Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings

Mobility has become an evocative keyword for the twenty-first century and a powerful discourse that creates its own effects and contexts. The concept of mobilities encompasses both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space and the travel of material things within everyday life. Issues of movement, of too little movement or too much or of the wrong sort or at the wrong time, are central to many lives, organisations and governments. Dreams of ‘hyper-mobility’ and ‘instantaneous communication’ drive contemporary business strategy, advertising and government policy while also eliciting strong political critiques from those who feel marginalised or harmed by these new developments. Fears of illicit mobilities and their attendant security risks increasingly determine logics of governance and liability protection within both the public and private sectors. From SARS and avian influenza to train crashes, from airport expansion controversies to controlling global warming, from urban congestion charging to networked global terrorism, from emergency management in the onslaught of tsunamis and hurricanes to oil wars in the Middle East, issues of ‘mobility’ are centre-stage. Many public, private and not-for-profit organizations are seeking to understand, monitor, manage and transform aspects of these multiple mobilities, and of the new ‘immobilities’, social exclusions and security threats that may be associated with them. And partly as an effect a ‘mobility turn’ is spreading into and transforming the social sciences, not only placing new issues on the table, but also transcending