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Mobility and memory articulate in numerous ways—and yet, until now, there has been no dedicated attempt to reflect upon the implications of this special relationship within the field of mobilities studies. My own work in the field—which straddles the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, sociology and cultural geography—suggests the reason for this lies primarily with the contemporaneity of the most influential mobilities scholarship to date. The research led by social scientists, in particular, has been preoccupied with analyses of the contemporary world in relation to the future rather than the past (including the definition of the new mobilities paradigm [“NMP”] itself by Sheller and Urry in 2006 [Sheller and Urry; Urry]). This is despite the fact that others working within the field, such as Colin Pooley (whose work is featured in this special issue), have long shown how the mobility tipping points of history echo and foreshadow those taking place today (e.g., Pooley; Pooley, Turnbull and Adams). While there is, of course, no necessary connection between historical research and the practice of personal and/or collective memory per se, an interest in thinking-backwards as well as thinking-forwards with respect to the operation of the mobilities paradigm is helpful. In this regard, the work of geographers and historians working within the mobilities field has been an especially important counterweight to the “futures-thinking” of the social scientists with innovative “retrospective” research on (for example): the mobilities of loss, grief and mourning (e.g., Maddrell, “Living with the Deceased” and “Mapping Grief”); family and social mobility (e.g., Holdsworth); and the legacies of Empire across a range of settings and applications (e.g., Clarsen; Coleborne, Insanity and “Consorting with ‘Others”’; Lambert and Merriman). Whether explicitly or implicitly, these subfields also engage with the issue of how we, as individuals and communities, access and remember the past through complex processes of memory and memorialisation

Based on passenger-seat ethnography with Yugoslavian-identifying people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article explores relationships between driving and the transformation of memory. I demonstrate how driving on decaying roads and the consumption of deconstructed Western popular culture—which so often provides the sonic background to such drives—are experienced as revealing the “public secret” of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s systemic flaws. Its systems of economic management and production, its foreign policy, and its domestic policy for addressing inter-ethnic tensions, including its approach to memory, render Yugoslavia perceptually as a nation always in state of simultaneous construction and deconstruction. In the processes of driving and listening, Yugoslavia is re-remembered increasingly as having fallen apart progressively rather than having unexpectedly collapsed. Furthermore, the Yugoslavia that was once experienced as home is now increasingly re-remembered as a place in which Yugoslavs never really belonged.

This article examines the US author Paul Auster’s twenty-first century fiction and traces that ephemeral moment, when encounters with and movements in places bring back forgotten memories, sometimes unwanted, through the body. The urban and other places through which Auster’s often unhappy and self-destructive characters move surprise them by making them re-live situations they would rather forget. These places form what Arnold H. Modell calls a “metonymic trigger” that activates a bodily memory, a process of recall and response, where the past and the present suddenly become indistinguishable. As such, memories are not echoes or representations of past events, but experiences in the here and now, and Auster’s literary fiction delicately articulates these experiences and captures the sense of immediacy and movement that accompanies memories and the processes of remembering. Memories are, however, also inextricably linked with imagination. Auster’s characters often find solace in imagined places, and the repeated encounters with these places soften the blow of encountering real ones. Gradually, the characters move from triggered body memories to a remembering that creates a distance between the trigger and the response. The powers of imagination, then, entangled with and emerging from bodily memories, seem essential in recontextualising the painful memories into something more manageable.

In the mid-1980s my father took the Alpine Shire to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to contest the proposed construction of a seventeen-metre-high concrete snowman. The Big Snowman was part of an Australian post Second World War tradition of constructing big kitsch monuments in small townships. These massive sculptures had been inherited from a similar trend in the United States and were designed to put communities on the tourist map by stopping the passing car in awe. Ultimately, my father was successful, and the Big Snowman was never built. Nonetheless, from the 1960s an estimated 350 Big Things were installed across Australia and around 150 still line Australian rural roadsides. This paper takes a mixed-method approach—utilising a family archive of documents related to the Big Snowman controversy, memory, and performance-based mobile fieldwork to ask what Big Things tell us about Australian national identity. Written in an auto-ethnographic style in conversation with mobilities, postcolonial, settler-colonial and feminist theory, this experimental paper articulates how elements of the “mechanic complex” that have been inherited from different countries can have complex site-specific meaning and impacts.

This paper uses diaries and oral history to assess the ways in which memory may alter accounts of migration and mobility. The diarist was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and in 1938, at the age of 18, she migrated to London (England) to work as a typist for the Inland Revenue. Her detailed diaries provide a vivid account of her migration and her subsequent life and mobility in London. Some 60 years after she came to London the diarist was interviewed in her own home, and was asked about her recollections of migration and of her new life in London. The paper focuses on three themes: the initial migration from Londonderry to London, building a life and travel in London, and her continued links to Ireland. For the most part the diary entries and the oral history account are very similar. The main differences relate to the ways in which some aspects, especially those linked to fear and uncertainty, have changed over time, with some worries fading but others becoming more pronounced, and through the impact of later acquired knowledge changing the diarist’s interpretation of events. It is concluded that both diaries and oral history can provide reasonably reliable and consistent accounts of past migration and mobility.

The decorated Japanese author Horie Toshiyuki’s omnibus, Oparaban, collects first-person narratives of a Japanese temporary resident of late 1990s Paris for whom the city is but a lived space (Lefebvre) of everyday life practices (Certeau), filled with multisensorial effects that the subject (the narrator) is immersed in, absorbs, and feels susceptible to. The urban space of Paris is also heterogeneous and volatile, as sensed in Roland Barthes’s Incidents. My paper discusses the story “M” in this volume, which revolves around body memories (Casey) of an incidental friendship between the Japanese narrator and Moroccan men living in Paris that develops at a subway station, through watching Formula 1 races on TV, and over ethnic food made from supermarket ingredients. These circumstances complicate the binaries of mobility and immobility, immediacy and distance, authenticity and alterity, and memory and representation. The story reveals the ambiguity of Parisian urban space with its multiethnic commodities and racialised bodies that are both fluid and frozen. The intradiegetic narrator, in his attempt at making sense of memories still palpable in immanent time (Husserl), associates them with literary, photographic, and cinematic memories in topographical and topological terms, including Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M.

Family trees initially seem innocuous and mundane. However, as an ongoing “project of mobility” which (re)shapes “family,” family treeing can (im)mobilise relations with past, present and future kin in ways that shape and are shaped by past, present and future narratives. In this theoretical and speculative paper, I explore this thesis by taking a special interest in childless family members and in understanding how practices of family treeing enable or prevent their stories, and even knowledge of their existence, from travelling through time. The article contributes to debates on family and intimate mobilities by showing that in addition to the complex assemblage of mobilities that maintain social connections in the present, family mobilities involve i) mobilities of knowledge, in addition to physical mobilities and ii) connectivities that stretch into longer timeframes than those discussed in family and intimate mobilities to date. The article also contributes to debates on mobility and memory by exploring the mobilities of different kinds of intergenerational knowledge, and their possible significance in (re)producing ideas of “family.” The significance of these ideas is explored through a discussion of family members in the present who are childless-not-by-choice, and their lived experiences of bereavement, taboo, meaning and legacy.

Since the early 19th century, developments in the British railway industry have been, and continue to be, regularly celebrated through commemorative practices. These acts of remembrance for different elements of the industry’s history are presented through a series of “components” (Papadakis) including celebratory events, material culture, and literature. Crucially, these components are drawn together to create a linear narrative of “progress” that concertinas time between the historic event being remembered and the commemorative event itself. This paper will demonstrate the role of “mobilities” in the context of commemorations of British railways from the mid-19th century to the present. Focusing primarily on elements of the industry’s history connected to Britain’s East Coast Main Line, this paper will demonstrate how the coalescence of the static, the moving, and the metaphorical contribute to the pervasiveness of the mobility of linear narratives of progress over time and space, ultimately erasing the spiderweb trajectories of technological development from popular culture and memory. In doing so, it will consider the deeper relationship between vehicles of mobility and the pathways —or punctuation points—of memory they help stimulate and cement in the public consciousness.

Tim Cresswell is a human geographer and poet, a hugely original and insightful writer and teacher, and an influential force within the discipline of Geography, the interdisciplinary field of mobility studies and much further afield. This interview, recorded in February 2020 in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (Tim has since written about “valuing” mobility during COVID-19 [2021]), was recorded by Jinhyoung Lee and myself over breakfast in Tim’s home in Edinburgh. He is currently Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh, after serving as Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Tim was awarded his first PhD under the supervision of Yi-Fu Tuan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a second PhD in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University of London on Topo-poetics: Poetry and Place (2015) under the supervision of the poet Jo Shapcott. The relationship between mobility, place and creative writing can be compared to a triple-helix of concerns we discuss through his work and this interview.

PA (Peter Adey): Firstly, I’d like to say thank you very much for agreeing to talk to us. I thought we were going to start off talking about something that has inspired the Academy of Mobility Humanities (AMH), and this journal, which is in relation to Pearce and Merriman's book and special issue of Mobilities (2017), “Mobility and the Humanities.” One of the interesting things they highlighted was a counter version of the way that the new mobilities paradigm and mobility studies could be constructed. They question the more social science driven origins, and present an alternative history to the new mobilities paradigm. Obviously, knowing your work very well, I wondered how you saw that kind of history? TC (Tim Cresswell): I think that until I saw that reference to an alternative history, I did not think that was necessary as a construct because, for me, I think that the way mobility and mobility studies became prominent was through the humanities. I never considered that it was anything other than that. And so, as they note in the paper, when I write about such things, I tend to note that thinking about mobilities connects the social sciences, the humanities, and, indeed, the arts. When I think about where my inspirations were, before the new mobilities paradigm paper and before John Urry's book, Sociology Beyond Societies (2000), there was work being done in a of number of fields, including anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, and literary studies that focused in one way or another on mobilities. So if you look at Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes(1992), you could say the only reason it’s not mobilities work was because it wasn't identified as such. It was clearly starting to talk about these ideas of transculturation and moving between things. And James Clifford was talking about living between sites, not focusing on one place as an anthropological piece of work but living across the routes with a “u” rather than roots with the two “o”s. In philosophy, there were all the works that were happening under the guise of postmodernism that cantered fluidity and the nomadic. Even in sociology, if you read a book of Zygmunt Bauman, you can call that social science or you can call that Humanities. The same is true of John Urry (Tourist Gaze, Sociology Beyond Societies, and Mobilities). If you read Mimi Sheller’s work, it is as much informed by the humanities as it is by social sciences. When I hear reference to the social sciences, I tend to think of something a bit more reductive than it needs to be. I think of a more empiricist, slightly more quantitative tradition that still tries to maintain the word “science.” But there is clearly the interpretive social sciences which overlap with the humanities. In my own work I think that all my trajectory of thinking about mobility is inspired by the Humanities or what would be recognised as humanities, including creative arts and literature.

In “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experience,” Erik Cohen outlines two ways of tourism centred on the world of meaning. For a person whose work and life are in line with the world of meaning, tourism appears to be a temporal break away from the life he agrees with and the spiritual centre. In contrast, for people whose daily lives are alienated from the spiritual centre of their own society, travel often appears as a pilgrimage to look for another spiritual centre. If, according to Cohen, different individuals need to be attached to different centres of sense, if the tourist experience is tightly related to the spiritual centre, then it seems to suggest that the exploration of the senses or meanings of travel initiated by this context must further consider the questions that follow: (1) How to break through the stereotypes and the rubric of the existing spiritual centre in order to achieve a reconstruction of the sense in the tourist experience; (2) how the tourist can recognise a “proper” touristic experience; (3) utilising the perspectives of MeleauPonty and Levinas to discuss the meaning of corporal vision, corporal space and travel; (4) whether or how to discover the meaning of Self during the travel.

This is the first introduction to mobilities studies, authored by one of the pioneering and leading scholars in the field, Mimi Sheller. Starting to be theoretically sought by John Urry and his colleagues engaging mainly in social sciences at Lancaster University about two decades ago, mobilities research increasingly brings together scholars from different academic backgrounds. This includes not only sociology, geography, and anthropology but also cultural and literary studies, art, and philosophy, testifying to its transdisciplinarity (Adey et al. 3). By defining the new mobilities paradigm not simply as “a totalising or reductive description of the contemporary world” but rather as “a set of questions, theories, and methodologies” (Sheller and Urry 210), it has propelled the “streams of scholarship that develop different theories, methods, and ‘styles’ of analysis in order to understand mobilities” (Faulconbridge and Hui 4). The publication of the first introduction in a condensed, small format, therefore, may be deemed to demonstrate the scholarship’s exuberance and elusiveness of continuously emerging offshoots; thus, which necessitates a guideline for entering the academia.