Scholar of mobility studies, what was your point of entry into our interdisciplinary field? Mine came relatively late, in graduate school. A course on cultural theory had supplied me with some tools to rotate the world on a different axis and see all kinds of phenomena anew. Another course, analyzing political economy, showed me how ideas shape how we work, live, and build. Inspired by these courses, all kinds of thoughts thrummed in my head as my college-town rock band hit the road for our first tour. Driving our van hundreds of miles every day across the country got me thinking: Where did this highway come from? (and, as David Byrne sang, Where does that highway go to?). Why, I wondered, did we build this machine that facilitates and compels our mobility? I returned from that summer tour with a half-baked plan for a doctoral dissertation on the ideological origins and effects of the US Interstate Highway System, a plan to which my somewhat skeptical faculty mentors ultimately agreed.

This all happened longer ago than this middle-aged cultural historian cares to specify; but suffice it to say that the field of mobility studies did not quite exist yet. Sure, there had been some social scientists (especially qualitative sociologists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists) thinking carefully and generatively about space and movement. And the more humanities-oriented scholars among us had been building for decades on provocative cultural histories like Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden (1964) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey (1977). As a framing concept, mobility tethered together the studies of power, agency, affect, place, migration, capitalism, and subjectivity undertaken by this multidisciplinary mass of researchers. Hence a gradual but definitive “mobilities turn” (every compelling new academic concept seems to get its own “turn”) in the latter decades of the twentieth century preceded the “new mobilities paradigm” that John Urry and Mimi Sheller, among other scholars, saw crystallizing in the early years of this one.

Though many of these scholars making this turn were also, out of necessity or vocation, teachers, the pedagogical enterprise of mobility studies remained—and remains—underdeveloped. Most of us educated in the late twentieth century took up mobility studies research through one of the “silo” disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. At present, though research institutes, seminars, courses, and—ahem—academic journals abound, postsecondary academic departments dedicated to mobility studies, to say nothing of doctoral programs, still elude us (though the master's in mobility studies at the University of Padova is a promising green shoot). Part of the hesitancy of institutions to commit to a professionalized mobility studies derives from the skittishness that interdisciplinarity evokes among established departments when, inevitably, questions of budgets, faculty lines, enrollments, and workload arise. But another explanation is the continuing lack of an established set of pedagogical methods, practices, canonical texts, and curricula that would anchor and legitimate a fully-fledged discipline. The question of whether we want that status for mobility studies, or if it's better to stay fugitive, nimble, and innovative as an interdisciplinary endeavor, is worth asking.

In any case, the matter of how one might draw students into the field, and give them the tools they need to become scholars, is a pressing one. As the two-part special section concluded in this issue shows, a number of the field's most engaging minds are thinking deeply about pedagogy and reporting back on designing and conducting vital courses and assignments. Edited and introduced anew by Sarah Gibson and Lynne Pearce, this special section aims to foreground the pedagogical enterprise that too often recedes into the background of mobility studies scholarship. In addition to Gibson's and Pearce's introduction, the section features accounts of teaching experiences, strategies, philosophies, and challenges from Peter Adey and Simon Cook, Paola Girón, Walter Imilan, Victoria de la Barra, Giada Peterle, and Chiara Rabbiosi. In addition to taking pedagogy seriously, the section testifies to the tremendous diversity of successful approaches among instructors in the field and will likely leave you, as it left me, envious of today's students.

Rounding out this issue is Luis F. Alvarez Leon's reflection on the ambivalence and regulatory challenges that attend the transition to autonomous mobilities. Alvarez uses a 2023 accident in San Francisco, which combined, in a perfect storm of circumstances, the hazards of both human-driven and autonomous automobility. His multilayered and future-oriented analysis will be valuable to policymakers and scholars alike. Although our “Trajectories” section is on hiatus until the next issue, we're glad to feature novel and book reviews that testify to and advance our interdisciplinary mission.