‘Mobile sociology’

John Urry's (2010 [2000]) Mobile Sociology remains as relevant as when it was first published. His ‘manifesto for sociology’ reveals the kind of grand plans that only theoreticians of Urry's standing have the courage to advance. His eloquent argument for a sociology that attends to ‘the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information, and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, such diverse mobilities’ shifted the discipline onto new conceptual ground and framed new agendas for researchers, proposing new questions, theories and methodologies (Sheller and Urry 2006: 211). In Mobile Sociology‘the social as mobility’ (Urry 2010 [2000]: 348 [186]), with ‘global civil society’ as its social base, replaced the ‘social as society’ (Urry 2010 [2000]: 348 [186]), a scheme developed in conversation with a broader set of arguments articulated by Mol and Law (1994), in Castells' (1996) account of networks as dynamic open structures, and the intertwining of human and physical worlds (Urry 2010 [2000]: 356–7 [194]) acknowledging that humans do not act independently from objects. Urry offers ‘complexity’, ‘inhuman, mobile intersecting hybrids’ as the ‘basis of post-social knowledge’ (Urry 2010 [2000]: 357 [195]). This chimed with developments in intersecting disciplines. Anthropology was rethinking culture in motion (Clifford 1997), and the production of migrant activities and subjectivities as place-making on the hoof (Rapport 1995). Geographers generated more dynamic approaches to spatiality, foregrounding intersection and connection; the run of life had found its pace and Thrift and Dewsbury's (2000) ‘Dead Geographies and How to Make Them Live’, captured this zeitgeist. The mobility and dynamism of social worlds were no longer arrested in the analytic gaze: henceforth knowledge must be mobile (Merleau-Ponty 2002; Bauman 2000). Mobility's moment deepens; which is why it is important to republish this paper and reflect on it further. In ‘ “gamekeeping”, networks, fluids, scapes, flows, complexity and iteration’, Urry (2010 [2000]: 347 [185]) spells out the lexicon of mobile sociology in concepts and metaphors that foreground mobility and unsettle the foundations of the discipline. This new set of thinking tools focussed on the interconnected motion of people, objects, money and so on, of multiple comings and goings in contingent, chaotic and unpredictable ways, and its benefits are amply demonstrated in the debate and research it generated. Despite these benefits, ‘flow’, and the ‘fluidity’ underpinning it, conveys a sense of ease, a smoothness of motion that is contradicted by even cursory examination of how specific mobilities actually work. I have two objections to ‘flow’: it is misleading as a description of mobilities; and analytically it erases important social information in the texture of the shifting, contingent connectivity that forms mobile sociology's core business. It doesn't tell us, and indeed discourages us from enquiring into, how shape-shifting, multiply interconnected substances of sociality in individual and collective life, and the dynamics between this and the inanimate substances with which human life is intertwined, actually work. The concept of flow obscures the mechanics by which it operates. Closer examination of mobilities mechanics undermines the concept of flow. The diverse tangle of mobilities composing the social world have their own trajectories, geographies and connections; and they move at different velocities and through quite different logics. Urry would not disagree. But differences in velocity, trajectory and logics expose the morphology of the social world and the ways in which it is (dis)organized and referring to them collectively as ‘flow’ insufficiently acknowledges that these are distinctive practices instantiating diverse dimensions of social difference. Additionally, people, objects and so on do not flow: they bump awkwardly along creating pathways as they go; they grate against each other; they dodge, stop and go, negotiate obstacles, back-track and move off in new directions propelled by different intersecting logics. They do all of these things and more; but they do not flow. I will elaborate this argument using examples from my recent research illuminating mobilities of people and objects, including the information, knowledge, money and so on, with which people and objects move. Urry's point about interconnecting mobilities is well taken, but it side-steps important questions about how people travel and the knowledge with which they travel; how people live with objects (Skuse 2005:124), and the human/non-human entanglements in the methods through which objects travel (Appadurai 2005: 5). People don't flow: they have plans and they travel. Travel, for me, is a way of thinking about people engaged in the long and short-haul mobilities of routine life. We know that people travel and have always travelled, but how do they travel? Where do they travel? How far do they travel? In what circumstances do they travel? How are their lives composed in travel? Travel is part of dwelling, not its counterpoint. It is precisely in addressing these questions that social substance and texture, the ways in which the social world is made and connected, are revealed. The notion of travel I want to work with is the journey. Journeys involve specific itineraries; and they connect places across neighbourhoods or continents. Transnational migrants' local journeys and all the other local journeys around a neighbourhood, the errands of daily life, trips to work, pursuit of entertainment and distraction, compose it. A journey is a continuous itinerary, a matrix, of movement; a kind of carrying along a path to borrow from Ingold (2000: 226). Journeys generate neighbourhoods in particular terms. Visual traces of journeys traversing neighbourhoods are deposited in urban landscape, like high-rise corporate owned buildings and British pubs in Hong Kong or mosques in North London. So journeys are the very social practices that connect and constitute places. A place is made in the tangle of journeys crossing it. Journeys carry plans, intention that is not always realized. So journeys are open unfolding possibilities, sometimes moving in new and unpredictable directions. Connecting places brings them into a network of local and trans-local coming and going (Ingold 2000: 227). British migrants connect Malaga with Manchester; Somalis connect Finsbury Park in North London with Hargeisa in the rhythmic movements of travel back and forth, and in circulations of family, presents and money. Local journeys explore the possibilities opened by longer journeys and this raises issues of scale. The circulations of routine life around a neighbourhood are journeys just as much as the long-haul journeys of transmigration. Sociology is fixated on long-haul journeys and has recently been less interested in restrained geographies of movement around a neighbourhood. Scales of mobility in the distances people journey contain vital information about the morphology and organization of the social world. This is not straightforward. At some levels expansive and restricted mobilities alert us to distributions of resources. Homeless ‘community’ mental health patients in Montreal, like Britons who live on minimum wages and Filipina maids in Hong Kong, live lives predominantly composed in small journeys. But interconnecting long and short haul mobilities also expose the spatial frameworks in which people calibrate their lives around tolerance of uncertainty. In a village in the Philippines three young women migrate to Hong Kong to work as domestics and one stays behind. The scales on which people travel are socially significant although this is not easily interpreted. Equally significant are the ways in which people journey and the purposes for which they travel. Doreen Massey (1993) suggests this in pointing out that we need to ask who goes where and in what circumstances. I suggested earlier via Ingold that people constitute places; and by now it is evident, through the examples of journeys of different scales outlined above, that people too are constituted through their journeys. By this I mean that journeys constitute people's lives: the kinds of lives they might live and the places in which they live them. The processes constituting lives also constitute subjectivities, ways of being human in the world, as a number of social commentators have noted. People are the sum of their journeys. Their lives and subjectivities are about where they go and why, how they go, and who they encounter on the way. We live as we go and make up life as we go along. Elaborating a conception of the journeys composing lives a little further, it is clear that journeys involve navigation. By navigation I mean the planning and execution of journeys involved in ordinary way-finding: improvised exploratory movement (Ingold 2000: 220). Navigation produces the arrivals and departures that make everyday life; the coming and going that make people and places. Navigation is inevitably social: it requires knowledge and skill. Knowing ‘as we go’ from place to place as Ingold puts it. Skill is compressed knowledge about the world and how to live in it (Ingold 2000: 289–99). What skill does it take to live a particular life? Such questions strike at the core of the social texture of mobile lives. If we think about people's lives as intersecting local, and perhaps, trans-local journeys we can ask what skill embedded in social practices does it take to navigate those routes. Homeless community psychiatric patients in Montreal, for example, navigate a complex matrix of places in securing the ingredients of everyday survival – clothes, food, snacks, showers, warm indoor space for spending time, places to sleep, conviviality and drugs (Knowles 2000). Such places are scattered through the city, they have different rules of access and are only successfully navigated with this knowledge and the skills that put it into operation. This takes us to the heart of where people travel and why. Homeless urban journeys are about everyday survival. An unemployed urban African's journeys are not so different, although they are executed in quite different circumstances. Filipina maids in Hong Kong navigate Hong Kong in piecing together the lifestyle requirements of their wealthier employers (Knowles and Harper 2009). They live inside others' lives and when they journey on their own account their journeys are smaller, eating minimally into the resources they are accumulating to support distant others. British and American expatriate lifestyle migrants navigate the same city more expansively, embellishing affluent lifestyles and servicing connections with people like them so that their connections with this Chinese city are refracted through the narrow lens of the familiar. They live in the city but they live in a lifestyle more. For lifestyle migrants place is secondary; they live in circumstances fabricated by entitlement. These cursory comparisons between groups of migrants open onto the kinds of lives people can lead in different places and these are connected to their reasons for travelling there in the first place. They also ground significant dimensions of social differences in mobility; on a global scale, exposing precisely the kinds of social texture flow conceals. Attention to the navigational aspects of journeying and the social skills it embeds connects with a set of perceptions about topography which are about surface and depth. To suggest, even metaphorically, that people and things flow is to conceptualize the terrain across which they travel as a surface. Embedded in Ingold's notion of navigation, on the contrary, is the image that people are in the fabric of the material, environmental and social world, finding their way through it, and this framing better connects with the mechanics, the actual practices, through which mobility is accomplished. An example brings some of the things discussed so far together and then leads into briefly considering the circuits and mobilities of objects. Take the multiple tangles of mass mobilities composing China's phenomenal economic growth: the biggest peacetime movements of people in history (Murphy 2002:1). The travel plans and navigational practices of migrant factory workers in South-eastern China connect rural areas with the engines of Chinese export-led growth bringing them into a network of coming and going, establishing routes along which people, food and money move between rural and urban areas in unpredictable circularities. Factory-workers' lives exceed the application of skill in the choreographies of production, which should not be underestimated. They share the scaffolding of their lives with others; the flux of journeys, activities and decisions that brought them to this factory and these jobs; wage structures that secure production of competitively cheap goods in the global scheme of things; and the interconnection between work and housing as places of intersecting mobile dwelling. These lives are made in multiple journeys of varied distance and temporalities of cyclical regularity. They are made in the traction between the sole of the foot and the surface of the ground across which they travel in the small circularities of factory production; the application of knowledge and skill including the skill of flexibility, moving between a cluster of factories following work generated by the demand for goods; and the longer, less frequent journeys between the factory and villages in Sichuan, Jianxi and other provinces to the West, journeys requiring navigational skills of ordinary way-finding. Rural migrants' navigation from villages involves securing enough money to leave through careful management of farming surplus, and kin-connections in the new city, then, once established, helping others navigate what Feuchtwang (2004: 166) calls ‘chains of unsettlement’. Rural migrants commonly begin urban life in construction, building the factories in which they will later work and the roadways connecting them. All of this, and a forty-hour journey on a crowded train and bus with unwieldy baggage, is inadequately captured by the concept of flow. Like the Filipina maids in Hong Kong and the homeless in Montreal, Chinese migrants rework the work of urban planners; and they do it on foot and with their hands: this is the ‘footwork of dwelling’ (Ingold 2000) touching the ground on which we move, not flow. People don't flow they walk, run, jump, slide and stumble: propelled by the action of the foot in friction with the ground, the accelerator; the bus, train or plane floor. A whole world of social difference and the morphologies to which they accumulate emerges from the mechanics of mobility. An old woman walks the streets of Addis Ababa on foot in a year old pair of Chinese flip-flops made by rural to urban migrants and repaired with a nail (Knowles unpublished manuscript in preparation). She rarely takes the bus and only went in a car twice – once for her husband's funeral: instead she flip-flops through the streets. A billion people world-wide still walk barefoot. The British and American women expats in Hong Kong travel by plane and car in entirely different shoes. These contrasts are entirely instructive in indicating global social morphology, in understanding how the world works/walks. Objects don't flow either. Manufactured objects, for example the products made in Chinese plastics factories by migrant workers, are launched on a loose matrix of routes by truck and ship transporting them to markets. These objects pass through roads, distriports, industrial zones, ports, and warehouses. They are routed by logistics software calculating transit times at different container ports and combinations of routes by land and sea. This, too, is not flow. And objects enter the lives of those who work in these places in ways worthy of investigation, organizing the lives of truckers, sailors, pirates, smugglers, distriport operatives, crane drivers, office workers and caterers. It is time to reclaim the social texture, the substance, the embedded social practices erased by flow. I have suggested in this response to Urry's liberating framework alternative notions of travel, journey and navigation, and some of the places where attention to the mechanics of mobility could begin. The activities of travel, journey and navigation fabricate the social world as well as reveal it. They expose what flow conceals, in ways that support comparison, exposing differences between places and between lives. Not difference in the anodyne sense in which it is often used, but difference that stacks-up to something more systematic in its chaos: to the way things work at micro and macro scales, as local and trans-local streams of activity.

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