Editorial Objectives
Changing Mobilities addresses the important nexus between social innovation, social science and design, engineering, and policies of (im)mobilities from diverse international and disciplinary perspectives. Authors and editors explore a wide range of transformations in mobile living, relating to changing practices of movement, blocked movement or immobility of people, objects, information, and ideas. Contributions are methodologically and theoretically innovative, and written in a lively, accessible and engaging manner, exhibiting the empirical detail of mobile living, debating societal and environmental implications, and socio-technical opportunities, security threats, challenges, mobilisations and risks. Critique is constructive, bringing different disciplinary perspectives to the issues (from the social sciences, arts, design, cultural and media studies, humanities, geography, human-computer interaction, international relations, politics, computing, engineering). The defining feature is that each contribution is grounded in a firm appreciation of how its contents relate to the broader imperatives associated with one of the most challenging aspects of the contemporary world: changing and complexly interdependent mobilities of people, objects, information and ideas.
With cheap travel, more than two billion cars projected worldwide for 2030, and ever more pervasive mobile computing technologies, more people, more goods, more data, more life are moving ever faster, farther and more frequently in the 21st Century. Mobilities research addresses critical dimensions of the associated sociotechnical transformations that cut across all domains of society. The mobilities turn is one of the most vibrant and important innovations in social science, but it is still under published considering the élan of its proponents, and its contributions are scattered across too many diverse headings. Changing Mobilities will form an important focus and vehicle for mobilities debates within and beyond the social science literatures, design and policy-making circles.
