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Feeling Motion: Revisiting Mobility History through Affect and Emotion

Mikkel Thelle

The article relates the study of mobility history to the fields of history of emotion and affect theory in the promotion of a cross-disciplinary research agenda. Taking as its point of departure a workshop in Copenhagen on feeling and space, the text draws lines and points of potential interface between historical mobility studies and the two related fields.

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Mobility History and Caribbean Tourism

Mimi Sheller

Mobility is not just a theme running throughout Caribbean history, but describes a conceptual approach and theoretical framework for better understanding the region. This review seeks to situate the history of Caribbean tourism in relation to a wider field of mobility studies in the region and highlights recent research in this area.

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Time for a Change: Transport and Mobility History in Chile

Tomás Errázuriz

For countries that are not leaders in modernization and technology, discussions of transportation history frequently conclude by acknowledging insufficient research on this topic. Indeed, this was my first impression when committing to this assignment. Nevertheless, once I started to review and gather material, my findings exceeded my initial expectations.

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Sketching Out the Indispensable Political Turn of Mobility History

Mathieu Flonneau

Adding to discussion started by Gijs Mom and Peter Merriman in Yearbook 6, this text is a plea for scholars to claim a role in the politicization of mobility. Globalization is profoundly upsetting previous mobility practices and raising important questions about democratic, equitable access to mobility. This essay argues that a historic understanding of mobility can shed light onto how representations of different users and modes of transportation affect current political debates. Historical readings remind citizens to be wary of seductive, novel, and high-tech mobility solutions—concepts that have persisted, in a variety of forms, for centuries. Today's “smart mobility” and sustainable development, for all their promise, must be compared to historic trends and weighed against today's low-tech modes of travel that persist in the face of modernity.

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History and Transport Policy

The Swiss Experience

Ueli Haefeli, Fritz Kobi, and Ulrich Seewer

Based on analysis of two case studies in the Canton of Bern, this article examines the question of knowledge transfer from history to transport policy and planning in the recent past in Switzerland. It shows that for several reasons, direct knowledge transfer did not occur. In particular, historians have seldom become actively involved in transport planning and policy discourses, probably partly because the academic system offers no incentive to do so. However, historical knowledge has certainly influenced decision-making processes indirectly, via personal reflection of the actors in the world of practice or through Switzerland's strongly developed modes of political participation. Because the potential for knowledge transfer to contribute to better policy solutions has not been fully utilized, we recommend strengthening the role of existing interfaces between science and policy.

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Where Are We Going? A Discussion of Mobility History in Latin America

Dhan Zunino Singh

The article outlines a possible course for mobility in Latin American history based on the diagnosis made by previous reviews on the field. It claims that although the emergence of new studies have signified a critical approach to transport technologies and greater emphasis on cultural and social practices of mobility, the term needs to be discussed more in theoretical terms to shape a common language among scholars from different perspectives. Moreover, mobility discussions should lead scholars to reconsider Latin America as a subject of analysis by critically revisiting the matter of periphery.

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The Necessity of Slowing Time: Speed as a Bridge between Transport History and Mobility History

Etienne Faugier

Two quotations, two periods of history. While the lines were written a century apart, their divergent sentiments reflect more than just the passage of time. They also show how, in the space of a century, the very concept of speed has become more complex, mainly because different kinds of speed are available thanks to new technologies in communications and mobility. The juxtaposition of these two quotations show a rupture: it seems that we are slowly shifting from a status where speed was both wish and choice to one where limited movement may be forced upon us by declining fossil fuels and growing pollution.

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A Field on the Move: Updating Italian Mobility Studies

Massimo Moraglio

Italian mobility history studies have seen remarkable developments since this journal published a first report on the topic in 2009.1 A review of main trends in Italian mobility studies since then reveals innovative developments opening new fields of investigation, with uneven but altogether appealing results, achieved not only by academic researchers but also by enthusiasts and journalists. Three themes are particularly discernible: mobility history and collective identity, denunciation of deficient transport system management, and a renewed attention

to business history.

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Intermodality and Beyond: For a New History of Mobility in Japan

Kate McDonald

A major intervention of mobility studies has been to suggest a new framework for the writing of history. Recent studies of diasporic Indian Ocean communities and trans-Pacific labor migration have shown that mobility history can open the door to histories of mobile subjects rather than static nations and, in the process, lead the way toward a transmodal and transnational research agenda. This article considers what the history of mobility has to offer to the modern history of transport and social life in the Japanese archipelago, which has most often been used to tell the story of the development of the modern Japanese nation-state.

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The Crisis of Transport History: A Critique, and a Vista

Gijs Mom

Using Peter Merriman's recent book as a trigger, this review-cum-polemic argues that mobility history is facing a scholarly crisis in the midst of other mobility-related fields that are blossoming. The core of the diagnosis is a lack of debate on a central question that is painfully missing. The article suggests as a remedy the opening up of the field along the paths of transmodality, transdisciplinarity, and especially transnationality. The national bias of much historical scholarship is a hindrance to its future blooming.