Mobilities: Co-Editor News
Mobilities is very pleased and excited to announce that two new Co-Editors – Julie L. Cidell, Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA and Marian Aguiar, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA will be joining our team on 1 July and we look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration.
In welcoming Marian and Julie it is with a heavy heart we announce that Mimi Sheller is stepping down after almost 17 years. As one of our co-founding Editors Mimi has been an integral part of Mobilities, in fact her name is synonymous with mobilities research the world-over. She is such a powerhouse of energy and creativity, and she will be sorely missed by us all. We wish her every success in whatever the future holds for her – and we are sure it will be amazing!
Peter Adey, Kevin Hannam, David Tyfield and Pennie Drinkall
Julie Cidell has long been a member of the Mobilities community, where her research focus is on urban infrastructure, local governments, and the relationship between mobility and spatiality. She studies how local governments and individual actors matter in struggles over large-scale infrastructure and policy development and the corresponding urban environments that are produced, including airports, railroads, logistics hubs, and freeway protests, as well as green buildings and urban sustainability policies. Imagining Sustainability: Creative Urban Environmental Governance in Chicago and Melbourne (Routledge, 2017), compares these two cities in terms of how actors in each place conceptualize and imagine the environment and what difference that makes to their policies and programs. She is currently editing A Research Agenda for Transport Equity and Justice (Edward Elgar) and is an associate editor for the Journal of Transport Geography. She teaches on urban geography, transportation and sustainability, and mobility justice, as encapsulated in her forthcoming textbook, An Introduction to Transportation Geography: Transport, Mobility, and Place (Rowman & Littlefield).
Marian’s work focuses on the intersection of culture and globalization, and comprises the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, transnationalism and diaspora, and global feminism. Her interdisciplinary research in mobilities studies draws primarily on the methods of literary and cultural studies to think through representations of movement, though she is keenly interested in the ways these cultural imaginaries take shape through institutional forms, such as law. Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (University of Minnesota, 2012) considers how depictions of the railway articulated notions of modernity and mobility in colonial and postcolonial India. Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora (University of Minnesota, 2018) looks at the transnational movement of people and concepts by considering cultural narratives about arranged marriage. As someone with family ties to India, she has always been particularly interested in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, but her current project on refugee mobilities extends to a broader geographic context by exploring migration and the imagination of movement in various border contexts. A recent article on art work incorporating emergency floatation devices from the Mediterranean refugee crisis reflects these new interests. For the past few years, she has co-edited a Palgrave book series on literature, culture, and mobility with Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce; in 2019 they published Mobilities, Literature, Culture, the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars’ engagement with mobilities scholarship.
