The Department of Human Geography of the Radboud University of Nijmegen cordially invites you to the Alexander von Humboldt Lecture series on the theme of ‘Culture(s) of Mobility’. Under this theme, we will analyse a new view on the analysis of ‘Mobility’.

The geography of modern society seems to be constituted by different places and the interaction between these places. Movement of people, goods, money, information and ideas is an important component of these relationships between places. And in our globalising society the relationships between places all around the globe seems to grow in importance. As a result, almost everything seems to be on the move. We live in a mobile world. But what drives this process of ever increasing mobility and what effects does it have on our daily lives and on the way our society is organised?

Until recently in social sciences in general and human geography in particular, places were seen as rather fixed containers and movements were conceptualised as movement from one stable state to another. Stability and being in one place was seen as normal. Such ‘sedentarism’ locates bounded and authentic places or regions or nations as the fundamental basis of human identity and experience and as the basic units of social research. On the other hand it is sometimes assumed that in our globalised and post-modern times nothing is stable anymore and we seem to live in a ‘deterritorialised’ world, where everything is flowing and moving. This is what Zygmunt Bauman designated as ‘liquid modernity’ and could also be denoted as ‘hyper-mobility’, or characterised as a ‘nomadist’ conception of our current society.

In the first rather simplified ‘sedentarist’ and mechanistic view, the only thing changing is the location or place of the people or things moving. What is often forgotten is the intricate relationship between places, identities and movement. What makes a place is to a large part determined by what does not move and is seen as permanent part of that locality. But it is also determined by what moves and changes. Issues of movement, of too little movement or too much, or of the wrong sort at the wrong time, are central to what we see as (authentic) part of a place, and or see as ‘different’ from that place, as strange or alien. Movement therefore makes and breaks places and transforms modern societies. Mobility, the degree and kind of movement, therefore is central to the structuration process and dynamics of our society, and thus is much more than just the sec movement from well established and stable place A to the other well established and stable place B and also involves much more than just the technical infrastructure for this movement from A to B. Mobility is full of socially produced meanings and involves power relations; there is the distinction between the tourist and the vagabond, the scientist and the illegal migrant. It is about how our society is continuously constituted and changing. It is part of our cultural dynamics. As a consequence of these social meanings and cultural dynamics, mobility means more than movement across space, as Cresswell (2006) formulates it in geographical terms: Movement is the dynamic equivalent of location while mobility is the dynamic equivalent of place.

At the other hand also the alternative ‘hyper-mobility’ view, where everything seems to be on the move, and we can only think in terms of mobility, also falls short, and overlooks the intricate relationship between mobility and immobility. It presupposes a utopian hyper-mobility in which ‘nomadism’ is romanticised. If every difference is dissolved in mobility and transformation and if all differences are lost in the indeterminacies of a melting modernity, the actual engine and motivation for mobility – the spatially differentiated society – is lost, and the concept of mobility itself is emptied of any meaning. At the same time every global networks of mobility is also dependent on, clearly identifiable, stable and reliable nodes and relay points. Moreover, the emphasis on mobility overlooks contemporary geo-politics of immobilisation. As it is often stated in the context of EU’s border regimes the mobility of some might mean the immobilisation of others. So talking about mobility involves the cultural interaction between movement and stability, about spatial structure and change, about identification and alienation. In this lecture series we want to address the way in which both sedentary and nomadic accounts of the social world operate, and it questions how that context is itself mobilised, or performed, through ongoing sociotechnical practices, of intermittently mobile material worlds (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 211).

Drawing upon your own interest and/or research we invite you to engage with the issues raised here. Building on recent major scholarly interventions addressing these concerns, an international roster of guest lecturers will be invited to Nijmegen to collaborate with in-house staff, external scholars and students to analyse and evaluate how to reflect on the Culture(s) of Mobility in human geographic research.

Sheller, M. & Urry, J. (2006) The new mobilities paradigm. In: Environment and Planning A. Vol. 38, pp. 207-226.

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