Mimi Sheller
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, The Global School, Department Member
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This chapter contains sections titled: The Activists Saving Iceland, Global Protest Networks: “This Smelter Ting Is All 'o Us Bizness”
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Business and Electricity
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The paper offers a review of mobilities' research in classical sociology and at its disciplinary borders. Differentiation of the new mobilities paradigm from prior approaches to globalization, nomadism, and flows is demonstrated, key... more
The paper offers a review of mobilities' research in classical sociology and at its disciplinary borders. Differentiation of the new mobilities paradigm from prior approaches to globalization, nomadism, and flows is demonstrated, key spheres of research - mobilities system, mobilities capital, mobilities justice, space-movement are outlined. The paper concludes with an appeal to elaborate emergent vital sociology sensitive to its own autopoiesis
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Tourism in the Greater Caribbean region stands at a dire inflection point in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’s massive disruption of travel as well as the spate of hurricanes barreling across the Atlantic every year: Will the industry... more
Tourism in the Greater Caribbean region stands at a dire inflection point in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’s massive disruption of travel as well as the spate of hurricanes barreling across the Atlantic every year: Will the industry bounce back to previous patterns of mass tourism, coastal development, overtourism, and tourism dependency, or will something else emerge? Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatán is a compelling ethnographic and historical account of the spatial, cultural, and ecological impacts of tourism in the Yucatan region of Mexico. It can help us ponder urgent questions about the future of tourism: Are entire regions and countries stuck with tourism as it is, or can those living within its grip imagine otherwise the future of places so heavily shaped by tourism over decades? For anyone who is currently asking this kind of question, Córdoba Azcárate’s approach to the production of tourism spaces—with their predatory extraction of land, labor, resources, and culture— will be indispensable.
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Chandler and Pugh’s (2021) ambitious undertaking is to understand how islands have not only become emblematic sites within a wide range of Anthropocene scholarship, but also ‘generative forces’ at the center of Anthropocene thinking. At... more
Chandler and Pugh’s (2021) ambitious undertaking is to understand how islands have not only become emblematic sites within a wide range of Anthropocene scholarship, but also ‘generative forces’ at the center of Anthropocene thinking. At the core of their analysis is the idea of ‘relational entanglements’, which are embodied through the four organizational devices they have identified of resilience, patchworks, correlation and storiation, each being different modalities of relational thinking. In this commentary, I reflect on both the promise and limits of this Anthropocene Islands project, engaging with its generativity to also push against its boundaries. I emphasize the origins of relational thinking in Caribbean theory; question the materiality of islands as sites for Anthropocene thinking; and posit the significance of Caribbean, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous animistic and shamanistic spiritual practices for being in ceremony with geo-spiritualities that connect human beings ...
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Abstract This assessment of past and future directions in mobility research calls for a Foucauldian approach to better understand the apparatus of uneven mobility illustrated via three examples: tourism mobilities and racialized space,... more
Abstract This assessment of past and future directions in mobility research calls for a Foucauldian approach to better understand the apparatus of uneven mobility illustrated via three examples: tourism mobilities and racialized space, geo-ecologies of elite secession, and disease mobilities and quarantine. Building upon an ‘archaeological’ and ‘geneaological’ study of territory, communication, and speed, this essay argues for both a deeper historicizing of mobility research in terms of colonial histories, political ecologies, and biopolitics, as well as a deeper excavation of the material resource bases of mobility in extractive industries, military power, and biomobilities of racial formation. Sovereign control over mobility, individual ‘disciplined mobility’ and counter-mobilities, and the surveillance, securitization, and production of knowledge about mobilities each emerge as fundamental elements for the future history of uneven mobilities.
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Mobility has become an evocative keyword for the twenty-first century and a powerful discourse that creates its own effects and contexts. The concept of mobilities encompasses both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and... more
Mobility has become an evocative keyword for the twenty-first century and a powerful discourse that creates its own effects and contexts. The concept of mobilities encompasses both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as ...
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Sociology and Mobilities
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Over the last two decades, the concept of ‘the commons’ has been rediscovered as a powerful organizing principle in social movements, radical political thought, and critical theory. The concept of commoning has also been adopted within... more
Over the last two decades, the concept of ‘the commons’ has been rediscovered as a powerful organizing principle in social movements, radical political thought, and critical theory. The concept of commoning has also been adopted within discussions of migration and critical mobilities research. This article will first trace some of these emerging ideas of commoning as a relational practice found in many political mobilizations around ‘reclaiming the commons’. Then it will turn to approaches to commoning that seek to complicate Euro-American histories by centering Indigenous practices of radical commoning, Caribbean and African diaspora mobile commoning, and recent concepts such as undercommons, queer commons, and migrant mobile commoning. The article asks: How can such practices of radical mobile commoning help us envision ways to unmake the existing violent settlings and destructive im/mobilities of enclosure, coloniality, imperialism, and capitalist extraction?
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This chapter contains sections titled: Suriname and the Decimation of the Saamaka Maroons, Your Ship: Alcoa Clipper, Tourists, Primitives, and Modern Workers, 1948–1952, Bauxite, Folk Dance, and Vernacular Styles, 1954–1959, Caribbean... more
This chapter contains sections titled: Suriname and the Decimation of the Saamaka Maroons, Your Ship: Alcoa Clipper, Tourists, Primitives, and Modern Workers, 1948–1952, Bauxite, Folk Dance, and Vernacular Styles, 1954–1959, Caribbean Modernity in Motion, 1962–1975
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Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day, when the entire world faces the urgent question of how to make the transition to more environmentally sustainable and socially just mobilities. All around the... more
Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day, when the entire world faces the urgent question of how to make the transition to more environmentally sustainable and socially just mobilities. All around the planet urban, regional, and international governing bodies are grappling with a series of crises related to how we move: an urban crisis of pollution and congestion, a global refugee crisis of borders and humanitarianism, and a climate crisis of global warming and decarbonisation. This article seeks to think across these crises showing how each is part of a wider disturbance in prevailing institutions concerned with the management of mobilities and immobilities. Mobility justice offers a new way to think across the micro and macro scale of transitioning toward more just mobilities.
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This chapter examines the production and marketing of aluminum as a carrier of uneven global modernities, thus highlighting the ways in which mobility and immobilization were simultaneously created in the world of traveling commodities,... more
This chapter examines the production and marketing of aluminum as a carrier of uneven global modernities, thus highlighting the ways in which mobility and immobilization were simultaneously created in the world of traveling commodities, transport systems, and tourism. More specifically, it considers the role of aluminum, the “speed metal,” in modernization by linking the North American world of mobility, speed, and flight to the heavier, slower Caribbean world of bauxite mining, racialized labor relations, and resource extraction. The chapter first looks at the emergence of U.S. air power in the early twentieth century before discussing the cultural motions of Caribbean modernity and the complex constellations of mobility and immobility that structure transnational American relations. It also discusses the role played by companies like Alcoa in promoting innovation in the United States in the use of aluminum and imagining the light modernity of the future.
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The articles in this special issue show how a theoretical approach informed by the mobilities turn can reveal new facets of the history of dangerous mobility. This afterword draws together some of these lessons concerning materialities,... more
The articles in this special issue show how a theoretical approach informed by the mobilities turn can reveal new facets of the history of dangerous mobility. This afterword draws together some of these lessons concerning materialities, bodily sensations, and performativity, and then considers how we might study these aspects of danger and mobility from an international, comparative, and historical methodological perspective.
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Seismology and Routledge
This Afterword to the Current Sociology Monograph on ‘Migrant Temporalities: Rethinking Migrant Trajectories and Transnational Lifestyles in the Asian Context’ reflects on how this issue adds fundamental insights to our understanding not... more
This Afterword to the Current Sociology Monograph on ‘Migrant Temporalities: Rethinking Migrant Trajectories and Transnational Lifestyles in the Asian Context’ reflects on how this issue adds fundamental insights to our understanding not only of migration, but also of time itself. Through these articles we gain a new appreciation of time in a multiplicity of forms: time as duration, time as discipline, time as politics, time as rhythm, time as flexible, time as suspension, time as liminal.
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abstract Haitians, like these cane cutters, are subjected to backbreaking labor for meager wages in the Dominican Republic, where theyare constant victims of discrimination.
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Race matters. “Too often scholars discuss mobility in the abstract, assuming or omitting the highly consequential matter of the identity of those who move and its effects on how they move.” This special issue on Mobility and Race has... more
Race matters. “Too often scholars discuss mobility in the abstract, assuming or omitting the highly consequential matter of the identity of those who move and its effects on how they move.” This special issue on Mobility and Race has invited contributors to rethink how unequal relations of power inherent in both mobility and race shape a racialized mobility politics. Th e articles that follow examine what Cotten Seiler has called the “racialization of mobility,”2 meaning the ways in which “the modern practices and institutions of mobility have been and remain highly racialized.”
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... Page 6. First published in 2003 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements St, Oxford OX4 1 AW, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-1812, USA © Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castaneda, Anne-Marie Fortier,... more
... Page 6. First published in 2003 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements St, Oxford OX4 1 AW, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-1812, USA © Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castaneda, Anne-Marie Fortier, Mimi Sheller 2003 All rights reserved. ...
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In a brief reflection on the multiple disruptions of mobilities imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this article shows the significance of the scholarship published in Transfers over the last ten years for thinking about the future. Clearly... more
In a brief reflection on the multiple disruptions of mobilities imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this article shows the significance of the scholarship published in Transfers over the last ten years for thinking about the future. Clearly the encounter with a novel and deadly virus—transferred between people, traveling rapidly across geographical regions, crossing over the threshold of our bodies, buildings and borders—has drastically changed many things about us, about cities, about economies, and about the world. An analysis inspired by critical mobility studies highlights the inequities of the mobility disruption, especially in the United States, the importance of histories and representations of mobility for understanding the present situation, and the need for changed choreographies of mobility after the pandemic.
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Page 289. -12-Creolization in Discourses of Global Culture Mimi Shelter In recent narratives of'global culture'the concept of creolization has been adopted as a convenient way to describe general processes of transnational... more
Page 289. -12-Creolization in Discourses of Global Culture Mimi Shelter In recent narratives of'global culture'the concept of creolization has been adopted as a convenient way to describe general processes of transnational cultural mixture and hybridization. ...
Several noteworthy artworks are starting to critically and creatively engage with LIDAR technology. One example is Where the City Can’t See from 2016, said to be the first fiction film shot entirely with the LIDAR laser scanning... more
Several noteworthy artworks are starting to critically and creatively engage with LIDAR technology. One example is Where the City Can’t See from 2016, said to be the first fiction film shot entirely with the LIDAR laser scanning technology. Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by author and journalist Tim Maughan, the short film depicts life within the near-future Chinese-controlled Detroit Economic Zone. We follow this narrative through the machinic LIDAR gaze, a three-dimensional aesthetic point cloud play of colors, shapes, dimensions, and movements infused with glitches, deflections, and disruptions. The film plays with not only the top-down logics and aesthetics of LIDAR mediality through its visual effects and story line, but also the creative bottom-up means of countering them within the film narrative, as well as in the film-maker’s own hacks of LIDAR cameras. In this chapter, we critically explore Where the City Can’t See as an artistic “anti-environment” that illuminates LIDAR technology not only as an emerging mobile media infrastructure but also a new visual aesthetic and cultural medium. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from mobile communication, media ecology, and mobilities research, we discuss how this LIDAR artwork both situates and unsettles such an emerging media environment. In doing so, our analysis also speaks to scholarship into contemporary and emerging mobile communication and mobile media art.
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They are: Turbulences of speeding up data circulation. Frontex and its crooked temporalities of ‘real-time’ border control by Silvan Pollozek The Editors think this is an excellent article in drawing on STS methodologies to analyze data... more
They are: Turbulences of speeding up data circulation. Frontex and its crooked temporalities of ‘real-time’ border control by Silvan Pollozek The Editors think this is an excellent article in drawing on STS methodologies to analyze data flows, temporalities and infrastructuring. Like the other article below, this one also is a critique of Frontex, and makes an important policy intervention. It contributes interesting views on how “intersecting orderings of mobility cause struggles between different parties, their agendas, and practices and produce clashes of temporalities on the ground”, which echoes John Urry’s important contributions to thinking about temporalities, as well as his interest in informational mobilities. Pollozek extends the mobilities framework in an innovative way into an analysis of the mobility of data in the context of the structures of Frontex and pressing contemporary issues. Thus it builds an important bridge between critical mobility studies and “the geographies of data circulation” and is another excellent example of the kind of work we support.
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ABSTRACT Through a reading of the articles gathered in this special issue, this commentary seeks to assess how critical research on reproductive processes, spatialities, temporalities, and assemblages can push mobilities theory towards... more
ABSTRACT Through a reading of the articles gathered in this special issue, this commentary seeks to assess how critical research on reproductive processes, spatialities, temporalities, and assemblages can push mobilities theory towards rethinking the politics of (im)mobilities, which can also give us a new lens on the reproduction of reproduction. It begins with questions of scale, and the power relations involved in the heterogeneous mobile embodiments and bodily entanglements of reproduction, including mobilities involved in fertility, assisted conception, surrogacy, abortion, egg freezing, or traveling to give birth. It then draws on process theories and relational ontologies within mobilities theory to think about multiple kinds of becoming as crucial to temporal processes of reproduction, involving both molar and molecular politics. Lastly, it elucidates the kinopolitics of reproduction and broadens the field of critical mobility studies to better take into account the material assemblages and affective entanglements of reproductive politics.
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The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica has generally been interpreted as a struggle between the post-emancipation Black peasantry and the white colonial government, which led to a violent confrontation, military suppression, and the... more
The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica has generally been interpreted as a struggle between the post-emancipation Black peasantry and the white colonial government, which led to a violent confrontation, military suppression, and the demise of the Jamaican House of Assembly in favor of direct Crown Colony rule. Yet, the archival record shows other more complex currents that were also at play, including multi-racial, cross-class alliances, and strong conflicts over local politics, corruption, and labor rights. This article focuses on a little noted aspect of the events of 1865: the arrest for sedition of Sidney Lindo Levien, a Jewish newspaper publisher of The County Union. Levien advocated for the poor, foreigners, and women; joined the Underhill Meetings supporting the political rights of the vast majority of people emancipated from slavery; and was arrested under martial law during the rebellion and later found guilty of sedition, serving nearly 7 months in prison of a 1 year sen...
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What mobilizes people to take up reproductive options, directions, and trajectories in ways that generate the possibilities and practices of mobilities? People’s desires for procreation or to resolve fertility challenges or partake in... more
What mobilizes people to take up reproductive options, directions, and trajectories in ways that generate the possibilities and practices of mobilities? People’s desires for procreation or to resolve fertility challenges or partake in sperm donation, egg freezing, or surrogacy; the need for abortion services; and forced evacuation for childbirth care all involve movement. Reproductive aspirations, norms, and regulations move people’s bodies, as well as related technologies and bioproducts. At the same time, these corporeal, material, in/tangible mobilities of bodies, things, and ideas are also generative of reproductive imaginaries and practices. Reproduction is mobile and movement affects reproduction. Building from an interdisciplinary workshop on reproductive mobilities in Kelowna, Canada, this article aims to push the mobilities framework toward the edges of feminist, affect, queer, decolonizing, materialist, and nonrepresentational theories in thinking through both reproduction...
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The article is the introduction to the special issue of Theoreti- cal Practice which is dedicated to “the communes and other mobile commons”. The editors of the issue explain how we could conceptualize various attempts to create communes... more
The article is the introduction to the special issue of Theoreti-
cal Practice which is dedicated to “the communes and other
mobile commons”. The editors of the issue explain how we
could conceptualize various attempts to create communes in
terms of mobile commons and mobile commoning. Since
the exemplary case of the Paris Commune many social
movements – urban, rural, indigenous, feminist, or migrant
– experimented with communes as alternatives to state and
capitalism and redefined in this way the meaning of spatial
practices, work and the labor movement. Against the
assumption that the commune is a necessary localized and
sedentary political form, the authors who contributed to the
special issue propose to grasp it from the perspective of
subversive mobilities: as kinetic entities. The introduction
presents the common ground on which these proposals meet
each other and come into dialogue. Various models of
mobile commons described here – communal, insurgent,
liminal, temporary, latent, care, fugitive, maroon, black,
indigenous, undercommons, uncommons, and many more
– testify of a recent mobility turn in the theories of the
commons
cal Practice which is dedicated to “the communes and other
mobile commons”. The editors of the issue explain how we
could conceptualize various attempts to create communes in
terms of mobile commons and mobile commoning. Since
the exemplary case of the Paris Commune many social
movements – urban, rural, indigenous, feminist, or migrant
– experimented with communes as alternatives to state and
capitalism and redefined in this way the meaning of spatial
practices, work and the labor movement. Against the
assumption that the commune is a necessary localized and
sedentary political form, the authors who contributed to the
special issue propose to grasp it from the perspective of
subversive mobilities: as kinetic entities. The introduction
presents the common ground on which these proposals meet
each other and come into dialogue. Various models of
mobile commons described here – communal, insurgent,
liminal, temporary, latent, care, fugitive, maroon, black,
indigenous, undercommons, uncommons, and many more
– testify of a recent mobility turn in the theories of the
commons