Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in An Age of Extremes

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day. We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and extreme challenges of urbanization. At the same time it is difficult to ignore the deaths of thousands of migrants at sea or in deserts, the xenophobic treatment of foreign-born populations, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the persistence of racist violence and ethnic exclusions on our front doorstep. This, in turn, is connected to other kinds of uneven mobility: relations between people, access to transport, urban infrastructures and global resources such as food, water, and energy. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of mobility. She shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, connecting these scales of the body, street, city, nation, and planet into one overarching theory of mobility justice. This can be seen on a local level in the differential circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and 'the right to the city'. On the planetary scale, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other kinetic elites are able to roam freely, the military origins of global infrastructure, and the contested politics of migration and restricted borders. Mobility Justice offers a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility of a world in which the mobility commons has been enclosed.

About the Author :
Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is the author of Democracy after Slavery, Consuming the Caribbean, Citizenship from Below and Aluminum Dreams.

Review :
This is a stunning book! It is beautifully reasoned and well-documented and demonstrates Sheller's mastery of her material, but it is much more. It is original in its approach ... and above all, it is elegantly and sensitively written.' Beautifully written, clearly argued . . . a wonderful book that deserves considerable attention It is a tour de force of cultural-material analysis, successful at many registers including the satisfactions of a mind-expanding reading experience. Her shimmering story of aluminum dreams links the very centers of global power, mobility, and communications with other places of abject poverty and environmental degradation. How people and materials move around our globalised planet is central to our intensifying environmental crises, pollution crises and increasingly murderous refugee crises. And yet mobilities are still often partitioned off as the technical and depoliticised stuff of engineers. This brilliant book should change this once and for all. A brilliant and searing exposé of the politics of movement and mobility, Mobility Justice forces questions of social and racial justice to the heart of debates about migration, transportation, smart cities, militarising borders, and planetary ecology. A unique and pivotal book... The essential fieldguide to the politics of mobility from the policing of racialized bodies to the impact of movement on climate change Sheller articulates the urgency of both understanding, and acting on, the ways we move in order to imagine and articulate a better world.