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This special issue of Mobility Humanities explores the experiences and interactions of stopovers in transport infrastructure. It has two thematic foci: First, we analyse experiences of dwelling and states of being-in-theworld during moments of immobility embedded in the mobile life of modernity. Second, we explore social interactions in immobile situations during travel and journeys. The common argument linking the articles is that experiences of pausing, waiting and stopping during travel are not simply interruptions, but rather important aspects of mobile life that foster social interaction and community building. All articles draw on ethnographic studies and analyses of cultural production (literature and video) to explore how people experience these moments of (im)mobility and how they shape our understanding of mobility, place and environment.

The article focuses on the relationship of waiting and (im)mobility. I draw on a video installation by Adnan Softić and his team which puts the “Bibby Challenge” at its centre, an accommodation vessel reappropriated to temporarily house persons escaping the Yugoslav War in Hamburg, Germany. The video is characterised by an interplay of found footage material, sound production, off-commentary, and iconic images of boats. By analysing the audio-visual mediation of waiting, the article unfolds its ambivalent semantics of waiting. I argue that the video allows us to grapple with the politics of waiting and to critically address well-established assumptions about (im)mobility and migration. This holds for the experience of waiting, the history of migration movements, and the discourse about migration. Eventually, the video points to the shared logic of managing goods shipped worldwide and the “management” of migration by nation states. Following the hints towards logistical just-in-time organisation of world trade with its wish for well-synchronised flows, the video offers to unfold the logistic management of migration which seeks to smooth the so-called flow of persons by making them wait.

Dwelling is often understood by static dimensions. This article sets out to mobilise the notion of dwelling by first drawing on the migrant philosophy of Vilém Flusser and comparing it with the views of Martin Heidegger and Marc Augé. Thereafter, the idea of dwelling in mobility is applied to a case study on East German long-distance lorry drivers. Based on extensive field research, including autoethnography, the author demonstrates the practices of long-haul drivers who inhabit their cabs as living spaces when being on the road and tend to prefer them over their flats. Further, he compares space and time available for long-distance drivers and demonstrates that, unlike space, there is ample time, guaranteed by the lorry’s tachograph, a control device that alleviates exploitation by employers. In this context, the article shows that on the highly competitive market of lorry driving it is not stricter legislation but the technological control of that legislation that provides the backdrop for dwelling experiences. After considering different qualities of waiting, the article concludes that long-haul lorry drivers in Germany, due to the lack of available space and the existence of sufficient time frames, find their ground for dwelling rather in temporal than spatial dimensions.

This paper presents some auto-ethnographic experiments in the embodied, affective and material encounters enabled by being in transit over land for longer than 24 hours. As a form of travel that is increasingly available in some places and increasing marginal elsewhere, long-distance overland travel offers a different perspective to passengering. Like others who have investigated shared spaces of transit like commuter trains and aeromobilites, this paper explores what happens when people are stuck together, moving with each other while simultaneously skimming along a surface. Taking these as sites of encounter—where bodies, technologies and social and material infrastructures are coming into contact with each other, while shaped by human circadian needs—I explore how interactions and encounters are enabled by the persistent co-presence of being trapped together over long-distances of transit. In particular, I focus on how different forms of shared proximities and distances manifest through both interactions and civil inattention that occur between both passengers inside and the passing world outside.

Usually, drivers decide where and when to take a break. However, sometimes accidents, treacherous weather, medical circumstances, political protests, or traffic congestion can lead to unplanned stops, interrupting their journeys and forcing them to take breaks. This paper examines the effects of road closures on service areas based on an incident involving an onset of adverse weather conditions in the late winter season that affected both lorry drivers and service area employees. I apply a concept of waiting integrated into mobility that rejects the duality of driving and resting and thus can transcend the functionalities classically ascribed to the service area. In the paper, I draw on ethnographic data collected during a snowstorm at a service area in north-western Bulgaria in February 2020.

The end of the American war in Vietnam in April 1975 saw hundreds of thousands fleeing to the United States and other countries by plane and in risky journeys by boat. Characterised by precarious longdistance movement, the refugee angle thus challenges romanticised notions of mobility which celebrate the unworried and freely chosen nomadism of rootless wanderers. However, refugees’ escapes entail not only involuntary and perilous mobility, but also forced and insecure immobility marked by uncertainty and impermanence. For example, exiled subjects are detained in refugee camps and obliged to stop, wait and contrive strategies for transitory dwelling in unfamiliar environments. In this paper, I will focus on contemporary Vietnamese American fictional productions that imagine refugees’ breaks on their escapes in refugee camps. The spotlight lies on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Vu Tran’s Dragonfish, two novels by 1.5-generation writers—who were born in Vietnam and fled at a young age—whose narrators under consideration are members of the first generation. Emphasising the collective elements of displacement and emplacement, these refugee camp narratives encode various refugee experiences that illustrate the long-lasting importance of ties nurtured and created in these physically, but not socially immobilising spaces.

Based on ethnography of airports in Eastern Arctic Russia (Chukotka), this article examines institutionalised practices of active waiting prior to the boarding of an aircraft, called the podsadka. On the one hand, a distinct feature of Russian Arctic aviation is its unpredictability. Delays, cancellations of flights, and persistent waiting by passengers are an inevitable part of the everyday life of airports in Chukotka. On the other hand, even in remote places of the Russian North, airports are spaces of heightened control. This article argues that the disjuncture between the rigidity of airports and the flexibility of people creates a podsadka game among passengers and contributes to its “hunting”/“active” peculiarities. The article begins with a comparison of passenger and air carrier perspectives, which are termed “lucky” and “efficient” mobilities, respectively. It expands on this theme by considering airports as spaces for displays of diverse airport regulations and passenger intentions. Finally, it focuses on specific traits of Chukotkan mobility that include overcoming multiple queues and waiting, revealing the strategies applied by local people to be lucky in their travels.

This piece aims to prompt the audience to engage with the contextual background of “An Interview with Harriet Hawkins,” conducted by Jinhyoung Lee. Harriet Hawkins’ works over the past ten years can be summarised using three keywords: creativity, GeoHumanities, and the politics of writing. They are considered to encapsulate the essence of her ongoing research. First, creativity is understood not only as the preserve of the artistic genius that produces creative outputs but also as an everyday creative practice that enables individuals to live differently. In this vein, she seeks to advance a creative (re)turn in geography. Second, the term “GeoHumanities” can be defined as the intensification of work at the intersections of geographical practice with arts and humanities practice. It allows her to conceptualise the notion of “a research aesthetics,” as conducted by artists, and “an experiment with the GeoHumanities,” as practised by researchers. Finally, Hawkins endeavours to combine paraethonography and autoethonography by orienting “an injunction to keep questioning” towards her research culture and her own research. This can be defined as a politics of writing that attempts to envisage life, research, and worlds in a different manner.

Harriet Hawkins is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She is the author of For Creative Geographies(2013), Creativity (2016) and Geography, Art, Research (2020), and coeditor of Geographical Aesthetics (2014) and Geographies of Making Craft and Creativity (2017). Hawkins is the founding co-director of the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities, and an associate editor and member of the founding editorial collective of the AAG journal GeoHumanities and is the editor of the journal Cultural Geographies.

This study examines how the geographical identity of the Korean Peninsula was formed in the early-modern, that is, Joseon Dynasty period, and what characteristics it had. The elements that made up the perception of the land have been summarised into just four elements: mountains, rivers, roads, and settlements. Among these, an important feature was the integration of physical geography and human geography, with mountains (including watersheds, leading from Mt. Baekdu) representing nature, and roads representing human geography. Such integrated geographical identity was systematised and explained by scholars that valued both theory (such as Fengshui thought) and practice in the eighteenth century, called Silhak. Therefore, the identity of land that merged human and physical geography was both a national identity and a means to recognise the coordinates of the land. Behind this recognition was a strong attachment to territory and boundaries, stemming from geopolitical factors such as asserting national borders internationally, which was at work work in the cultural politics of the government (imperial court) level cultural politics.