The Way They Blow the Horn: Caribbean Dollar Cabs and Subaltern Mobilities

Critical geographies of transport and mobility: Studying power relations through practice, academia, and activism

“…Nicholson's (2020) From London to Grenada and Back Again examines encounters between London and Grenadian youth and their role in anti‐colonial thought and in Grenadian revolution of the late 70s and early 80s. Finally, Best's (2016) ethnographic work on Caribbean migrant dollar cabs in New York City provides a clear example of a postcolonial decentering of mobilities scholarship, adopting Roy's conceptualization of informality and concluding that dollar cabs “inhabit a space of contingency.” Skelton and Mains's (2009) critical insights into the complex connections between the West and the Caribbean highlight how strong counterdiscourses from the Caribbean take creative forms and establish a postcolonial voice which lends itself to Schwanen's vision of a decolonial transportation geography. These selected texts demonstrate the wide array of Caribbean transport activities that inform what path a postcolonial or decolonial transport geography might take.…”

Placing Transport Workers on the Agenda: The Conflicting Logics of Governing Mobility on Bishkek's Marshrutkas

“…Discussion of labour struggles involving Uber and its cognates is only just starting in legal studies (Rogers 2017), technology studies (Wallsten 2015) and the computing sciences (Gl€ oss et al 2016). However, a few mobility scholars and geographers have also recently turned their gaze towards transport workers, studying the precarity of rickshaw pullers (Rahman and Assadekjaman 2013) or motorcycle taxi drivers (Diaz Olvera et al 2016;Parsons and Lawreniuk 2017) in global South cities, or looking at subaltern mobilities using the example of dollar cabs in the Western context (Best 2016). Such research has brought a range of important topics onto the research agenda, including questions about the agency of precarious transport workers (Agbiboa 2016) and the ways neoliberal policy projects can affect workers' incentives to mobilise collectively (Paget-Seekins 2015), importantly illustrating the significant political mobilisation power of mobility operators (Sopranzetti 2014).…”

“…A few publications have started to address these divides and bring out the critical concerns of mobilities literature when studying transport workers or mobility operators in the global South (Diaz Olvera et al. ; Parsons and Lawreniuk ) and North (Best ). These publications articulate the consequences of neoliberal transport politics (Paget‐Seekins ) and transport worker's precarity, but also their subversive agency (Agbiboa ), and capacity for political mobilisation (Sopranzetti ).…”

“…Second, the literature we find on transport workers, mostly based in empirical settings from the global South (Cervero 2000;Cervero and Golub 2007;Finn and Mulley 2011), remains largely outside recent and ongoing debates in critical urban transport studies. A few publications have started to address these divides and bring out the critical concerns of mobilities literature when studying transport workers or mobility operators in the global South (Diaz Olvera et al 2016;Parsons and Lawreniuk 2017) and North (Best 2016). These publications articulate the consequences of neoliberal transport politics (Paget-Seekins 2015) and transport worker's precarity, but also their subversive agency (Agbiboa 2016), and capacity for political mobilisation (Sopranzetti 2014).…”

Spatial patterns of international migrant resident settlement and incorporation in Winnipeg Manitoba

“…Mensah and Williams () describe the shifting motivations for multifamily living for Somali immigrant households in Toronto. In the opposite direction, research finds examples of economic tools such as dollar cabs or day labor centers producing new socio‐spatial arrangements that help to reduce social and political costs of migration (Best, ; Visser, Theodore, Melendez, & Valenzuela, forthcoming).…”