Airports seem to be an endless ground for conceiving past and present (aero)-mobilities. Understood not only as air mobilities but also as the dominant mobility of international travel, aeromobilities offer an encompassing understanding of airports as sites of meaningful (im)mobilities of people, objects, ideas, and ideologies. These sites touch on more power relationships, across far larger and thinner scales of time and space, than the ones usually considered in the study of transportation places. As the first review on airport historiography in this journal showed, scholars have socially, politically, and culturally investigated airports in manifold ways, turning them into key transdisciplinary objects for the development of mobilities studies. In recent years, studies on European airports have been numerous. Few of these have engaged in deep historical analysis, although temporalities play a key role in airports. As spaces they are constantly changing, with terminals themselves being significantly more mobile than planes in terms of design and architecture. The existing literature misses links between the past and present times of airports.
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How Are Aeromobilities Changing? Reviewing the Literature on European Airports
Jean-Baptiste Frétigny
In Mobility in History
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jan 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 123–132 (10 total)
The Transfers/T2M Duo and the Evolution of the Reflection on Mobilities
The Textbook Case of the Historical Representations of the Paris Beltway
Mathieu Flonneau
regard, in order to answer in the affirmative, the “almost ideological” [ sic ] efforts of French medievalist Jacques Le Goff to see in this fortif’ , this “hollow wall that is the beltway,” a reassuring common point with his own historical period of
Time and the Other in Nineteenth-Century German Travel Writing on Africa
Tracey Reimann-Dawe
Afrikareisende traditions. First, the authors conform to the stereotypical image of the German academic explorer whose expedition and sense of self is heavily influenced by “scientific”—scientificist—ideology. Second, these three explorers covered similar
Walking as a Metaphor
COVID Pandemic and the Politics of Mobility
Avishek Ray
ideological practices of territorializing the city-space. “In Modern Athens,” writes Michel de Certeau, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes “a metaphor”—a bus or a train. Stories could also take
A City for Woody Allen? The New Banks of the Seine in Paris, a Product of Rootless Sociology and City Planning
Mathieu Flonneau
June 2013 saw the completion of a project to transform the riverside expressway on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris into a pedestrian promenade, accompanied by a series of leisure and recreation features. This article critiques that project as a purely cosmetic measure for the prestigious city centre, decrying both its underlying ideology and its unintended consequences, and raising questions concerning the new urban quality of life and the moralization of mobilities.
The “Missing Link”
Space, Race, and Transoceanic Ties in the Settler-Colonial Pacific
Frances Steel
The inauguration of a steamship route between Canada and Australia, described as the “missing link,” was envisaged to complete Britain's imperial circuit of the globe. This article examines the early proposals and projects for a service between Vancouver and Sydney, which finally commenced in 1893. The route was more than a means of physically bridging the gulf between Canada and Australia. Serving as a conduit for ideologies and expectations, it became a key element of aspirations to reconfigure the Pacific as a natural domain for the extension of settler-colonial power and influence. In centering the “white” Pacific and relations between white colonies in empire, the route's early history, although one of friction and contestation, offers new insights into settler-colonial mobilities beyond dominant themes of metropole–colony migration.
“The Song They Sing Is the Song of the Road”
Motoring and the Semantics of Space in Early Twentieth-Century British Travel Writing
Martin Walter
When, in the early twentieth century, British middle-class writers went on a tour in search of their country, travel writing not only saw the re-emergence of the home tour, but also the increasing appearance of the motorcar on British roads. With the travelogue playing the role of a discursive arena in which debates about automobility were visualized, the article argues that, as they went “in search of England,” writers like Henry Vollam Morton and J. B. Priestley not only took part in the ideological framing of motoring as a social practice, but also contributed to a change in the perception of accessing a seemingly remote English countryside. By looking at a number of contemporary British travelogues, the analysis traces the strategies of how the driving subjects staged their surroundings, and follows the authors' changing attitudes toward the cultural habit of traveling: instead of highlighting the seemingly static nature of the meaning of space, the travelogues render motoring a dynamic and procedural spatial practice, thus influencing notions of nature, progress, and tradition.
New Mobilities, Spaces, and Ideas to Market
European Travel Writers and the Making of a Genre—Comment
Steven D. Spalding
geography. Such writers fail to see Africa’s past ideology and prejudice and resort to familiar tropes of Othering. The rare pearl is the writer who experiences something more than solipsistic confirmation of bias and instead embraces encounters of
(Re)Constructing the Baikal-Amur Mainline
Continuity and Change of (Post)Socialist Infrastructure
Olga Povoroznyuk
aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Dramatic political, ideological and economic transformation left behind unfinished infrastructure projects. 2 Currently, the Baikal-Amur Mainline is among the longest northern railroads in the world. Its
Book Reviews
Tristan Josephson, Marcin B. Stanek, Tallie Ben Daniel, Jeremy Ash, Liz Millward, Caroline Luce, Regine Buschauer, Amanda K. Phillips, and Javier Caletrío
opinion, child welfare systems, and the increasing criminalization of certain populations. Yet while Conlon and Hiemstra convincingly track the “development and materialization of dominant ideologies” of immigrant criminality across these different