AAG 2016 CFP – Mobilities, Mobility Justice & Social Justice

[David Butz]

Call For Papers, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

San Francisco, March 29 - April 2, 2016 

 

Mobilities, Mobility Justice and Social Justice – PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY

 

Session Organizers: David Butz, Department of Geography and Nancy Cook, Department of Sociology, Brock University.

 

For this special session we are seeking conceptual and/or empirical papers that interrogate the relationship between mobility and social justice in a variety of social and locational contexts, especially with the goal of framing differential mobilities as a social justice issue.

 

Critical scholarship often takes the relationship between social mobility and social justice as its primary terrain of inquiry. But until recently the intersection of spatial mobility and justice has been outside its purview. In the past decade critical mobilities scholars have incrementally altered this analytical landscape by attending to the ‘politics of mobility’ (Adey 2006; Cresswell 2010, 2008): the entanglements of power, social exclusion and mobilities that articulate the intersection of mobility and justice. Who is free to move? Who is forced to move? Who is stuck in place? The capacity for movement (motility) under conditions of one’s choosing is regarded as a valuable resource or form of capital that is unequally distributed in social contexts structured by hierarchies of power (Elliott and Urry 2010; Larsen et al. 2006; Kaufmann et al. 2004; Kaufmann 2002). In other words, the potential for movement is socially differentiated. Moreover, mobilities are fundamental structuring components of social hierarchies, and mechanisms of their reproduction (Kaufmann and Montulet 2008).

 

Critical mobilities thinking has systematically linked differential mobilities to social exclusion: when people’s capacity to move is hampered their ability to participate in economic, social and political life is curtailed (Jensen 2013; Adey 2010; Urry 2008; Sager 2006). Mimi Sheller (2012, 199-200; see also Bergmann and Sager 2008) suggests that a social justice modality within mobility studies raises questions of who is able to access and appropriate mobility capital, and how broadly capabilities of movement are extended throughout a social system: ‘mobility ethics suggest that ensuring mobility justice will entail moving beyond simply a politics of the de jure right to mobility, to instead ensuring that the de facto capability of mobility is protected and extended as a common basis for social justice.’ In this ethical framing, social justice praxis fosters people’s motility and access to mobility options, thereby nurturing their social agency and personal imaginaries, potentials and futures, as well as democratic social systems (Kronlid 2008). Enhanced social inclusion is the anticipated political outcome.

 

The interventions of landscape and urban planning scholars (e.g. Martens 2012, 2006; Jackson 1984) demonstrate that transportation infrastructure is key to mobility justice, in contradictory ways. On the one hand, it can extend a person’s mobility capabilities and options and consequently their social engagements. Less sanguinely, roads, for example, also articulate relations of social inequality by entrenching the social marginalization of those who lack access to the mobility capital of an automobile (Featherstone et al. 2005), or who live in rural regions (Farrington and Farrington 2005). Stranded, the spatially marginalized are less agential at some scales. Studies of highways and other urban transit systems illustrate the structuring power of infrastructure; they are mobility platforms that enhance or compromise social and mobility justice depending on how they influence the ability of different groups to participate in movement.

 

A growing body of scholarship associates transportation infrastructure and (im)mobility in the context of disaster (Cook and Butz 2013; Sheller 2012, 2011, 2006; Budd et al. 2011; Birtchnell and Büscher 2011; Butz and Cook 2011; Diken 2011; Jensen 2011; O’Regan 2011; Graham 2009; Cresswell 2008). As these analyses show, natural disasters and their associated effects can impede motility and mobile lives by disrupting access to dominant mobility systems in ways that reshape or exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities. They re-differentiate differential mobilities, with consequences for mobility justice. In post-disaster situations, a reduced capacity to be mobile can isolate populations, imposing friction and stillness.

 

In connecting motility to power differentials and exclusions in various ways, these literatures situate mobility analyses in a social justice frame. Sheller’s notion of mobility justice derives most clearly from this conceptual terrain. However, the concept itself is more evoked than specified in her work, and the relationship between mobility/mobility justice and social justice is only inferred in all of this literature. Moreover, we are left to wonder what particular social conditions create the context for mobility (in)justice.*

 

This special session has the objective of contributing to both critical mobilities literature and social justice scholarship by developing the concept of mobility justice and detailing its relationship to social justice.

 

If you are interested in participating in the session, please send an abstract of 250 words or less to David Butz (db...@brocku.ca) before October 25 2015.

 

*Parts of the session description are paraphrased from N. Cook and D. Butz. In press. Mobility justice in the context of disaster. Mobilities. (DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2015.1047613)

 

 

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David Butz
Professor – Geography
Interim Director – Social Justice Research Institute (SJRI)
Editor-in-Chief – Studies in Social Justice
Brock University, St. Catharines, CANADA, L2S 3A1
Tel: (905) 688-5550 ext.3205
Fax: (905) 688-6369

www.brocku.ca/social-justice-research-institute
www.studiesinsocialjustice.org
www.brocku.ca/social-sciences/undergraduate-programs/geography/faculty/david-butz

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