Pluralising (im)mobilities: anti-Muslim acts and the epistemic politics of mobile methods

Abstract

A critical agenda towards pluralising the politics and practice of mobile methods can enable more diverse epistemologies of uneven mobility and urban knowledge. In this article a challenge is offered to normative treatments of mobile methods including walking practices that inscribe dominant ways of seeing the city in anticipation of a liberal, secular, and sovereign subject. Taking empirical examples to ground conceptual insights on 'fields of power' and social difference, I suggest that researching together with Muslim women in UK cities (Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham) challenges normative approaches in Euro-American social sciences towards producing knowledge about people and place. It addresses two key questions: how do different Muslim women's experiences of urban space and anti-Muslim acts impact upon walking practices? What are the everyday politics and conflicts that shape multilayered and entangled temporalities of urban walking practices? Drawing on Urry's movement/moorings dialectic, I advance that we need to take seriously stasis caused by physical and perceptual barriers to mobility, such as threat of violence, and to rethink entirely our right as researchers to orchestrate the movement of others. By re-framing mobile methods we can become more attuned to mobility justice and distinct registers of difference in the politics of knowledge production.

Making Smart Things Strange Again: Using Walking as a Method for Studying Subjective Experiences of Smart City Surveillance

“…First, employing walking methods requires consideration of the ways that the possibilities and limitations of walking through urban space itself are influenced by people's embodied subjectivities. As feminist scholars have shown, one's gender expressions, physical abilities, skin color, and religious conduct are but a few dimensions of embodied subjectivity that significantly enable or constrain movement through or occupation of specific urban spaces (e.g., Wilson 1992;Nairn 1999;Hinger 2022;Warren 2021). While our study assumed participants who were physically and emotionally able to join our walks, we believe other, potentially less mobile embodied subjectivities can be accommodated in adaptations of our method.…”