In this paper I explore the notion that our movements in and through a place define our engagement with it and help to constitute it as a place. Concepts and concomitant interpretations of place as a ‘situated’ and contemplative experience have to date received much cultural geographical attention. In increasingly mobile societies, however, I argue that mobility should be central to the ways in which we conceptualise and understand the character and meanings of different spaces and places. Although geographical exploration has begun concerning the politics and power relations of the mobile subject, little attention has yet been paid to the experiences and spatialities generative of the body-subject in mobility. Whilst acknowledging the importance of representations in directing action, I strategically emphasise and explore the notion that we create meaning and belong in a place according to how we are in a place. Drawing upon ethnographic work with racing and touring cyclists in the United Kingdom and France, I consider how the conjoining of the person and bike and the resulting embodied rhythms and kinaesthetic sensations of the movement of cycling are constitutive of the character and meanings of particular places. Ultimately, in this paper I point to an understanding of the kinaesthetic and sensuous experiences of the hybrid subject–object (in this instance ‘the cyclist’) as fundamental in rethinking how people live, feel, and ultimately create meaningful spatial relations.
Conceptualisations of movement and mobility within geography are increasingly complicating reductive and sedentarist understandings that have tended to theorise mobility either as meaningless, or as the practical outcome of ‘rational’ decision makers. Until quite recently there has been a sedentarist bias in cultural geographic enquiry that has resulted in negative readings of mobility as insensate, polluting and harmful. Conversely, while transport geography has long explored people's daily mobility, it has used a primarily quantitative toolkit to explore the ‘rational’ reasons why movement occurs. The corollary of this has been an assumption that meaning is derived from points A and B, and an emphasis on explaining travel choice by eliciting linguistic accounts of movement. More recent research has begun to problematise such understandings and in doing so illuminate potential avenues of enquiry. Consequently, this review makes an argument for research into cycling to explore the content of the line between A and B in order to highlight the often fleeting and ephemeral meanings that can contribute significantly to what movement means. An essential part of this project is for research to focus on the ‘immaterial’ embodied and sensory aspects of mobility that have previously been neglected or marginalised. In order to realise these goals, this article also makes a case for broadening out the palette of methods used to study mobility and discusses the use of video as one possible way to provide more nuanced accounts of people's journeys.
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There has been a recent upsurge in mobilities research relating to embodied movement, and a corresponding interest in adapting methods to acquire data while on the move. At the same time, many of the questions being asked relate to non-representational aspects of movement, notably the sensory, emotional and affective. While approaches that attempt to enable the researcher to 'be, see and feel there' such as mobile video ethnography are becoming more popular, they have not been without their critics. Situated within literature on affect and (post)phenomenology, this article critically examines the go-along to weigh up what we might gain and lose from using such methods. I demonstrate the ways in which such methods have the potential to enhance recollection, empathy and our ability to research 'quiescence' through the elicitation of detailed verbal accounts. Acknowledging their shortcomings however, I discuss the potential contribution that bio-sensing technologies may make in conjunction with go-alongs. Ultimately, I argue that despite the value-laden nature of such technologies and the history of anthropometry they are situated within, if used sensitively such tools may be used to promote positive logics of affect and mobility.
This paper is about the entanglements or mutually affecting engagements with the material world that occur in the course of trying to becoming mobile with a small baby. Drawing on a rigorous empirical base of 37 interviews with 20 families in East London, we analyse the relationships between discourses of parenting and the material practices of journey-making. Bringing together conceptual work on the new materialism and mobility studies, we advance the concept of mother–baby assemblages as a way to understand mobile motherhood, and consider the emotional and affective dimensions of parenting in public that emerge through journey-making. We argue that the transition to motherhood occurs in part through entanglements with the more than human in the course of becoming mobile (including matter, affects, policies and built form). We further argue that approaching motherhood from the perspective of material entanglements advances geographical scholarship by deepening our understanding of mobility as a relational practice. Finally, we extend conceptual work in Geography as a whole by showing the utility of new materialist philosophy as a means for theorising identity.
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