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While detours permeate people’s daily lives, scholars have rarely focused their attention on the potential of detours to inform new meanings and space-time relationships in mobilities. This special issue probes the logics, sensibilities and experiences that detouring entails as a social and cultural endeavour. In this introduction, we acknowledge the concept’s frequent association with inconvenience and frustration, and touch on its more fruitful or subversive compositions, epitomised by the notion of dérive and other humanities concerns. We then chart a range of emergent and promising uses of detours in the fields of migration, pedestrianism, the arts and literary studies. Finally, we highlight three theoretical impetuses at stake in following these elongated paths. The collection of papers forming this special issue questions the generativeness of such circuitous motion, beyond its productivist framing. They focus on the intentionality, tactics, and aesthetics of the people performing them, while paying attention to the entanglements of (non)human agencies engaged in these topologies of space-time.

The 2015 so-called “European refugee crisis” saw an unprecedented number of refugees enter Europe via the Balkan Route. Despite the corridor officially closing in March 2016, refugees continued to travel along the Route to reach Western Europe via (in)formal border crossings. This paper examines “The List,” a document that existed between the Serbian and Hungarian authorities to manage mobility across their shared border. It remained the single legal pathway to the European Union available to refugees based in Serbia from mid 2016 until March 2020. This article seeks to conceptualise the role of detours as a mechanism of governing (im)mobility along informal migration corridors. Detours, as mechanisms of control over mobility, offer a critical lens for understanding the interplay between power, temporality, and the lived experiences of forced migration. By exploring detours in this way, their dual role in fostering hope and agency while simultaneously enforcing control and exclusion can be examined.

This article focuses on migrant women’s im/mobilities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, with a case study of Mongolians in South Korea. An ethnographic study in 2021 and 2022 of 30 Mongolian women participants showed that they were both mobile and immobile, with their different trajectories of movement within their communities largely shaped by gender, economic precarity, and marginalised status. They drew maps of their communities which illuminated unmarked routes within this migrant destination. Interview narratives supplemented these maps and revealed timescales of critical incidences surrounding the participants’ migrations and mobilities. An analysis of the participant data illuminated gendered detours of migrant women. Such detours reflect migrant women’s marginalised livelihoods in host societies as well as geopolitical imbalances between global south and global north countries. Through this novel methodological approach, it was possible to see and know the worlds of migrant women on the move, many of whom are otherwise invisible and in places that are unrecognisable to non-migrants. Studying the desires and dislocations of migrant women in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic contributes to the burgeoning research on migration and im/mobilities and furthermore engages the concept of gendered detours.

This paper investigates the notion of detours in everyday life—both as a form of resistance to a mega-highway project in south-eastern France and as a broader practice. Using qualitative methods such as interviews, participant observation and a participative workshop with residents of a planned-to-be-crossed municipality, this article shows how the practice of detour is mobilised both as part of a strategy of struggle and as part of everyday practices by residents to denounce the dysfunctions of the metropolisation process and its impacts on the region. Drawing on debates around mobility justice and methods adapted to the study of protests, we discuss the notion of detour as a way of inhabiting a place. This paper examines how detours can form part of a political reading of mobility in a context of metropolisation, illustrating how such detour practices are conceived as foundational to alternative ways of being and living. Finally, the paper aims to put into perspective the real capability of detouring in a constrained everyday context; this capability of detours may contribute to reshaping local social class relations, evaluated through the lens of mobility justice.

Often detours are considered wasteful mistakes in the context of rational travel and logistics. However, detours may also be understood as culturally rich and socially dense phenomena that are vital to our everyday mobilities. We argue that they might even be seen as signs of street wisdom. In this paper we offer a theoretical scaffolding of detours and a tentative taxonomy of four different types of detours. These are related to empirical fieldwork conducted among unhoused, previously unhoused, and socially marginalised people in Denmark. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of how detours are tactically used in four different streetwise ways: 1) Detour to avoid stigmatisation, 2) Detour as autonomy, 3) Detour as safety, and 4) Forced detours. The four different examples highlight how detours serve as survival tactics for unhoused people and how new design interventions create obstacles in their everyday lives, requiring them to generate new tactics on the fly.

This study explores the experiences of leisure hitchhikers on Europe’s roads, drawing on “detours” as a framework. Utilising interviews with 16 active hitchhikers, the research reveals how detours— whether imposed by drivers or tactically seized by hitchhikers—lead hitchhikers to develop capacities for resourcefulness, imagination, and solidarity within structural constraints. Key themes include the unpredictability of detours, heightened feelings of vulnerability, chance encounters, and how these diversions shape hitchhiker subjectivities and self-narratives. This research contributes to our understanding of how individuals navigate and find meaning in experiences at the edge of their comfort zones, while also illuminating how detours can help cultivates a form of mastery and even resistance. In conclusion, detours, it was found, are not always negative and often serve as catalysts for personal growth and skill development.

The present article aims to provide the reader with a concise overview of the arguments presented in Climate Leviathan, which sets out to explore potential future political-economic scenarios that may emerge in the wake of climate change. The book presents four scenarios, predicated on two dichotomies: pro/contra capitalist order and planetary sovereignty. The initial scenario, designated Climate Leviathan, is marked by the formation of a global order that is committed to the consolidation of prevailing capitalism through a novel manifestation of planetary sovereignty. The notion of Climate Behemoth is predicated on the rejection of planetary sovereignty whilst adhering to the prevailing capitalist order. Conversely, Climate Mao combines the tenets of Maoist lines with the exercise of sovereignty over the planet by the masses to address the climate crisis. Climate X delineates a trajectory that is non-capitalist and anti-planetary sovereignty, guided by multi-layered climate justice movements operating at various scales and employing diverse ideas and methods. The authors posit the hypothesis that Climate Leviathan is the most probable, albeit inadequate, future trajectory, whilst advocating the concept of Climate X as a principle that upholds climate justice and freedom.

Joel Wainwright is Professor at Department of Geography at the Ohio State University. His research covers political economy, development, social theory, and environmental change. He is an (co-)author of The End: Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis (2025), Rethinking Palestine and Israel: Marxist Perspectives (2019), Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (2018), Geopiracy: Oaxaca, militant empiricism, and geographical thought (2012), and Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya (2008).

Quarantine was an ideal context within which to observe the seemingly conflicted relationship between immobility and therapy. Here, games no longer functioned merely for entertainment, but replaced in-person gatherings, encouraged self-care, and assisted in education. Somehow, though quarantine limited mobility, the forward movement of life played out in games. Life simulation games provided players with a setting that closely resembled a reality without COVID-19, permitting one to experience safety and solace. Business simulation games like Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, by contrast, situated players in singular settings rife with issues related, not just to the coronavirus, but also to its after-effects in different real-life sectors, specifically medicine and education. This predicament begs further examination, as healing becomes contingent to the space available and the extent of movement permitted to the player within such games. These games’ singular premises, settings, and sets of controls strikingly resemble the quarantined player’s own immobile and limited circumstance. Thus, this study seeks to explore the promise of this moment of resemblance between the real and virtual. While the virtual game space is oft-conceived as contained within a “magic circle,” it is possible that, despite the pressure of quarantine to limit actual movement, therapy may lie within the permeability of a virtually immobile game space.

In an increasingly hyper-connected world, the static positionality of individuals in their localities seems to become the exception rather than the norm. In this article, I intend to answer questions about mobility and itinerant lives by following the phenomenon of “vanlife” across national borders in South America. During the pandemic, anthropologists, among other scientists, have improvised new fieldwork methods, and I was one of them. I turned this lifestyle into the subject of my research and turned anthropology into a mobile practice. Anthropologists have always depended on mobility by doing fieldwork in faraway places and have developed mobile roots, at least during parts of their academic careers. Nevertheless, the discipline paradigm has remained essentially sedentary. In this paper, I investigate how the discipline core must be re-thought if one rejects the epistemological privilege of the sedentary society. I show how some classical concepts of ethnography fail to function when applied to constant mobility, and social structure takes a backseat while individual agency comes to the forefront. To establish the concept of “survival capital,” this ariticle surveys Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of capitals by applying it to people on the move and investigates the social and cultural substances of the mobile dwelling lifestyle.

Migration is an act of displacement and/or dislocation that can be experienced depending on political, economic, and cultural factors. The mobility of people or communities to a different place, country, or even continent carries the added burden of profound psychological realignment. Thus, within the migration, irrespective of the antecedents, displacement and trauma constitute the cardinal aesthetics of mobility. An epistemological inquiry into human mobility yields many moral insights into displacement and resettlement. The partition of British India and the repatriation of Burmese Indians are remarkable examples of displacement, with significant cross-migration and repatriation events. While the partition narratives represent trauma caused by relocation, the experiences recounted by repatriates expose deep-seated fears of social exclusion. These events and narratives raise critical questions about displacement, dislocation, psychological realignment, and/or the renegotiation of identities. This study explores the depiction of displaced lives in Partition literature and interviews with repatriated Burmese Indians, employing narrative analysis to examine the formation of migrant identities. The resultant exploration of the aesthetics and ethics of displacement in refugee and repatriate narratives from India enables us to perceive migration-engendered displacement as a geopolitical shift and a profoundly human experience.

We live in an age of motion: This is the starting point from which Thomas Nail positions The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction from a personal and historical perspective. The book aims at systematising Nail’s movement-oriented theorisation, and at the same time, making it accessible to non-specialists. It opens with an explanation of the two main motivations underlying his thought. The philosophy of movement proposed by Nail stems from a first critical motivation with a specific polemical target. As he states, Euro-Western thought has traditionally considered movement as subordinate to more primary principles. Unmoving entities, such as mind or spirit, have been valued as superior to moving ones, such as bodies or nature. Under a logic of domination, stasis has been placed above movement in the same way form has been placed above matter, God above humans, citizens above migrants, or men above women. By criticising such an ontological hierarchy, arguing for the primacy of movement means suggesting that “there is no absolute top” (5). Through a possibilistic view, a philosophy of movement thus aims to contribute to an ethics of togetherness and survival against domination and exclusion. The second motivation emerges from a meditation on four major phenomena that define an unprecedented age of motion and help to understand the primacy of movement: 1) the advent of quantum physics, for which the world is made by vibrating fields of energy at every scale; 2) the pervasiveness of digital media and mobile devices, which means that we are constantly immersed in digital fluxes; 3) the increase in human mobility driven by globalisation and the consequent formation of highly mobile societies; and 4) climate change, which is making even the Earth itself, not to mention its species and materials, more mobile. According to Nail, such conditions constitute a historical opportunity to gain an alternative point of view and to discuss some cornerstones of Western thought.