Mobility involves a displacement—the act of moving between locations.
These locations may be towns or cities, or they may be points a few centimeters
apart. This is the simplest understanding of mobility as it appears on
maps of movements. In classic migration theory, for instance, the choice of
whether or not to move would be the result of so-called push and pull factors
in A and B, respectively. The content of the line between them would
remain unexplored. The cumulative effects of these movements are also
what remain taken for granted in more recent social theory where movement
is coded as travel, nomadism, routes, or lines of flight. This line is a
good starting point for such an exploration. I want to explore the content
of the line that links A to B, to unpack it, to make sure it is not taken for
granted.
The movements of people (and things) all over the world and at all
scales are, aft er all, full of meaning. They are also products and producers
of power. I want to make an analytical distinction here between movement
and mobility. For the purposes of my argument, let us say that movement
can be thought of as abstracted mobility (mobility abstracted from
contexts of power). Movement, therefore, describes the idea of an act of
displacement that allows people to move between locations