Micro-Mobilities in Lockdown
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Abstract
In this paper I reflect upon my own micro-mobilities and embodied mobile practices living and working under COVID-19 government restrictions in Wales in mid-2020. I use the opportunity to reflect upon the past ten years of Transfers and to think about future research in the field of mobility studies, arguing that an attention to seemingly ordinary embodied movements and mobilities provides one avenue by which mobility scholars could move beyond the mobility/immobility binary and approach mobility as being more than transport, migration, and communication. Mobility is, I suggest, ubiquitous—even during government lockdowns—and I explain how Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the “molar” and “molecular” can be useful for understanding how some movements become perceptible and others imperceptible, and why scholars frequently draw a clear distinction between mobility and immobility.
Contributor Notes
Peter Merriman is Professor of Geography at Aberystwyth University and was an Associate Editor of Transfers between 2012 and 2019. He is the author of Mobility, Space and Culture (2012) and Driving Spaces (2007), and has edited or co-edited five books, including Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020), Mobility and the Humanities (2018), and The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2014). Email: prm@aber.ac.uk