New Book Out by C-MUS Professor Ole B. Jensen: Staging Mobilities, Routledge
In recent
years, the social sciences have taken a ‘mobilities turn’. There has
been a developing realisation that mobilities do not ‘just happen’.
Mobilities are carefully and meticulously designed,
planned and staged (from above). However, they are equally importantly
acted out, performed and lived as people are ‘staging themselves’ (from
below). Staging mobilities is a dynamic process between ‘being staged’
(for example, being stopped at traffic lights)
and the ‘mobile staging’ of interacting individuals (negotiating a
passage on the pavement). Staging Mobilities is about the fact
that mobility is more than movement between point A and B. It explores
how the movement of people, goods, information,
and signs influences human understandings of self, other and the built
environment. Moving towards a new understanding of the relationship
between movement, interaction and environments, the book asks: what are the physical, social, technical, and cultural
conditions to the staging of contemporary urban mobilities? Jensen
argues that we need to understand the contemporary city as an assemblage
of circulating people, goods, information and signs in relational
networks creating the ‘meaning of movement’. The
book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, urban
studies, mobility studies, architecture and cultural studies.
