Mobility in History

This essay reviews scholarship which has focused on the bodies and embodied experiences of people moving and being moved. Scholars have long been interested in how physical bodies move through space and how actors perceive space during movement. This attention to embodied experience includes phenomenological engagements with the environment, sensorial perceptions during movement, and emotional entanglements with ways of moving through space. The essay then examines studies of transportation that analyze how gender, class, race, and national identity (and the intersections thereof) affect how a person experiences, uses, and ascribes meaning to modes of transportation. The essay demonstrates that just as experience and subjectivity shape transportation choices, so do transportation choices shape experience and subjectivity.

Drawing on published material, gray literature, and personal research, this article explores the implications of growth in mobile phone usage across Africa for patterns of physical mobility, organization of transport services, and the potential for improved transport planning. Emerging intersections between virtual and physical mobility—and broader interactions with wider social, economic, and political contexts—offer fascinating new foci for research in the continent. Social equity issues, including those associated with gender- and age-related mobility, will require careful monitoring and further explication over time, as patterns of phone ownership develop and change.

Vietnam has been the focus of a creative and burgeoning body of academic, policy, and industry research broadly focused on mobility. This review is designed to give an inter-disciplinary overview of some of the new mobility related academic work on Vietnam and reflect on the broader political, economic and social contexts and catalysts of the mobility turn. The review considers three sub themes: transportation mobility, migratory mobility, and social mobility. It concludes with some reflections on the potentials and limitations for intersection between these fields, and anticipations of new mobility research areas in the coming years.

Mobility requires waiting, especially in intermodal transportation systems. People must wait in airports, stations, and vehicles; at bus stops; in queues at registration desks and luggage checks; at boarding; and elsewhere. Waiting is part of the public transportation routine. As Ohmori and Harata report, an average commute time for train commuters in Tokyo is sixty-nine minutes.

In the last two decades many researchers have taken diverse approaches to the study of airports. The airport was long considered a topic for specialists and designers, or admired as a monument celebrating the spectacle of aeromobility—from early aeronautical shows to later Sunday excursions to the huge observation terraces overlooking the airfield. Today the airport as a critical issue permeates the literature at various angles. Why such a profusion and what do these works offer the history of mobility?