LSIAs across (im)mobility type and location type. We find that immobile students are more likely to have a connection to, and experience with, the local labour market, to be satisfied with their social life, and to live with their parents compared with their geographically mobile peers. However, the advantages differ in type and amount between the peripheral and the urban case locations. We conclude that immobility should be (re)framed as an advantageous strategy for some young adults in early higher education.
... For a route well-traveled may over time turn into a meaningful place, just like the places or the nodes at either end of the route". In the last decades, the need to go beyond perceiving traveling time as dead time, and instead engaging in the corporeal and social experiences of mobility and to conceptualize buses and trains as places than only modes of traveling, has been emphasized in some literature dealing with mobility (see for example Symes 2007;Jiron 2009;Jensen 2009;Bissell 2016;Holton & Finn 2018). This article follows and adds to these thoughts by exploring and showing various experiences of mobile places and how they shape how teenagers move and feel. ...
... Fewer studies have analyzed more positive or constructive experiences of public transportation for young people, but some studies have shown or pointed towards the importance of public transit for socializing, freedom and development of identity and independence (Symes 2007;Jones et al. 2012;Skelton 2013;Goodman et al. 2014;Holton & Finn 2018). For example, young people may experience mobility as providing opportunities and freedom, as "a means of opening up interstitial spaces beyond surveillance and possibly outside conventional norms of behavior (as perceived by parents and authority)" (Porter et al. 2010, 803). ...
When young people travel, they are often very dependent on public transport or parents. This study uses interviews with 16–19 years old teenagers in Stockholm to investigate their everyday experiences of public transit. The paper explores the experiences of buses and subways, here conceptualized as mobile places, to understand how they shape teenagers’ daily life. Understanding teenagers’ experiences of public transportation is part of understanding their everyday life, struggles, and possibilities to be mobile and participate in society. It is also a step towards ensuring that they find public transportation inclusive, safe, and worth traveling with today and in the future. Conceptually, the analysis focuses on how these mobile places are experienced as providing weights or reliefs to the everyday and if, how and when they may be places of interaction or retreat, addressing two needs in teenagers’ personal being and development. The study shows how various experiences of traveling with buses and subways shape how the teenagers feel, and how they make strategic choices in relation to this. A quite manifold, varying, and complex picture of public transportation arises, with stories of wellbeing, comfort, discomfort, and exclusion, and with sharp differences between girls and boys, and between buses and subways. These nuances are essential in planning and evaluation of transport systems in regard to how, when, where, or for whom public transport can be a part of social sustainability, as public policies often assume.
... Abundando más en la cuestión de la movilidad juvenil, distintos autores han señalado el carácter complejo y multifacético de ésta (Holton & Finn, 2018). En ese sentido, el propio Farrugia señala tres dimensiones que definen la movilidad juvenil: la estructural, la simbólica y la no representacional -o, podríamos decir, afectiva-, las cuales: ...
Resumen Este artículo aborda ejes relevantes para la comprensión del fenómeno denominado “descapitalización juvenil” en el medio rural español. En él se explora el papel de las representaciones y las características demográficas y socioeconómicas del rural, de los condicionantes de clase social y género, así como la incidencia de la formación y el diseño de las políticas de desarrollo en la generación de expectativas de migración o arraigo por parte de los y las jóvenes rurales. La base empírica de esta reflexión la ofrecen los resultados de una línea de investigación de más de una década en el campo de la juventud rural, que integra métodos cuantitativos y cualitativos los cuales muestran la necesidad de atender a la juventud y desarrollar acciones específicas para ésta.
... This quote illustrates the hectic and stressful life of a single parent, juggling multiple roles. Although it is usual to think of mobile learners, from a mobilities perspective, as traversing physical distance (for example, Holton & Finn, 2018), Chris was more than 'mobile', she was a blur in situ. Her account chimes with Enriquez's (2011) notion of being in a 'tug-o-where', seeking to operate in physical and online dimensions simultaneously. ...
This paper arises from doctoral studies which adopted a multi-methods design which aimed to disclose being healthcare students using a mobile phone for academic work: the student and mobile phone, i.e. mobilage, was the unit of analysis. This paper picks up on a long-term but sparse conversation about the use of phenomenology to investigate networked learning. Reasons for the paucity of work in this area are explored, including the nature of questions that phenomenology seeks to engage: to unveil and convey pre-reflective human consciousness. I seek to supplement this gap, as I see it, in the literature by contrasting two arms of my thesis project: one relied on ten in-person encounters with informants and another an online focus group designed to gather information from within the informant's lifeworld. These two methods frame a discussion of the merits, weaknesses and fidelity of my approach to gathering data pursuant to hermeneutic phenomenology, i.e. considering the difference between methods where the researcher is or is not in the informant's immediate co-presence. Gadamer's horizon fusion metaphor is arguably easier to conceive of with informant and researcher co-located, where the setting and conversation is informal, perhaps typical of everyday mobile phone use. Ten such encounters were undertaken and analysed through repeated listening to audio recordings and phenomenological writing. In contrast, the online focus group lasted for three months with seven informants who never met physically. Informed by experience sampling methods, weekly trigger messages were posted for the group to respond to, ideally in situ. Acknowledging that all data is mediated in need of interpretation, the paper reflects on the possible effects of data gathering at varying levels of temporal and interpretive proximity, or 'hermeneutic shades', between the researcher and the phenomena carried within data gathered, helping to condition what weight to afford information from different media. Van Manen's analytical method and goal of writing vocative anecdotes to convey aspects of the essence of a lived experience is considered against examples of direct accounts from the online focus group, one of which, it is argued, fulfils his criteria for phenomenological anecdotes. It is proposed that this demonstrates the potential worth of an online medium to not only supply data for phenomenological writing but arguably even represent phenomena without passing through the hermeneutic/analytical writing process.
... The most important macro factors attracting Erasmus students are language and climate, as well as the general academic prestige of selected host country (Rodríguez González et al., 2011). Personal factors are more nuanced, therefore, classifying them is challenging, yet one could conclude that student mobility is a multifaceted, competing, and often conflicting process (Holton and Finn, 2018). However, another study suggests that key individual factors responsible for selecting mobility destination include course suitability, academic reputation, job prospects, and teaching quality (Soutar and Turner, 2002). ...
The European Union has promoted academic mobility for almost half a century. A side effect of that has been a growing carbon footprint, as most academic mobility in Europe is done by air. Based on mobility data for 2014−2020, we analysed its spatial distribution and identified dominant destinations. Juxtaposing these results with research on higher education institutions’ environmental measures and policies, we have identified that the willingness to reduce the carbon footprint is emerging yet tenuous, and more declarative than actual. We recommend more decisive steps to reduce air travel within Europe, outlining the possibilities for carbon footprint reduction without harming European academic mobility itself.
... Some of the ways the three case studies show similarity confirm and support previous research conducted with mature students. For example, each of the participants described common barriers to participation and advancement, including socioeconomic factors, caring and domestic commitments, balancing part-time work, and geographical considerations, consistent with findings by Burke (2004), Holton and Finn (2018) and McCune et al. (2010). ...
... Emphasis is given here to 'the stakes of becoming hybrid in particular ways, the myriad forms of body-to-body attunement demanded … and how that shapes the kinds of public spaces produced' (Brown 2012:3). According to Holton and Finn (2018), the strength of this approach lies in its ability to explicate subjective, embodied and lived experiences beyond psychological and cultural boundaries, and, in doing so, explore how certain forms of mobility become enlivened through senses, imagination, perception and memory. ...
In the last decade there has been an upsurge in the popularity of electric mountain bikes. However, opinion is divided regarding the implications of this emerging technology. Critics warn of the dangers they pose to landscapes, habitats, and ecological diversity, whilst advocates highlight their potential in increasing the accessibility of the outdoors for riders who would otherwise be socially and/or physically excluded. Drawing on interview data with 30 electric mountain bike users in England, this paper represents one of the first attempts to empirically explore the experiential, ecological and socio-cultural implications of this activity. Utilising Stiegler's (2013a) account of the pharmakon, in which technology is positioned as both remedy and poison, we suggest that the e-mountain bike's role in the promotion of social and environmental responsibility is both complex and contradictory. Specifically, findings indicate that while this assistive technology can play a key role in facilitating deeper connections between riders as well as an ethic of care towards others, it can, at the same time, generate more individualised and automated experiences of recreational mobility in outdoor environments.
... In the early episodes of the series, we see students negotiating house rules and beginning to take responsibility for particular chores. Although studies show that many English students may not actually move out of the parental home for HE (see, for example, Abrahams and Ingram, 2013;Donnelly and Gamsu, 2018;Holton and Finn, 2018), this emphasis on 'moving away' in both the TV series and the focus groups is likely informed by the historically dominant cultural norm of a 'residential model' of university education in England that remains pervasive (Whyte, 2019). ...
Amid debates about the future of both higher education and Europeanisation, this book is the first full-length exploration of how Europe’s 35 million students are understood by key social actors across different nations.
The various chapters compare and contrast conceptualisations in six nations, held by policymakers, higher education staff, media and students themselves. With an emphasis on students’ lived experiences, the authors provide new perspectives about how students are understood, and the extent to which European higher education is homogenising. They explore various prominent constructions of students – including as citizens, enthusiastic learners, future workers and objects of criticism.
... There is a growing evidence that this student mental health crisis is exacerbated by patterns of inequality related to class (Stahl & Habib, 2017), sexuality and gender (Mearns et al., 2020), race (Ahmet 2020) and disability (Osborne, 2019). Feelings of stigma, being out of place, and disconnection is often identified by local and working-class students who can be seen to struggle the daily renegotiation of their home and university selves (Abrahams & Ingram, 2013;Holton & Finn, 2018). And, of course, many of these issues are also experienced by university staff (Askins & Blazek, 2017;Johnson, 2020;Todd, 2020), inevitably reflected in the emotional geographies they bring into the classroom (Analogue University, 2017; Carrigan, 2015). ...
This paper reflects on tensions and challenges in encouraging and enabling students to foreground their personal emotional material in the learning process, while this process itself remains embedded in the neoliberal subjectivities of the university, wider social contexts and the individual selves. We explore our teaching on a final year undergraduate module in which students are asked to explore the emotional geographies of their everyday lives, and for which specific strategies were employed to create a supportive space in the classroom and beyond. We reflect on how these intentions to enable students to engage in emotional explorations conflict with: the overarching neoliberal infrastructures of the university and its intrinsic grounding in assessment and monitored performance; the wider societal landscapes of inequality; and with how these structural issues pervade individual hopes, routines, anxieties and interpersonal relationships. We conclude by outlining how emotional geography pedagogies need to simultaneously provide adequate space to engage with personal emotional experiences and to question and challenge established institutional frameworks and practices.
... Over the past few decades, the forms of following have changed as the emphasis on migration and mobilities experiences and the production of power relations behind mobile and immobile subjects (Spinney 2011;Schapendonk 2020) has increased. Following is applied in a wide range of studies from a focus on cycling (Spinney 2011), car driving (Harada and Waitt 2013) and students' everyday mobilities (Holton and Finn 2018) to a focus on circulation as an alternative to sedentary migration (Schmoll 2005;Tarrius 1993), pastoralist mobilities (Pas Schrijver 2019), itinerant mining (Bolay 2017), salsa dancers' entangled mobilities (Menet 2020), transnational mobilities (Choplin and Lombard 2010;Schapendonk 2020) and refugee trajectories (Janssens 2019;Wissink 2019). These and other studies have provided important insights as they engage with research participants in different contexts and develop deep understandings of their mobility practices. ...
The increasing interest in mobilities among social scientists over the past two decades has generated new research approaches to deepen the understanding of people’s diverse movements. These methods have focused on capturing research participants’ mobilities, but also led to new ways of thinking about researchers’ mobilities as a strategy to collect data. In this paper, we explore the relationship between researchers and research participants’ mobilities through the idea of ‘following’. Drawing on insights from the Moving Marketplaces research project on eight markets in the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, we highlight the lack of beginnings and endings of following. This leads us to a reflection on what to actually follow as well as an analysis of the doings of following. This paper examines some of the unexplored terrains in the conceptual and methodological debate around following and argues that it is essential to reflexively engage with the implications and practicalities of this approach. We argue that it is more productive to regard following not only as the physical process of following people, objects, knowledge, etc., but also as a theoretical and methodological openness that embraces and articulates the dynamic and non-linear character of ethnographic research practices.
... This raises an important parallel to Brown's (2011) conceptualization of the emotional geographies of aspirations as well as the diverse ways emotions are transformed into spatial discourses, practices and embodied experiences (Kenway and Youdell, 2011). Extending the analytic lens on emotions to examine the mobile worlds of education, Holton and Finn (2017) incorporate mobile methods, such as go-along and walking interviews (Holton, 2015) to capture the shifting senses of belonging as students move across cities and educational sites, both nationally and transnationally. Such approaches reveal the emergent and existing spatial connections across different actors and sites that connect young people's embodied experiences to institutional framings in the family, school, and campuses, and interpreted within national and transnational contexts. ...
This chapter provides a critical appraisal of the key methodologies used in generating an exciting body of geographical scholarship around education and learning, with a focus on three areas of productive tensions: data, scale/mobilities, and pedagogy. The first section discusses what constitutes data in extant research on the geographies of education and the politics and ethics which shape our definitions and emphases. The second section explores the question of scale to reflect on how scholars have drawn the parameters of their research field and, at the same time, offer some thoughts on the role of mobilities thinking (and mobile methodologies) in researching contemporary and diversifying forms of educational and learning spaces. The last section explores the potential of researching with pedagogies and pedagogic research in enriching the current subfield, linking such methodological prospects with an ongoing interest in the creative connections between geographies of education and education of geography. We conclude with a suggestion for greater attention to ideas of data, scale/mobilities, and pedagogy to develop a capacious methodological imagination for geographies of education.
... Indeed a striking feature of rural migration patterns, including those in the North of Scotland is the close association of youth outmigration with further and higher education entry, and with evidence of employment-related migration much more opaque (Stockdale, 2002). The significance of internal migration in terms of entry to higher education is aligned more generally with a growing body of research from the UK exploring student mobility for higher education (Donnelly & Gamsu, 2018Holton & Finn, 2018). ...
A growing body of literature has focused on issues of migration in career development and guidance, however typically this research has focused on international migration rather than migration within a country’s borders. This paper presents a specific case study of internal migration in the UK context, focusing on young people from two island communities as they move through higher education and into the working world. The paper is specifically focused on the importance of cultural differences, including workplace cultures, with regard to students’ career development. The findings demonstrate the relevance of internal migration pathways to career development and indicate that a culturally informed approach to career guidance practice is important when working with internal as well as international migrants.
... The TEF, which was introduced into English HE in 2017, detailed institutional and programme level information on teaching quality, student continuation and graduate employment outcomes in relation to gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status (OfS, 2018(OfS, , 2019. BAME students, who frequently commute to University, can be focused on family, part-time employment, religious and solitary activities (Holdsworth, 2009) and are more likely to miss enhancement activities, such as employability initiatives and extra-curricular work-based projects that contribute to personal and professional development (Holton & Finn, 2018;Thomas & Jones, 2017). So how can we ensure that STEM education has a greater focus on 'diversity inclusivity', whereby the curricula recognise the diversity of cohorts and ensure inclusive pedagogy that is achievable to all (Hanesworth, 2015)? ...
As universities embrace widening participation, we are starting to observe sector-wide awarding gaps, and with student continuation within Engineering & Technology as one of the lowest in Higher Education (HE), it would appear that our current curricular is not always effective for the attainment of a diverse student body. This paper highlights the external driving forces related to the widening participation within HE and how this is influencing STEM education. It describes the current practice that has positively influenced diversity awareness and how HE can use the student voice more effectively to drive forward both institutional change and programme curricula design to ensure positive outcomes for all students.
... Importantly, in these studies and in the present research of the Transpennine Ale Trail, mobile drinking practices involving mobility through public space, commercial venues and various forms of public transport give rise to antagonisms and conflicts. Further still, while recent research has analysed train-based transportation and commuter practice (Holton and Finn 2018), there is relatively little research on trains as facilitators of leisure. The ale trail therefore involves a leisurely mobility which brings drinkers from cities to towns and villages, and thus into potential conflict with other occupants of those spaces. ...
Ale Trails, where a series of pubs noted for serving real ale and craft beer are linked together along a prescribed route followed either on foot or by bus or train, are now a well-established activity in the UK and beyond. However, in some cases they have become associated with large groups of rowdy drinkers characterised by excessive consumption and disorderly behaviour. While copious research has focused on drinking urban leisure spaces, few studies have examined leisure mobilities involved in drinking in, and intoxicated mobilities through, rural and suburban spaces. This article uses Henri Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis to analyse leisure mobility through the spaces constituting the Ale Trail – including pubs, train carriages, station platforms and village streets. In these spaces, the differing rhythms of diverse individuals and groups as they move through heterogeneous spaces on foot and by train give rise to both shifting alignments and conflicts. The article concludes with a discussion of the spatial, temporal and affective dimensions of alcohol consumption and demonstrates the relevance of rhythmanalysis concepts and methods for exploring contemporary forms of leisure mobilities.
... Rose is depicted as heterosexual which some have argued can be a further advantage in the HE system (Allen et al., 2020;Seal, 2019). And finally, Rose has added privilege, by the fact the character is shown to be a 'traditional' student in the sense she is neither a commuting student, nor is she represented as a mature student (who may have family and/or caring responsibilities, and may also be working to contribute to the household finances) -both factors which scholars highlight as being a boundary to equal opportunity in UK HE (Holton and Finn, 2018;Merrill, 2019, respectively). While the focus on one character who is adorned with many privileges, in this television drama and our subsequent analysis, will not necessarily reflect the whole range of students who are currently navigating the UK HE system, it does enable an examination of the representations of how those students who do possess those privileges may hold the HE system to account for their financial investment in their education (see Nixon et al., 2018). ...
Through a textual analysis of four episodes comprising the 2019 ITV 1 psychological thriller Cheat, this article explores a fictional representation of the United Kingdom (UK) Higher Education (HE) setting in a television drama. We discuss our analysis in the context of growing marketisation of UK HE, where academics are increasingly viewing students as powerful consumers. We focus on one of the central characters, final-year undergraduate student Rose Vaughan, and the staff with whom she interacts in a fictional HE institution-St. Helen's College. This article engages with the following themes: 'The powerful student consumer' and 'The commodified academic'. Insight gleaned through the textual analysis of this dramatised depiction of UK HE allows us to attempt to understand how both students and academics might be navigating the neoliberal university and negotiating place and status as (paying) students and (commercial) academics. Although heralded as powerful student-consumers in much literature, our analysis of this television drama shows how students can potentially disrupt the united front often attempted by HE institutions, but Special Section: Students in Marketised Higher Education Landscapes 2 Sociological Research Online 00(0) ultimately are faced with a 'the house always wins' 1 scenario. Our article offers an important contribution to the psycho-sociological literature into how the television drama depicts that the student experience has been transformed and impacted by HE's marketisation. This includes a reconsideration of how the television drama portrays what it means to be a student, by exploring how one student is conceptualised, understood, and represented in the psychological thriller.
... Academic skills, language support and willingness or curiosity to learn about or work in different spatial contexts, is similarly important. So, too, is a wider understanding of how students and staff relate to each other both within and outside the formal teaching space-times (Holton and Finn, 2018). ...
Drawing on interviews with selected UK planning academics and survey results from current planning practitioners, this article provides valuable and timely perspectives on how internationalisation is experienced by those within and beyond the immediate institutional context. Although internationally focused planning education helps planners tackle the manifold urban challenges in the global South, the article goes on to argue that relational approaches hold much promise for planners working in so-called developed countries, including the UK, to understand the diverse needs of different diasporic communities. Such knowledge is crucial to develop sustainable planning solutions in the face of uneven processes of urban development.
... In contrast to the practices of studentification, through which the (seemingly) mobile student is often limited to a specific geographical 'student' area of a town or city, the 'local' student is more deeply embedded in place. Finn (2017) and Holton and Finn (2018) point out that the complexity of placed commitments for local students, which often encompass employment, study, childcare and family, requires considerable local mobility and flexibility. Holdsworth (2006Holdsworth ( , 2009a shows how these contrasting engagements with place are often the defining features of the local student's university experience, either from the perspective of the student themselves or as seen by traditionally mobile students. ...
This article uses an analytical framework informed by social geographies to explore the complex relationships between Higher Education Institution, undergraduate student and place. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study exploring the experiences of college-based Higher Education students studying degree courses in Further Education Colleges in England, the article sees student subjectivities as structured through inequalities of institutional positioning in a stratified system as well as through layered local histories of industrial loss. Taken as an instance of undergraduate education in a massified and geographically unequal national context, the findings in this article offer an insight into the contradictory role played by Higher Education in its local area, particularly where a local area is defined by both a lack of and a need for increased educational opportunity.
... Interest in education and mobilities has grown significantly over the past decade or so, where previously only a small number of researchers worked in this area (Brooks and Waters, 2011;Waters and Brooks, forthcoming). Now we see substantive, insightful research on a range of related topics, including: mobility for higher education (Brooks, 2018;Holton and Finn, 2018;Finn, 2017;Patiniotis and Holdsworth, 2005), international student mobilities (Beech, 2018;Findlay et al., 2012;Brooks and Waters, 2011;Koh, 2017), child migrants and schooling (Berg, 2015;Hanna, 2018) and education and migration in contexts of displacement (Arnot et al., 2009;Fiddian -Qasmiyeh, 2010Dasstalaki and Leivaditi, 2018). All of this work speaks to the significance of education for structuring and effecting mobilities and socio-cultural differentiation of different kinds, globally. ...
This paper explores the phenomenon of cross‐boundary schooling (CBS), where more than 30,000 children undertake a daily, checkpoint‐crossing commute to school and back again, over the Hong Kong–Shenzhen border. It elaborates on the notion of “state assemblage” to consider how the power of the state (in this case, both the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong authorities) manifests in CBS and, in particular, how the state attempts to exert control over children's and parents' bodies. This view of CBS contrasts with a sense of “agency” that prevails around discussions of educational mobilities, and we explore this tension here. The paper focuses on two related aspects of CBS—materiality and the role of habit and rhythm in directing, guiding, and cajoling children to conform to an extremely rigid and regimented daily routine. We found that the material structures that make up the border are crucial in enabling CBS to “function” and that notions of rhythm and habit are very useful for understanding how the “flow” of educational mobilities is achieved. At the same time, we considered instances where flow was disrupted, rhythms were changed, and individuals somehow resisted the material constraints of the border.
... The act of 'going away to university' remains, argue Holton & Finn, a classed experience, as "residential mobility is often privileged over remaining in the family during study" (2018: 426). Being a 'local student' can bring with it a stigma; staying at home is referenced in policy debates as a "second-best option, or a constrained choice" (Christie, Munro & Wagner, 2005: 12) and local mobility performances are mistaken for immobility, the presumption of a working class or minority background, a sense of being "stuck" (Holton & Finn, 2018;Finn & Holton, 2019). ...
This report represents the summary findings from the APP-funded research project into the
experiences and outcomes of commuting students at NTU.
Discussions about the student experience of higher education have become paramount in the wake of a (post)pandemic landscape. This article examines student geographies by focusing on the everyday travel practices that students engage in as they journey to the classroom. In doing so, it considers the potential effect these journeys may have on the student experience and consequently their wellbeing. This research employs a multidisciplinary approach utilising sociology, emotional geography and mobilities studies to conceptualise the journey to the classroom as one where emotions intersect with notions of space. To accomplish this, a project with 17 undergraduate students was conducted using focus groups and interviews along with the visual methods of autophotography (‘photo diaries’) and map drawing. This methodological approach meant journeys were explored in a more interpretive way as both a physical and emotional experience for the students to reflect on. Findings from this project acknowledge the nuance of emotional challenges faced by these students through three key themes that arose during these journeys: students’ concern about lateness, the emotional significance of their transitions through different spaces, and the reliance on emotion management mechanisms where negative emotional states were experienced. This article emphasises the importance of providing space for student expression, reflection and reflexivity to counter the emotional challenges they may face and which recognises the emotion work they engage in during this journey.
An increasing number of scholars acknowledge the complexity of urban integration. Analysing how a large‐scale urban development project integrates existing urban structures cannot be limited to urbanistic preoccupations of ensuring functional connections between these areas. To offer a larger conception of urban integration, this paper suggests a user‐centred approach. By considering the development of person‐place relationships as an original way to measure urban integration, it analyses the emergence of place attachment among the student population of the University of Luxembourg in Belval, a newly built knowledge district developing in Esch/Alzette, Luxembourg. The aim is to provide scientific evidence on the multidimensional relationship between the students and the city, and how it is influenced by their place of residence and by sociodemographic characteristics. The paper uses a combination of survey results and qualitative insights from focus groups. Findings draw a nuanced overall picture. Place attachment is significantly influenced by place of residence. While most of the students only develop limited ties to their university location, a significant number establishes a certain form of attachment that is less characterised by spatial practices in the city than by the creation of an intangible student identity linked to Esch/Alzette. This mainly concerns older, international students who have a clearer vision of their post‐student life and consider making Esch/Alzette their home. The missing elements of the campus, such as green areas or an urban atmosphere, were recurrently mentioned by the focus group participants as factors leading them to explore the city centre.
This article analyses the circumstances and attitudes that explain why young adults from a specific area of inland Spain opt to remain in their rural place of origin. The analysis is based on open interviews with 41 young adults born and raised in the area in question. The interviews show that at least a third of them plan to stay in their place of origin, while others acknowledge that they would like to do so although they believe it will not be possible. The analysis reveals the important role that social origin, educational attainment and gender play in shaping the residential expectations of young rural adults, as these variables interact with each other and with the opportunity structure of the place. These interactions facilitate, on the one hand, the continued presence of those who have certain types of place-linked capital, and on the other, of males of low social origin and low educational level.
The development of megaregions significantly reconfigures the lives of their residents, giving rise to mobile work and multilocal dwellings. Employing qualitative methods, this study examines how mobility and residential multilocality influence mobile workers’ well-being in China’s Greater Bay Area. Using the new mobilities paradigm, different well-being resources are found to mobilize in the workplace, at home and in transit spaces to manage personal well-being, with mobility and relationality as central mechanisms. This study aids in understanding the well-being creation and mobilization mechanisms in space-networks and invites reflections on regions caught between territory and network and megaregions as actual or imagined.
Computer Science (CS) degrees have some of the poorest continuation rates across HE. This study describes an intervention within a diverse CS student cohort to identify students who may be at risk of mathematical academic failure and the success of student mentor-led workshops in enhancing these students’ mathematical ability. Diagnostic screening identified 46% (N = 92) of the cohort with low mathematical knowledge, with prior entry qualification being the only significant (p < 0.0001) reason for this gap. These identified students were invited to attend weekly mathematical workshops, with a positive correlation between attendance and attainment and females more likely to attend. The CS students were satisfied with having the mathematical workshops delivered by student mentors. In summary, this combined intervention of screening and mentor-led academic support successfully identified gaps within first-year students’ mathematical knowledge, with the workshops addressing the diversity in mathematical understanding and helping reduce a prior qualification awarding gap.
Research on ‘studentification’, or the concentration of students in particular neighbourhoods, whether in older shared rental housing or new purpose-built student accommodations, has neglected questions of difference, including gender. Yet while such questions have been the purview of student geographies more broadly, the latter have seldom extended analyses to neighbourhood-scale urban processes. Just as feminist urban geographers have shown gentrification to be a gendered phenomenon, I demonstrate how studentification likewise relies on and (re)produces certain gender relations, drawing on a case study of Waterloo, Canada. Specifically, studentification is linked to women’s enrolment trends, masculinist modes of profit-oriented urban development, and gendered discourses of urban safety. The analysis highlights the need for renewed dialogue between disparate literatures on the geography of studentification and student geographies of housing and home to further our understanding of the role of social difference in studentification processes.
Rosemary Deem untersucht die Durchführbarkeit organisationaler Transformationsprozesse bei der Durchsetzung unterschiedlicher Gleichstellungstrategien an europäischen Universitäten, die sich zumeist in volatilen, ungewissen und komplexen Kontexten vollzieht. Trotz politischer Unterstützung gestaltet sich die nachhaltige Etablierung von Gleichstellungskonzepten schwierig. Deem untersucht verschiedene Akkreditierungsprogramme, die den wirksamen Einsatz von Gleichstellungsstrategien begleiten und zeigt auf, dass die Programmevaluation, -bewertung und -beratung aufgrund der komplexen und multidimensionalen Problemlagen der Gleichstellungsarbeit erschwert ist. Auch die konkreten Gleichstellungsprogramme sind durch die Herausforderungen ihres Handlungsfelds, aber auch aufgrund unzureichender Ressourcen gefährdet. Schließlich zeigen sich auch die erfolgversprechendsten Wandelagenten als besonders widerständig: Führungskräfte können die Gleichstellung zwar theoretisch unterstützen, praktisch bedeutete dies jedoch eine Änderung der institutionellen Prioritäten.
This article explores transnational Chinese students' education migration to the United Kingdom through a lifecourse perspective. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 43 transnational Chinese graduates from U.K. universities, I found that participants regarded their transnational education migration as a stepping‐stone to adulthood. Influenced by the mobilities paradigm, this paper elaborates on the transitions to adulthood experienced by transnational Chinese students. The findings illustrate how transnational education mobilities transform social networks, in which transnational Chinese students rehearse their role as an adult in everyday social interactions, and how the intersection of Confucian collectivism and students' class background influences their experiences and understandings of transitions to adulthood. Therefore, this paper advances existing scholarship on transnational Chinese students by proposing a lifecourse perspective and exemplifies the complexities of mobile youth's lifecourse transitions by emphasising the cultural and social construction of transnational Chinese students' adulthood.
To understand tourism and events commuter students' motivations, engagement, and learning experiences, semi-structured interviews with 14 students at a university in the UK were undertaken. These interviews revealed that in addition to increased tuition fees which incentivise the presumed cost-effective choice of commuting, mental health issues appear to be another major reason why commuter students decide to stay at home for the duration of their course. The findings also indicate that while commuter students in this study tended to prioritise their academic integration, social integration with peers and participating in extracurricular activities were lacking, thus hindering their sense of belonging. As a result, several recommendations for universities are identified and proposed which could enhance commuter students’ sense of belonging. While the findings are particularly relevant to policymakers and academics in the UK, they resonate more widely in an era of changes in higher education on a global scale.
Going to university is often characterised as a rite of passage to adulthood which also offers future career and financial benefits to the graduate. However, in this study the findings indicated that for working-class women, a strong justification for going to university was needed. The discernment phase of internal conversation considers ‘aspirations, reproaches and challenges’ (Archer, Being human the problem of agency. Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 235), as individuals weigh-up the risk factors of life projects with potential future rewards. These internal conversations centred on a moral entitlement to a place at university based on academic capabilities or to fulfil their career aspirations through teacher training. For Horizon-Expanders, Incremental-Hybrids and Returners, the discernment phase of internal conversation when considering if university was a ‘worthwhile’ project was more extensive and protracted, than for the Mobility-Maintainers.
In this chapter, we reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to a wider audience, and crystallised, many of the issues discussed in this book. The mass spread of COVID-19 has illustrated how international students are often ‘invisible’, taken-for-granted and exploited. As a consequence of national and local ‘lockdowns’ and border closures, many international students have found themselves stranded. Here, students’ relationships with nation-states, borders and societies are highlighted. With the disappearance of part-time work, their economic vulnerability has been exposed (where hitherto international students were all assumed to be wealthy)—the diversity of the international student body is something we have discussed at length. In this chapter, we consider other recent geopolitical events, too, that have already had a significant impact on student mobilities, globally. We then return to the question of ethics—one that has underpinned much of our discussion throughout the book before, in closing, reflecting on the future of research on this topic, and where the next ten years might lead us.
In the context of a proliferation of post-16 options, the need for substantial individual financial investment in university education, and uncertainties of employment outcomes, this paper explores student agency and structural constraints around career planning and progression into Higher Education (HE). Analysing data collected on behalf of a National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP) hub in England, this research considers the views of students and staff at further education colleges (FECs). It draws on fourteen in-depth interviews with students undertaking qualifications that facilitate university entry, and seven interviews with staff involved in delivering information, advice and guidance (IAG) in some capacity within FECs. The paper explores the similarities and differences in how IAG is perceived, regarding its timing, depth, focus and scope. Students and staff broadly agreed that IAG in their FEC was often too broad, generic and insufficiently tailored to individual needs. In the cost-benefit analysis on university progression, students weighed up individual circumstances, calculating their best option whilst negotiating the structural constraints. Self-sufficiency was a common desire and ambition, and as such, the financial risks of entering university needed to be mitigated by a clear promise of stability in the future.
This paper uses social network analysis methods to explore how the spatial mobility of students to attend university creates regional divisions and socio‐spatial hierarchies of schools and universities. Using community detection methods as our methodological lens we stitch together regional economic geography, the student mobilities literature and the sociological and geographical analysis of elite education. Combining these statistical techniques with qualitative data from our broader study, we explore student flows between different geographical areas in the UK for universities. The clusters or ‘communities’ of areas underline how student migration to attend university in the UK is a moment which reflects and re‐creates regional and national boundaries. The second part of the paper examines school to university student flows, highlighting a distinctive, predominantly English cluster of elite schools and universities. Examining student mobility patterns with network methods allows us to distinguish a distinctive archipelagic geography of elite formation through higher education. This paper uses social network analysis methods to explore how the spatial mobility of students to attend university creates regional divisions and socio‐spatial hierarchies of schools and universities in the United Kingdom. Using colours to show clusters of schools and universities that are more densely connected than would be expected, our graph shows how most universities are tied into regional patterns of recruitment. However, a small cluster of elite universities primarily recruit from a sub‐set of elite private and selective state schools in England and Wales, suggesting an archipelagic pattern of elite formation in the school to university transition.
In the English higher education context, “going to” university is commonly associated with leaving the familial home at the age of 18 and moving to a new city. This article sets out to problematise dominant narratives of student mobilities, by focusing on the everyday and imagined mobilities of students who stay in place for their degree education. On the basis of data from a case study of undergraduate education in further education colleges in England, the article sets out three challenges to the binary opposition between student mobilities and immobilities. First, the simple association between immobility, disadvantage, and deficit is challenged. The second challenge complicates perceptions of traditionally mobile undergraduates. Finally, the imagined “other lives” of local students challenge their characterisation as unable or unwilling to imagine student mobility. The article both highlights and seeks to resist powerful popular understandings of mobilities and undergraduate education.
This paper outlines some of the material assemblages that are formed in international distance education (DE) in Africa. It offers a first exploratory study of materialities in DE and how they potentially distribute and aggregate to form a network to provide education. Through the use of interviews, students lived experiences are explored to unpack the multiplicity of networks needed to overcome the de‐aggregated and distributed institution. The multiplicity of networks that form in DE brings challenges that question how spaces become connected and disconnected and how different materialities shape DE. The materialities in DE produce forces and effects, such as translocal and transmobilites that are more than just the human actor, but extrude materials, networks, and connectives that transform continuously. The interconnectivities of the university and home or institution and students are brought together through enabling technology, but infrastructure does not always have the ability for the facilitation of aggregation.
Student transitions are a central part of higher education policy and practice internationally. However much of the work within this important area is underpinned by unquestioned and limited assumptions of what transition as a concept might mean. Moreover, too often understandings of transition defer to narratives that sustain a stereotypic understanding of students’ experiences. This study contributes to a major shift in our understanding of the notion of transition. In order to do so, I draw upon Meyer and Land’s theory of threshold concepts, and from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, to contest established understandings of students’ experiences. I propose a new approach to re-theorising and doing transition comprising three intertwined perspectives: transitions as rhizomatic; transitions as troublesome; and transitions as becoming. The article ends with a consideration of how these concepts could impact upon practice and offers an agenda for further research.
Studies of the connections between urban geographies and studentification have an international signature across continents. Yet, the transformative effects of student populations in China are under-stated within theorizations of urban change, despite unprecedented demands for student housing. In this paper, we explore neighborhood change in Haidianlu within Beijing. With an original focus on off- and on-campus student accommodation, we show that studentification processes are fueled by predilections to live off–campus and the production of student-oriented housing. The significance of our discussion is to assert that less-regulated student lifestyles are reinforcing urban geographies of socio-spatial segregation and are illustrative of the effects of the privatization of housing and land markets in China. The concept of studentification is pivotal to theorize how cross-cutting relations between the expansion of higher education and marketization of housing markets are reshaping Chinese cities to become more exclusionary, and comparative to other geographies of global studentification.
The Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities is an interdisciplinary and international culmination of the growth of men’s studies that also offers insight about future directions for the field. The Handbook provides a broad view of masculinities primarily across the social sciences, with the inclusion of important debates in some areas of the humanities and natural sciences. The various approaches presented in this Handbook range across different disciplines, theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and conceptualizations in relation to the topic of men. Editors Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Robert W. Connell have assembled an esteemed group of contributors who are among the best-known experts in their particular fields.
In this study, our cross-case analysis of students? lives challenges the conventional home?university model of transition and highlights the importance of acknowledging the influence of this complex symbiotic relationship for students who attend university and live at home. We argue that as with stay-at-home holidays, or ?staycations?, which are of such crucial importance to the tourism industry, so stay-at-home students or commuter students are vital to higher education and the term utilised here is ?stayeducation?. Through the narratives of ?stayeducation? students, we see how family and community aspects of students? lives are far more significant than previously realised, and our study suggests that these heavily influence the development of a student sense of belonging. Drawing upon biographical narrative method, this paper introduces three first-year Business and Economics students enrolled at different universities in London and explores their journeys through their transition through home, school and early university life. Ways in which key themes play out in the transition stories of our students and the challenges and obstacles for the individual are drawn out through the cross-case analysis. Findings support the existing literature around gender, class and identity; however, new insights into the importance, for these students, of family, friendships and community are presented. Our work has implications for academic staff, those writing institutional policies, and argues for the creation of different spaces within which students can integrate into their new environment.
It has become increasingly clear that social activities play an important role for many UK undergraduate students in informing identity and place attachment through interactions with their term-time location. While attention has been given to the ways in which students construct ‘exclusive geographies’ through self-segregation from non-students, thus far there has been very little discussion of how students' identities may be affected by their changing activity spaces and how this may blur the boundaries between student and non-student spaces. Exploring these transformations over the duration of the degree is important as they highlight how identity performances may be influenced by students' transitions through university and their changing mobility patterns. This paper will address such matters by considering the following: (1) how first year activity spaces may constitute a student bubble for new undergraduates; (2) how, in subsequent years, these activity spaces adapt as students hone their social practices and explore environments less associated with student life; and (3) how ‘local’ student's activity spaces can become complex as they contemplate locating their multiple identities during term time.
Politics in geographical research on mobilities evaluates the nature of power and control of mobility and considers how people are differently enabled and constrained by these processes. Politics is usually approached along subject-centered lines where the task is to identify who is enabled and who is constrained and subsequently to account for the hidden mechanisms of power behind this unevenness. This article argues that what these subject-centered analyses can risk underplaying are the very transformations that mobility practices such as commuting themselves actually give rise to. This article draws on qualitative fieldwork during an evening train commute between Sydney and Wollongong in Australia to argue that the politics of mobilities needs to attend to ongoing processes of “micropolitical” transformation that take place through events and encounters, changing relations of enablement and constraint in the process. My argument is that we need to expand our understanding of what constitutes mobility politics to understand the nature and reach of the multiple forces that are at play, affecting and transforming life in this zone. This potentially enables us to more sensitively evaluate questions of responsibility and intervention.
In recent years, a growing body of literature has emerged concerning the mobilities of students, specifically relating to the interactions between local and non-local students, which can accentuate unequal access to education; social interactions and learner outcomes. Central to much of this literature is a sense that being mobile in institutional choice is the most appropriate and expected approach to successful university life. Conversely, local students, disadvantaged by their age, history, external commitments and immobility, are thought to be unlikely to share the same ‘student experiences’ as their traditional counterparts, leading to feelings of alienation within the student community. This paper will seek to problematise this binary by examining the experiences of a group of local and non-local students studying at the University of Portsmouth using Bourdieu's reading of habitus and capital. This is useful as it provides a more critical insight into how students’ [dis]advantaged learner identities are [re]produced through their everyday sociability. Moreover, these findings extend previous discussions of first year transitions by questioning the influence of accommodation upon the formation of identities and the initial experiences of ‘being’, or ‘becoming’ students. This paper also seeks to extend previous theoretical tendencies that privilege identity formation through mobility rather than stasis.
Whilst research into the changing landscape of the UK Higher Education (HE) has produced a burgeoning literature on ‘internationalisation’ and ‘transnational student mobility’ over the past few years, still fairly little is known about international students’ experiences on their way to and through the UK higher and further education. Frequently approaching inter- and transnational education as ‘neutral’ by-products of neoliberal globalisation, elitism and power flows, much HE policy and scholarly debate tend to operate with simplistic classifications of ‘international students’ and therefore fail to account for the multifaceted nature of students’ aspirations, mobilities and life experiences. Drawing on the notion of ‘resilience’ and insights from the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, this paper envisages alternative student mobilities which run parallel or counter to the dominant flows of power, financial and human capital commonly associated with an emerging global knowledge economy. Engaging with ‘resilient’ biographies of social science students studying at three UK HE institutions, the paper challenges narrow student classification regimes and calls for a critical re-evaluation of the relationship between international student mobility and other contemporary forms of migration, displacement and diaspora.
Based on empirical research with participants from working-class backgrounds studying and working in higher education in England, this article examines the lived experience of shame. Building on a feminist Bourdieusian approach to social class analysis, the article contends that ‘struggles for value’ within the field of higher education precipitate classed judgements, which have the potential to generate shame. Through an examination of the ‘affective practice’ of judgement, the article explores the contingencies that precipitate shame and the embodiment of deficiency. The article links the classed and gendered dimensions of shame with valuation, arguing that the fundamental relationality of social class and gender is not only generative of shame, but that shame helps in turn to structure both working-class experience and a view of the working classes as ‘deficient’.
In recent years interest has emerged regarding the geographies of higher education students, particularly in patterns of mobility and dispersion. While anecdotal rhetoric suggests a ‘typical student’ exists within UK institutions, what resonates is the notion that students are inherently heterogeneous, experiencing University in differing ways and times according to their circumstances and year of study. This paper uses ‘walking interviews’ conducted with University of Portsmouth students as a method to unpack how ‘non-local’ students might go about interpreting their sense of place within their term-time location. This methodology was designed specifically to ensure discussions of ‘sense of place’ remain directly in the context of the city and recognises the adaptive relationships students have with their term-time locations. This is important as there is a tendency within the literature to focus solely on the transition into University, ignoring that students often experience pressures throughout their degree pathway. These pressures can be linked to various social and spatial changes, such as insecurities regarding fitting in amongst unfamiliar peer groups or a lack of confidence concerning engagement with academic and non-academic practices, and draws attention to the non-linearity of students’ associations with their term-time location.
Recent conceptualisations of place have sought to reconsider place as being the sedentary equivalent to mobility, instead recognising its dynamism and its potential for evoking powerful emotional responses. These notions hold particular resonance in the realm of higher education, with discussions emerging of the important influence place may hold for students as they progress through university. Although this has been recognised from the perspective of ‘mobile’ students, what is less clear is how these notions of place might influence the trajectories of ‘local’ students, specifically how feelings of place disruption or identity dislocation might spill out into their non-student lives and their wider sense of ‘being’ students (or non-students) within what are often highly emotive and memory-laden places. This is important as the process of ‘re-sensing’ place through the lens of a student may challenge long-established conceptions of the city for ‘local’ students. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Accounts of emotion and affect have gained popularity in studies of learning. This article draws on qualitative research with a group of non-traditional students entering an elite university in the UK to illustrate how being and becoming a university student is an intrinsically emotional process. It argues that feelings of loss and dislocation are inherent to the students' experiences of entering university, and that 'coming to know' a new community of practice is an emotional process that can incorporate feelings of alienation and exclusion, as well as of excitement and exhilaration. A broader understanding of how students learn then depends not just upon the individual's emotional commitment to developing a new learning identity, but on the emotional interaction between the student and the learning environment of the university.
Recent research has begun to pay attention to the importance of place to the research encounter. This paper makes a contribution to these discussions through an investigation into the lived experiences of higher education students. Although there is a burgeoning literature on what has been termed ‘student geographies’, there has been relatively little attention focused on the methods that we might employ in exploring these geographies. Here we consider ‘walking interviews’ as an approach to helping better comprehend students' experiences and understandings of University towns and cities. Accompanying students ‘in the field’ allowed us to explore students' narratives ‘in place’ while seeing first hand how some of the multi-sensual and multi-layered experiences of place might be captured and interpreted. We argue that such place-based interviews allow us to ‘get into the gaps’ of student experiences and understand how students' dynamic relationships with place shape their conceptions and narrations of their term-time location.
In this article we argue that the mobilities turn and its studies of the performativity of everyday (im)mobilities enable new forms of sociological inquiry, explanation and engagement. New kinds of researchable entities arise, opening up a new or rediscovered realm of the empirical, and new avenues for critique. The mobilities paradigm not only remedies the academic neglect of various movements, of people, objects, information and ideas. It also gathers new empirical sensitivities, analytical orientations, methods and motivations to examine important social and material phenomena and fold social science insight into responses. After an outline of the mobilities paradigm, this article provides a wide-ranging review of emergent `mobile methods' of studying (im)mobilities. We discuss some of the new researchable entities they engender and explore important implications for the relationship between the empirical, theory, critique, and engagement.
This paper proposes an approach to mobility that takes both historical mobilities and forms of immobility seriously. It is argued that is important for the development of a politics of mobility. To do this it suggests that mobility can be thought of as an entanglement of movement, representation, and practice. Following this it argues for a more finely developed politics of mobility that thinks below the level of mobility and immobility in terms of motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction. Finally, it outlines a notion of constellations of mobility that entails considering the historical existence of fragile senses of movement, meaning, and practice marked by distinct forms of mobile politics and regulation.
This article explores the experiences of widening access students at two prestigious universities in Scotland. It is based on interview data collected from a small sample of young and mature students who had all attended a widening access course prior to coming to university. The analysis centres on the students’ construction of themselves as ‘day students’, who live at home and combine studying with commitments to family or to paid employment. While they see being day students as a pragmatic response to their financial and material circumstances, it is argued that this disadvantages the students within the university system, both through their limited ability to participate in the wider social aspects of student life and through their exclusion from networks through which important information circulates.
In the context of widening participation policies, polarisation of types of university recruitment and a seemingly related high drop‐out rate amongst first generation, working class students, we focus on the provision offered by the universities to their students. We discuss how middle class and working class student experiences compare across four different types of higher education institution (HEI). Exploring differences between the middle class and working class students locates widening participation discourse within a discussion of classed privilege. We conclude that, whilst there is a polarisation of recruitment between types of universities, there exists a spectrum of interrelated and differentiated experiences across and within the HEIs. These are structured by the differential wealth of the universities, their structure and organisation; their ensuing expectations of the students, the subject sub‐cultures, and the students’ own socio‐cultural locations; namely class, gender, age and ethnicity.
This paper explores constructions of the 'new' university student in the context of UK government policy to widen participation in higher education. New Labour discourse stresses the benefits of widening participation for both individuals and society, although increasing the levels of participation of students from groups who have not traditionally entered university has been accompanied by a discourse of 'dumbing down' and lowering standards. The paper draws on an ongoing longitudinal study of undergraduate students in a post-1992 inner-city university in the UK to examine students' constructions of their experiences and identities in the context of public discourses of the 'new' higher education student. Many of the participants in this study would be regarded as 'non-traditional' students, i.e. those students who are the focus of widening participation policy initiatives. As Reay et al. (2002) discovered, for many 'non-traditional' students studying in higher education is characterized by 'struggle', something that also emerged as an important theme in this research. The paper examines the ways in which these new student identities both echo the New Labour dream of widening participation and yet continue to reflect and re-construct classed and other identities and inequalities.
This article looks at the experiences of a small, qualitative sample of 12 working-class women attending an Access course in a large, inner-city further education college. The risks and costs involved in making the transition to higher education were evident in the women's narratives, and both material and cultural factors inhibiting their access to higher education are examined. The desire to 'give something back' which motivated all these women's attempts to move into higher education is discussed. The women were either juggling extensive labour market commitments or childcare and domestic responsibilities with studying. In such circumstances, when any sort of social life is sacrificed, what becomes visible is time poverty, and, in particular, a lack of time for 'care of the self'. Six of the women were lone mothers and it is further argued that complexities of marital status intersect with, and compound, the consequences of class. Beck's thesis of individualisation is used as a backdrop to the women's stories in order to highlight the costs of individualisation for the working classes, but also to problematise the discrepancies and disjunctures between projects of the self and the women's experiences of returning to education. The article concludes with an exploration of the consequences of a policy of widening access and participation for working-class mature women and suggests that, while currently all the change and transformation are seen to be the responsibility of the individual applicant, universities, especially those in the pre-1992 sector, need to change if they are to provide positive experiences for non-traditional students like the women in this study.
This paper interrogates assumptions surrounding the practices of leaving home and going to higher education in England and Wales. As more students from non-traditional backgrounds are encouraged to go to university, this is leading to greater diversity in students’ experiences of university life, and one of the key aspects of this is that more students are choosing to stay at home for the duration of their studies. This paper explores how and why students make the decision to stay at home. While recognising the financial advantages of living at home we argue that the decision cannot be reduced to economic expediency, but reflects young people's access to legitimate cultural capital and family and peer endorsement of leaving home as an expected process and outcome of going to university.
This reader samples a wide range of modern theological, religious and philosophical discussion on the problem of evil, understood both in terms of the practical or spiritual problem of coping with evil, and the theological problem of explaining its presence in God’s world.
This paper advances theorising around student geographies in higher education (HE). It extends recent work, which has problematised the primacy of social class and binary thinking about student mobilities, and presents local/non-local experiences and im/mobility as a defining dualism. Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study of women's experiences during and on completion of HE, the following explores the ways in which a more diverse and constantly negotiated set of mobility practices emerge relationally, in the stratified field of HE, and through shifting personal and emotional attachments. Theoretically, the paper develops a new approach to student mobilities, synthesising dominant Bourdieusian notions of field with relational theories pertaining to mobilities (e.g. Adey, 2009), emotion (e.g. Holmes, 2010) and personal life (e.g. Mason, 2004; Smart, 2007). Such an approach makes it possible to move beyond the binary thinking that has become entrenched in policy and academic debates about student mobilities, and recognise a broader range of movements, flows, stops and starts that emerge relationally, emotionally and temporally as students and graduates move into and through HE. It is argued here that, given the policy emphasis on accelerated and flexible HE provision (BIS, 2016), a gradational view of student mobilities is more important than ever.
This paper scrutinises the underlying motivations of short-term international students by unpacking the notion of ‘leaving the comfort zone’ for self-discovery and self-change. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Canadian exchange students volunteering and studying in the Global South, the paper contributes to scholarship on everyday and emotional geographies of international student mobility and wider debates in mobility by examining how emotions of comfort and discomfort as well as everyday practices are productive for self-discovery, belonging, home-making and distinction. It reveals how students align the boundaries of their comfort zone and an un/reflexive self along the international and imaginative borders of the Global North/South. Contrary to tourism and mobility studies, I argue that students view everyday life and their relative immobility while abroad as both a distinctive and reflexive exercise. I suggest that students want to extend the boundaries of their comfort zone and their sense of ‘home’ to the Global South.
Mobilities are shaped by social inequalities and spatial unevenness as demonstrated in a range of existing studies across disciplines. These inequalities are manifest at different scales, from the very local spaces of everyday life to global spaces of accelerated mobilities. Mobile spaces, however distant, are connected through common everyday practices and the sociocultural contexts in which they are produced. In this paper, we argue that researching these interconnectivities and commonalities requires a particular methodological approach that accounts for the situatedness of experience. Our focus is on the ways in which inequalities according to gender and generation are generated through urban designed spaces. We suggest that drawing in to a shared material and ‘border’ object, the urban bench, provides a point of reflection on these distant yet parallel expressions of mobile inequality.
Using qualitative and quantitative data, this article explains how South Asian women’s attendance at university in Britain went from being exceptional in the 1970s to routine in the present century. Focusing upon the reflexivity of young South Asian women around issues of education, subject choice, marriage and careers in relation to their parents and their communities offers a better understanding than currently dominant social capital explanations of South Asian educational success. We show that conceptualizing reflexivity in a variety of forms following Archer better accounts for the different educational trajectories at the intersection of relations of ethnicity, class, gender and religion. The educational and career outcomes and transformations entail complex forms of resistance, negotiation and compromise across intersecting identities. These developments are transforming class and gender relations within South Asian ethnicities.
This paper considers the role of schools, place and national identity in shaping the ways in which young people make sense of the geography of higher education choice in the Welsh context. Drawing on two qualitative studies, it illustrates how attachment to nationhood and localities, as well as the internal processes of schools, bear upon the geographical mobility of young people living in Wales. The analyses suggest that this choice-making process, and the ways in which young people rationalised these decisions about where to study, varies according to where they lived and which school they attended. The paper illustrates the importance of moving beyond exclusively social-class based analyses of university choice making and embracing the significance of school and place in young people's geographical mobility.
Developing the ideas of a body of work that has begun to attend to the differentiated powers of stillness, the aims of this chapter are firstly, to unpack commuting stillness in a way that reveals multiple stillnesses; and secondly to unpack the multiple capacities of stillness. To achieve this, the chapter outlines four different ways of understanding the capacities of stillness in relation to commuting: as attritive; as protocological; as transparent; and as volatile. With the assistance of ethnographic fieldwork in Sydney, each of these four articulations of stillness examines the formative capacities of stillness in terms of generating new attachments, new relations, new ways of feeling, and thus new configurations of urban life. In doing so, this chapter moves away from more representational and discursive understandings of stillness towards a more affective, ontological investigation into its constitution.
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, nomadism, and flow, and outlines some of the key themes and research areas within the field, in particular the concepts of mobility systems, mobility capital, mobility justice, and movement-space. In addressing new developments in mobile methodologies and realist ontologies, this review of the field concludes with a call for an emergent vital sociology that is attentive to its own autopoiesis.
Linking physical and social mobilities to a modernity typified by increased foci on individualization, consumption, workplace flexibilization and the need for further (and further) education, this paper argues the need for mobility scholars to pay greater attention to the role played by educational institutions in family formation and the decisions associated with where to locate oneself in relation to these institutions. The research project under consideration took place in a remote Australian resource boomtown, an epicentre of global capital concentration and a concomitant mobile modernity. It focuses on educational decision-making that absorbs increasing amounts of energy among middle-class families in various parts of the globe, exploring the sociological implications of this and the links with physical and social mobilities.
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-modal context of Copenhagen, Denmark. Following the conceptualization of everyday mobility practices as heterogeneous ‘negotiation in motion’, the empirical analysis investigates how the strong relational dynamics between household members are organized around affect, care, familial bonding, and the rhythms of everyday life, which shape spatial patterns of moving together and apart. A new qualitative method combining GPS tracking, mapping, and household interviews is explored to show how everyday patterns of relational mobility are filtered through spatial affordances, affective ambience, and the temporalities of the lifecourse to influence transport alternatives of route and modal choices.
Within the mobilities literature, there is a growing body of research on the decline of automobility and the emergence of new mobility regimes. In this context, I will outline an understanding of ‘mobility as dispositif’ which facilitates tracing interweavings of discursive knowledge, material structures, social practices and subjectifications around mobilities. Specific value of the dispositif concept consists in analysing multifaceted, but decentral power relations effecting inequalities in relation to mobilities at different scales, shown by way of existing studies of automobility. Thereby, the co-constitution of social order, space and hegemonic mobilities regimes moves to the fore. Yet, what is missing in this Foucauldian genealogy of mobility dispositifs is a broader conceptualisation of stabilising material conditions. Accordingly, I use elements of regulation theory as a complementary and framing social theory to understand the dispositifs of mobility as embedded in and stabilised through (but not as a simple function of) specific modes of regulation and regimes of accumulation. Finally, I consider the current automobility dispositif and conclude by sketching some signs of its decline.
This study utilises an innovative creative method of plasticine modelling to explore the identities of local students (those who live in their family home) at the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England. Students created models representing their identity, which were used as a springboard for in-depth discussion. Through drawing upon Bourdieusian theory this article attempts to shed new sociological light on the subject of local student experiences. In much of the literature this is presented as problematic and it is often argued that local students either 'miss out' on the conventional university experience or that they are stuck between two worlds. This paper, however, presents a more complex picture of local students' experiences of inhabiting local and university spaces. The data is analysed through a Bourdieusian lens in which the university and local worlds are seen as fields of struggle, this allows for a nuanced understanding of how students conceptualise their positions and dispositions in relation to both fields. The findings indicate that living at home can be both problematic and of benefit to the working-class students in particular. Despite being immersed within two somewhat contradictory fields they can sometimes develop various strategies to enable them to overcome any internal conflict. In this article we draw uniquely upon Bhabha's concept of a third space to expand upon Bourdieusian theory, arguing that a 'cleft habitus' is not always negative and can be a resource for some in their attempts to negotiate new fields.
There is a mobility turn in the social sciences affecting how we scrutinise, research and represent the city. In recent scholarship on mobilities, global human mobilities have been identified as predominant. Nevertheless there have been calls for research that focuses on issues relating to everyday transportation, materialities and the spatial contexts of im/mobilities. This article is a response to those calls with a specific focus on young people’s local experiences of urban im/mobilities. It is also a challenge to the lack of attention afforded young people by urban studies. Young urbanites are of an age where personal physical mobility to take advantage of all the resources, recreation and sociality offered by an urban landscape is an important part of ‘growing up’ and identity formation. Utilising two of mobility studies’ conceptualisations, relationality and identity formation, this article examines young Aucklanders’ im/mobilities through urban space.
This article argues for an understanding of public transit spaces as sites of multiple dynamic interactions. Much inspired by the approach of Erving Goffman, the article explore a “mobilized” understanding of some of his central concepts. The theoretical underpinning is the development of concepts related to interaction, mobility, and transit that focus on notions of the “mobile with,” “negotiation in motion,” “mobile sense making,” and “temporary congregations.” The theoretical approach aims at seeing public transit spaces as sites where cars, pedestrians, mopeds, and bikes on a regular basis “negotiate” not only routes in and across the space but also express dynamic flows of interaction in motion. The claim is that what seems like ordinary urban movement patterns are more than this. By moving in the city among buildings, objects, and people, one interacts with the “environment,” making sense of it and ultimately producing culture and identity. Empirically, Nytorv square in Aalborg, Denmark, is mapped and analyzed through recurrent field studies. The article aims at unpacking the geography of mobility at the site of Nytorv by applying the two perspectives of the “river” and the “ballet” to the mobile practices of the site.
On the Move presents a rich history of one of the key concepts of modern life: mobility. Increasing mobility has been a constant throughout the modern era, evident in mass car ownership, plane travel, and the rise of the Internet. Typically, people have equated increasing mobility with increasing freedom. However, as Cresswell shows, while mobility has certainly increased in modern times, attempts to control and restrict mobility are just as characteristic of modernity. Through a series of fascinating historical episodes Cresswell shows how mobility and its regulation have been central to the experience of modernity.
One of the important tasks of mobile sociology is to attend to the diverse proximities that are generated through the interplay of multiple forms of mobility. In answering to this challenge, mobilities researchers have illuminated how multiple forms of mobility have given rise to different physical and virtual proximities, involving corporal travel and new communication devices. However, in spite of this apparent diversity, many discussions of physical and virtual proximity appeal to a similar ontology of connection. In the mobilities literature proximity is often understood in the context of an orientated connection towards points of significance and therefore can be described as ‘pointillist’. In response, this article stages an alternative way of apprehending proximity that removes the point. It does this by advancing the mobility-diagram of the loop. The ‘transversal’ proximities that the loop foregrounds seek to apprehend the transformative relations of mobile bodies and their near-dwellers, whilst at the same time untether the study of everyday ‘neighbourhood’ mobilities from their productivist heritage.
In this article I discuss just why travel takes place. Why does travel occur, especially with the development of new communications technologies? I unpack how corporeal proximity in diverse modes appears to make travel necessary and desirable. I examine how aspects of conversational practice and of `meetings' make travel obligatory for sustaining `physical proximity'. I go on to consider the roles that travel plays in social networks, using Putnam's recent analysis of social capital. The implications of different kinds of travel for the distribution of such social capital are spelled out. I examine what kinds of corporeal travel are necessary and appropriate for a rich and densely networked social life across various social groups. And in the light of these analyses of proximity and social capital, virtual travel will not in a simple sense substitute for corporeal travel, since intermittent co-presence appears obligatory for many forms of social life. However, virtual travel does seem to produce a strange and uncanny life on the screen that is near and far, present and absent, and it may be that this will change the very nature of what is experienced as `co-presence'. I conclude by showing how issues of social inclusion and exclusion cannot be examined without identifying the complex, overlapping and contradictory mobilities necessarily involved in the patterning of an embodied social life.
In this special issue on transnational urbanism, we are interested in accounts of transnational mobility that are attentive to everyday practices and geographical emplacement. Eschewing narratives of trouble-free movement by disembedded actors, consideration is thus given to the mundane and situated efforts by which people make their lives across international borders. We also wish to amplify the social scientific register of transnational migrants by considering groups whose mobility has thus far been little examined. In this introductory paper we elaborate these arguments, while also summarising the content of the substantive papers which follow.
In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
Contemporary cities and places are defined by mobility and flows as much as by their sedentary and fixed properties. In the words of Shane the city may be seen as configured by ‘enclaves’ (fixed and bounded sites) and ‘armatures’ (infrastructure channels and transit spaces). This paper takes point of departure in a critique of such a sedentary/nomad dichotomy aiming at a third position of ‘critical mobility thinking’. The theoretical underpinning of this position reaches across cultural theory, human geography and into sociology. It includes a notion of a relational understanding of place, a networked sense of power and a re‐configuring of the way identities and belonging is being conceptualised. This theoretical framing leads towards re‐conceptualising mobility and infrastructures as sites of (potential) meaningful interaction, pleasure, and cultural production. The outcome is a theoretical argument for the exploration of the potentials of armature spaces in order to point to the importance of ‘ordinary’ urban mobility in creating flows of meaning and cultures of movement.
Drawing on qualitative research with a group of prospective university entrants in Wales, this paper examines the relationship between higher education aspirations and young people's emotional connections with home during the transition to university. The data demonstrate that decisions about where to study were shaped by conflicting ambitions; namely the desire to encounter both different and familiar places during a move away from the parental home. This paper contends that a number of students were able to reconcile these demands and thus formulate ‘suitable’ aspirations by migrating within Wales.
This paper is concerned with conceptions of mobility and immobility. Although I argue that practically everything is mobile, for mobility to be analytically useful as a term we must focus on the contingent relations between movements. Building upon theories of mobility from geography, sociology, cultural studies and, in particular, Urry's ‘mobility/moorings dialectic’, the paper draws these ideas out using examples from the airport terminal.