This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.
Based on research with members of two Senior Citizens Forums in the South East of England, this article examines the biographies and motivations of those who get involved in such activities, with particular emphasis on (a) how they see themselves in relation to ‘other older people’ and (b) their relationships with the places in which they live. We address these issues in relation to the characterisation of participants in such forums as the ‘usual suspects’ whose legitimacy to speak on behalf of others may be questioned, and by reference to a growing recognition of the significance of place in the lives of older people. Whilst the locations of the two Forums studied are geographically close, culturally they are quite distinct and we identify important differences in motivations, backgrounds and priorities of forum members in the two places that are associated with these differences. Our research confirms that place-based participation tends to engage those who are fitter and who have more social and cultural capital, but questions assumptions that this means they are spaces for the pursuit of self-interest
This article discusses mobile and visual methodologies and the use of visual and mobile methods in the context of a study exploring the negotiation of risk on the journey to school. It sets out an epistemological approach that encompasses the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences and current debates on visual methods, arguing that ‘mobile’ and ‘visual’ methods are not only compatible, but often indivisible. This argument is developed through the researcher’s experience of using mobile and visual methods to explore the range of social, emotional and sensorial responses to mobile space. In particular, it is argued that methods that are both mobile and visual produce insights into everyday life experiences, especially of excluded groups such as children and young people, which are not available using more traditional methods
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