Agentive Motility Meets Structural Viscosity: Australian Families Relocating in Educational Markets

Abstract

This paper will develop and illustrate a concept of institutional viscosity to balance the more agentive concept of motility with a theoretical account of structural conditions. The argument articulates with two bodies of work: broad social theory of reflexivity as negotiating agency and social structures; and sociology of mobility and mobility systems . It then illustrates the concept of viscosity as a variable (low to high viscosity) through two empirical studies conducted in the sociology of education that help demonstrate how degrees of viscosity interact with degrees of motility, and how this interaction can impact on motility over time. The first study explored how Australian Defence Force families cope with their children's disrupted education given frequent forced relocations. The other study explored how middle class professionals relate to career and educational opportunities in rural and remote Queensland. These two life conditions have produced very different institutional practices to make relocations thinkable and doable, by variously constraining or enabling mobility. In turn, the degrees of viscosity mobile individuals meet with over time can erode or elevate their motility.

Handbook of Gentrification Studies

“…This has also been expressed with the notion of motility which highlights three dimensions related to individuals: access (range of possible mobilities according to place and time), competence (physical, acquired, organisational) and appropriation (strategies, motivations, values) (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004). The notion of a territory's hosting potential (Kaufmann 2011) or (institutional) viscosity (Doherty 2015) take into account more structural elements. Class inequalities may turn on access, competence, appropriation of (new) mobilities and urban space itself, which that can be an object of political struggle.…”

“…(ibid.). The concept of (institutional) viscosity goes in the same direction; it was coined to balance the more agentive concept of motility with a theoretical account of structural conditions and to capture the variable degrees of resistance or facilitation offered by a structural context (Doherty 2015). It can 'analytically distinguish settings and systems that enable and support mobility (low viscosity) from those that make it difficult or impossible (high viscosity), and express relational degrees between them (being more or less viscous)' (ibid.…”

Kinetic health: ecologies and mobilities of prevention in Europe,c. 1100-1600

“…As a rule, urban policing was designed to safeguard the political and economic interests of local elites (Roberts 2019 ). It thus involved the imposition of an uneven mobilities regime and a top-down exercise of what scholars have termed ‘motility’ (Young 1980 ; Doherty 2015 ; Sheller 2016 ; Marston 2019 ; Blondin 2020 ). The surveillance principles these agents employed were grounded (and certainly legitimated) in Galenic terms, which emphasized the positive flow of air, water and other matters and their role in the reduction of nuisances and miasmas, major causes of humoral imbalance and therefore of disease.…”

Planetary mobilities: movement, memory and emergence in the body of the Earth

“…For example, authors have described mobilities in terms of flow (Law, 2006;Urry, 2003, pp. 59-74), turbulence (Cresswell and Martin, 2012), friction (Cresswell, 2013;Tsing, 2005) and viscosity (Doherty, 2015). However, these concepts have largely been deployed in a metaphorical way, and there has been little sustained engagement in the mobilities field with the physical sciences.…”