The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities

The 21st century seems to be on the move, perhaps even more so than the last. With cheap travel, and more than two billion cars projected worldwide for 2030, more people and more goods are moving ever faster, farther and more frequently. However, all this moving about is happening incredibly unevenly, at different paces and intensities, with alternate rhythms or cadence and with varying impacts and consequences. These are, in other words, very different lives on the move and they might be quite difficult to sustain environmentally, socially and ethically. In order to grasp at these trends, 'mobility' has become a keyword of the social sciences; delineating a new domain of concepts, approaches, methodologies and techniques which seek to understand the character and quality of mobilities and immobilities with more subtlety and detail than before.

The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities explores and critically evaluates the debates, approaches, controversies and methodologies, inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. This authoritative review is timely given the increasing interdisciplinary proliferation of 'mobility studies' across the social sciences, arts and humanities, and remarkable transformations, developments, decisions and behaviours occurring in the ways we move. It brings together leading specialists from range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessible way whilst giving detailed grounding in the evolution of past debates on mobilities. It illustrates disciplinary trends and pathways from migration studies and transport history to communications research, featuring methodological innovations and developments and conceptual histories - from feminist theory to tourist studies. It explores the dominant figures of mobility, from children to soldiers and the mobility impaired; the disparate materialities of mobility such as flows of water and waste to the vectors of viruses; key infrastructures such as logistics systems to the informal services of megacity slums, and the important mobility events around which our world turns; from going on vacation to the commute, to the catastrophic disruption of mobility systems.

The text will also be forward-thinking, projecting the future of mobilities as they might be lived, transformed and studied, and possibly, brought to an end. International in focus, the book transcends disciplinary and national boundaries to explore mobilities as they are understood from different perspectives, different fields, countries and standpoints.

This is an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in mobility across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study