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In their essay, “High Mobility as Social Phenomena,” Gil Viry and Vincent Kaufmann used the term “high mobility” to signify that “work-related forms of long-distance travel” have intensified in most industrialised countries (1). It distinctly expressed an essential aspect of lifestyle emerging significantly in the 21st century, the routinisation of geographically distant movement for work amongst other reasons. In the age of “planetary urbanisation”(Brenner 162), the term goes far beyond the western world and the area of work-related travels they focused on, as described appositely in the opening paragraph of the seminal book,Mobilities (2007), by one of the pioneers of mobility studies, John Urry:

This paper is an introduction to the philosophy of movement. It describes the contemporary motivations and goals of the project as well as its similarities and differences with the mobilities paradigm and process philosophy. I argue that what is unique about the philosophy of movement is that it is the only philosophy that accepts the primacy of motion as its methodological starting point. The philosophy of movement is the analysis of phenomena across social, aesthetic, scientific, and ontological domains from the perspective of motion. It is a philosophy of indeterminacy or processes understood as processes. That is, not as a sequence of static discontinuous occasions as or as a continuous vital energy. In the philosophy of movement, the world is made of processes whose relatively stable iterations generate the phenomena we see around us. Things are emergent “metastable” patterns of indeterminate motion.

What might mobility look like at the end of the world? In this paper I explore different apprehensions of inter-planetary mobility or “evacuation” as our Earth appears to become uninhabitable for life, and humanity is forced to seek a way to “exit” or evacuate the planet. In these imaginings of mobilities in the future, rendered at a sometimes impossibly vast, planetary scale, evacuation has become a common trope for drama, used as a technical but dramatic device that is often left unquestioned or critically examined. And yet these forms of planetary evacuation tend to repeat other aesthetic and narrative forms that are interrogated within the paper at length,especially as they pertain to problematic gendered, racial, colonial and reproductive logics. Sketching out this extreme form of “emergency mobility” through science fiction literature and film,the paper explores the politics, ethics and potential (in)justices of planetary evacuation mobilities. But planetary evacuations are perhaps not as interesting on their own because of what they might say about how we perform and imagine evacuation mobilities on the Earth now, and in the near future.

The studies of people’s migration and artistic mobilisation are traditionally viewed separately as discreet critical and disciplinary practices: the former is said to belong to the social sciences and the latter, to the humanities. From this perspective, Literature, for example, is considered to belong to the Arts and Humanities. However, this paper suggests that Literature could constitute an axis of articulation of mobile forces of real diasporic lives studied by the social sciences and of itinerant figures of imagined lives depicted by the arts. This paper shows such an intersection through a close reading of “Arrivederci,” an award-winning Tagalog short story written by Fanny A. Garcia, a multi-awarded fictionist in the Philippines. This short story was published in the early 1980s, during the early years of “exporting” Filipino labour as government policy during the Marcos dictatorship. The analysis points to how a literary text could both depict the dire conditions of the life of Filipino domestic workers in diaspora and foreshadow the by-now-familiar narrative of the so-called “mga bagong bayani” (“the new heroes”)‚ the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). In this narrative, what unfold are the textualualization of the concrete experience of migration of Filipino overseas domestic helpers and the realisation of the principle of aesthetic structuring in a literary text. Both in Philippine literary history and the history of Filipino migration since the 1970s, the significance of “Arrivederci” is in its early, almost prescient,literary iteration of the specificity of the experience of the overseas contract workers, foreshadowing its later reiteration in their real lives, which this paper refers to as diasporic claustrophobia.

Historically, recreational running grew partially with the aim of controlling the side effects of “sedentary” lifestyles and physical inactivity, i.e.,obesity, heart diseases and other health risks. This trend developed in the 19th century, with the emergence of middle classes who had the requisite time and resources to exercise during their leisure time. Recreational running became popular in the 1970s, within the context of renewed societal attention to fitness and physical health, which developed in countries such as the USA and spread quickly to other industrialised nations. Based on ethnographic research, I discuss in this article the crucial role that mobile tracking devices, as markers of an active lifestyle, play in keeping runners (im)mobile. I focus on how the data generated by GPS sports watches are widely shared and used by runners and their followers in general as well as specialised social media platforms. I disentangle why, paradoxically, these mobility technologies make exemplary mobile people more immobile, because many hours are spent behind electronic device screens to communicate (and seeking social approval for) their mobile performances. I place my critical anthropological analysis of recreational running and mobility technologies within the context of wider societal trends related to (self-)discipline.

In 1878, Dr. Heinrich Rothdauscher, a German pharmacist working in Vigan, made a short expedition to the Cordilleras. He published his experiences as a memoir in 1932 (Lebenserinnerungen eines Deutschen Apothekers). Although Rothdauscher, who described himself as having a highly developed musical sense, did not dwell at length upon matters of music, some of his observations are pertinent to understanding the phenomenon of late nineteenth century Western contact with Philippine indigenous and syncretic musical traditions. More importantly, his vivid descriptions of Philippine colonial soundscapes in cities and remote tribal settlements are uniquely intriguing and unusually vivid. His observations are all the more interesting since these were made at the time of the invention of the phonograph in 1877 by the American Thomas Edison. Rothdauscher describes what may be the last moments in which certain types of Philippine music and their corresponding soundscapes were at at the very threshold of the era of the commodification of sound.

Professor Mimi Sheller visited the Academy of Mobility Humanities (AMH) in December 2019 to hold a special lecture titled “Movements for Mobility Justice,” and to commemorate the publication of the Korean edition of her celebrated book Mobility Justice. On this occasion, I was honoured to interview this distinguished scholar who is widely acknowledged in mobilities studies. This interview, which was held on December 12, 2019 at Konkuk University in Seoul, was planned for the interdisciplinary journal of Mobility Humanities, embracing the perspective of “the humanities of mobility, that is,the mobility humanities” (Kim et al. 100) which was then at the stage of planning and the inaugural issue of which is now present in this form.

TK (Taehee Kim): I would like to firstly congratulate you on the publication of the Korean edition of Mobility Justice. I believe that this book will become a catalyst for expanding the new mobilities paradigm throughout South Korea. Thank you for agreeing to interview today at such short notice, we are delighted to have you here with us. MS (Mimi Sheller): It’s my pleasure, thank you for having me here today, I am excited to have the opportunity to help spread the new mobilities paradigm in Korea. TK: As this interview will be published in the first issue of our new journal, Mobility Humanities, I believe this will be a great outlet to spread the notion of mobility justice to scholars throughout the globe. MS: Excellent! TK: This interview has two agendas. We will firstly discuss your book, Mobility Justice, and then in broader terms to discuss the new mobilities paradigm. At the end of the interview, I would appreciate some advice on our new Mobility Humanities journal.

A hallmark of the American century of the car is people known as automotive enthusiasts. This article asks: What is an enthusiast conceptually, and how is this enthusiasm organised empirically in grassroots and corporate car culture events? Undergirding this quest is the likelihood that a variety of conditions, not least increasing driver assistance technologies and perhaps eventually autonomous vehicles, will sever the multi-sensory engagement of enthusiasts and their cars, relegating enthusiasm in the future to a marginal pursuit of relatively few people. The article explores the concepts of subjectivity/self/identity, subcultural membership, lifestyles, hobbyists, fans and the special case of the car collector, who may be the paramount enthusiast. It then examines four examples of organised car culture,two grassroots (RADwood and Luftgekült) and two corporate (Hagerty and the Porsche Club of America [PCA]). The paper concludes with a call to analyse the phenomenological experience of automotive enthusiasm as a kind of corporeal-technological world view.

Facebook, an online social media and networking site, offers services that can tremendously transform contemporary lives and the identity Facebook users project to the public. Its visual capability is so powerful that it can easily supplant a voluble written statement. The visual acuity that is enabled by Facebook technology is a dead-on centre by its eloquence, rendering affordances to some Filipino-German women, the subject of the study. It is this visual capability that is appropriated by them. There are tens of thousands of Filipino women married to German nationals contracted through international marriage social media agencies and sites or informal modes of marriage arrangements. Such transnational marriages have enabled their diaspora, rendering the mobilisation of lives. This notion of mobility through transnational marriage unions is taken a step further by Filipino-German women through their appropriation of Facebook technology, mobilising it to construct narratives of their lives. Using Tim Cresswell’s politics of mobility, John Urry’s metaphors of mobilities, and John Bollmer’s notion of identity and the social media, the paper decodes their Facebook posts to read representations of themselves as cosmopolitan transnationals, both “corporeally and in a virtual sense,” amidst hostile immigration systems that “police” movement and the crossing of borders.

The book Mobilities, Literature, Culture by Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce stems from the so-called “humanities turn” in mobility studies, and the increasing contribution of cultural geography, literary, and cultural studies to a field mostly connected to the social sciences. Tracing back to the pre-history of the new mobility paradigm, the editors underline both its interdisciplinary origins and its multi-disciplinary applications,by which complex visions of mobilities emerged over the last decades (Jensen et al.). The possible lines of research of this both historically rooted and recently growing dialogue are already charted by the editors’ profiles: In fact, Pearce has both mapped the relation between mobility studies and the humanities (Merriman and Pearce), working also on literary representations of automobilities; Mathieson has been working on mobilities analysing works from nineteenth-century British sea narratives to travel literature and the nineteenth-century novel; and, finally, Aguiar’s research has focused on migration and also on African and South Asian representations of colonial and postcolonial railways.