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There is a growing interest in aesthetics in mobility studies, which would be associated with the growing involvement of the arts and humanities in mobility studies, as Merriman and Pearce noted earlier. Similarly, it is only recently that mobility studies have expanded to include the ethical or moral dimensions of mobility. This special issue is an outgrowth of the 2023 Global Mobility Humanities Conference (GMHC) and the 20th Annual Conference of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T²M). This introductory article therefore enquires into the aesthetics and ethics of mobility as inextricably connected. Specifically, it discusses how mobility researchers engage with “aestheticising mobility,” recognising mobility or movement as a formative element or device in art and creative practices, and “mobilising aesthetics,” aesthetic and ethical dimensions of bodily mobilities, such as running, bicycling, “still-dancing,” and escaping an emergency. Drawing on Scott, it reflects on how mobility studies is committed to exploring the “common good,” embodied in “domestic,” “industrial,” “civic,” “market,” and “ecological” mobilities. Finally, we hope that this special issue will be a catalyst for raising new questions or agendas that will encourage further research from the aesthetic-ethical nexus for a future of mobility justice (Sheller).

Postcolonial mobilities are complex to analyse because they are deeply intertwined, on different scales, with questions of resistance, belonging, and justice. An analysis of literary representations of postcolonial mobilities in South African fiction offers insights into the poetics that are used to locally negotiate agency, amid such complexity. The diachronic qualitative analysis engages with pre- and post-apartheid fiction set in Johannesburg by visualising their protagonists’ mobility; thus, it contributes to scholarship in postcolonial literary criticism and postcolonial mobilities. The analysis is rooted in Massey’s theorisation of space as intersecting trajectories, Cresswell’s discussion of mobility and politics, and Sheller’s concept of mobility justice. Methodically, the analysis is based on psychogeographic visualisation strategies. The results show that mapping, as a literary representation of embodied, reiterative practice, emerges as a transgressive strategy by which the protagonists traverse (im)material boundaries of racialisation in the fragmented cityscape of Johannesburg. Mapping locates the protagonists spatially and temporally within their respective communities, allowing for ensuing spatialising practices of making home. The discussed texts are An African Tragedy (Dhlomo), Mine Boy (Abrahams), Cry, the Beloved Country (Paton), Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe), Portrait with Keys (Vladislavić), and Zoo City (Beukes).

Chika Unigwe is an Igbo writer from the Nigerian city of Enugu. She migrated to Belgium in 1995 and, two decades later, published a collection of ten short stories titled Better Never Than Late. These overlapping stories portray the everyday lives of Igbo immigrants in the Belgian cities of Turnhout and Antwerp. While migration to the Global North is one of the salient features of postcoloniality, studies of Afrodiasporic literature seldom apply the New Mobilities Paradigm. This interdisciplinary framework problematises the inattention to and trivialisation of concrete and embodied mobilities. I therefore examine literary representations of mobility and nostalgia in Better Never Than Late through the narrative technique of heteroglossia. I argue that Unigwe deploys a diversity of Igbo diasporic voices in her short stories, whose formal dialogism enables a thematic critique of mobility exigencies and psychodynamics. The heteroglossic narration centres on Agu and his wife, Prosperous, who routinely host or visit members of the Igbo diasporic community. More pertinently, the climactic denouements of the short stories create hermeneutic blanks, within and through which both implied and actual readers of varying ideological orientations can join Unigwe in interrogating the ethical situatedness of Igbo mobility and nostalgia.

This article connects mobility studies and disability studies in analysing the short story “Bukan Yem” (in English, “Maybe Not Yem”) written by Etik Juwita. The story depicts the journey of Indonesian women migrant workers returning to their hometowns. Juwita, who is also a migrant worker, presents the character Yem, a seemingly mad woman who accompanies the protagonist along the treacherous journey to her village through the coastal north route along the Java Island. This paper analyses the main character in the story, her movement as she makes her journey home, and the “mad” woman character who accompanies her. The paper argues that the story “Maybe Not Yem” reconfigures madness as literary aesthetics in two ways: first, by disturbing the binary between sanity and insanity, and second, by asserting the character’s agency via her mobility. This paper reveals the interconnection between mobility studies and disability studies to reassess madness as literary aesthetics and to reinforce ideas of agency of the mobile subject.

This literary exploration of African women’s automobility practices takes the car as a site of inquiry into gender dynamics in Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel, Changes: A Love Story. It engages the car as a category of mobile infrastructure that is gendered, class-oriented, and a cultural signifier. The car is positioned as an infrastructure invested with deeper meanings beyond its physical presence, thus it provides the primary medium for understanding the intersections of patriarchal power, gendered mobility constraints, and ethical justice issues within the Ghanian setting. Employing interdisciplinary conceptualisations of automobility, the paper argues that the car signifies on multiple levels, serving as a site of gender conflict, as baits, gifts, space for female bonding, and “epiphanic” moments, as well as a space of security, self-preservation, identity, and independence. Its multiple symbolisations heighten the importance of Automobility poetics as well as the complex intersections of gender identities and patriarchal power. The paper argues for Automobility poetics specific to African literary productions. It advances critical considerations for Automobility practices of women within their cultural context, asserting that a woman’s quest for mobility often initiates resistance to injustice.

In this article, I argue for an approach to counter-road narratives informed by mobility studies. Many works on road narratives (in literature and film) have benefitted from theoretical inputs from mobility studies and have, in turn, provided insightful accounts of mobility as an object of artistic representation. However, counter-road narratives—a term and concept that owe much to Nadia Lie’s definition of “counter-road movie”—are still unfamiliar with this kind of critical attention (or with nearly any attention at all). Predominantly representing immobility while maintaining a thematic interest on mobility, counter-road narratives are thus aligned with the growing idea within mobility studies that mobility and immobility are related and codependent states, activities, and notions. Through an analysis and critical reading of two Portuguese women’s counter-road novels, guided by the key concept of relative immobility, I discuss the politics of mobility involved in the narrative depiction of the female protagonists’ stillness and demonstrate how these characters still find imaginative and mostly aesthetic ways of moving. Finally, I ask (with only a hope of beginning to find an answer) what the implications of this kind of aesthetic mobility are for the question of embodiment, which is fundamental to mobility studies.

Movement is crucial to aesthetics—the feeling of beauty—found in various forms of art, design, and environmental experiences. Kinaesthetics, the embodied experience of movement, is connected to aesthetics as both relate to our feeling of movement and sensory stimuli. They may overlap in physical performance, where the felt beauty and expressiveness of movement are linked to the bodily sensations and control involved in performing the movements. This can also have a (kin)ethical component, as movements raise ethical questions or challenge social norms and values, shaping our moral perspectives. Our own movements significantly impact our physical and mental well-being, and our social and environmental relationships. (Kin)ethics helps us understand the ethical implications of movements, such as how our actions affect others and the environment, and how we can use our movements to promote social justice and equity. (Kin)ethical considerations can influence (kin)aesthetic judgments of movement. Both evaluate human experience and the values that shape our understanding of the world. This paper, then, reflects on the complex interrelations between (kin)aesthetics and (kin)ethics, drawing upon research within sport studies, particularly on recreational running, to show what mobility studies, as an interdisciplinary field of research, can learn from sport studies.

The paper delves into how cycling transforms our relationship to the world. It investigates the potential of cycling infrastructure design to increase the sentient capacities and the ambient sensibility of mobile actors. Through ride-along interviews with regular utilitarian cyclists in the Paris Region of France, the research uncovers the affective and sensory relationship to cycling infrastructure and the environment. This relationship is characterised by a tension between paradoxical values, traditionally associated with social constructions of differentiated gender categories, of (1) modern emancipation (individualist, conquering) and (2) environmental consciousness (care and attention extending not only to oneself but also to the vulnerability of others, animals and vegetal species). Cycling practices, and the pleasures derived from engaging in the urban environment, challenge and reshape the dominant hierarchy of values in patriarchal society.

This paper discusses the artistic practice of electronic dance poets The Long Dead Stars in relation to walking-arts (human mobility) and the movement of rock (non-human mobility), contextualising an environmental agenda through a walking-arts inspired aesthetic that playfully but seriously attunes with earth materials. Exploring the significance of aesthetics, we ask “how might an artistic collaboration with rocks, with Earth, enable a non-othering, where rock and human are equal?” Through practices such as channelling, deep listening, ludicerious aesthetics, scanning and dithering, we consider how aesthetics can contribute to a successful human-rock partnership. As is right when trying to repair a broken relationship, in this case between the human and non-human, we start with an apology, an Anthro-apology, before exploring how aesthetic practice might move the relationship forward.

Emergencies or disasters have been acknowledged by mobilities and migration researchers for some time as crucial interruptions or threats to mobile life. Indeed, in the first edition of the journal Mobilities, Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller and John Urry suggest, through a range of disruptive events, natural disasters, environmental crises, and pandemics predating COVID-19, that “issues of ‘mobility’ are centre-stage.” In this collaborative paper we present and reflect on a workshop on “Emergency (Im)mobilities” which took place in Brisbane—Meanjin, Australia in 2023, where we engaged in an activity to explore different key terms and concepts attached to, and that might have potential for, research on “emergencies” in mobilities. While some of the authors have worked directly on, and had experience in, more obvious emergencies including so-called “natural disasters,” others reflected on the workshop theme through their own interests in creative arts, literature, migration studies, and more. We offer this reflective, collaborative, and creative paper to future mobilities research that engages in emergencies and crisis in order to reflect on current and future emergency aesthetics (in its sensory, emotional and affective registers), including diagrams, procedures and communications that simultaneously shape our engagement as researchers and as community members who have faced, and will continue to face, emergencies that both mobilise and immobilise us.

This short piece is an introduction to the Dialogue section. It provides a brief outline context to the panel discussion which took place during the 2023 Global Mobility Humanities Conference & Annual Conference of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility co-hosted by T2M and Academy of Mobility Humanities (AMH) in Seoul in 2023. The panel invited reflections from four T2M presidents, namely, Hans-Liudger Dienel, Mimi Sheller, Mathieu Flonneau, and Carlos LópezGalviz, as a means of supplementing one of the conference keynotes by Gijs Mom, founding president of T2M. Using the editorials of the first issues of five journals, this piece brings together contributions made over the past seventy years to the fields of transport history and mobility studies, providing a relevant background to the various issues discussed during the Dialogue.

Chair and Discussant: Carlos López-Galviza Professor of History and Social Futures, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK Carlos López-Galviz served as the role of President at T2M from 2021 to 2024. Additionally, he serves as a professor of History and Social Futures at Lancaster University. His research primarily focuses on exploring the historical interplay between cities and infrastructure, particularly examining it through the lens of “past futures.” Notable recent publications by him include Global Undergrounds (2016) and the monograph Cities, Railways, Modernities: London, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (2019) Discussants: Hans-Liudger Dienelb Professor for “Work Theory, Technology and Participation,” Berlin University of Technology, Berlin, Germany Hans-Liudger Dienel served as the second President of T2M, holding the position from 2008 to 2014. Presently, he is a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. His work centers on technology and participation, technology and education, and the future of technology. He is a prolific author and co-editor, with notable publications such as Internal Crowdsourcing in Companies (2021) and Citizens’ Participation in Urban Planning and Development in Iran (2017), among others.

This book is not a typical academic study, although it is written by an academic. Dominic Davies, a literary scholar with postcolonial interests, has put together an engaged and personal work in cultural politics, exploring how a rhetoric of infrastructure has been deployed by capitalists and government operatives in various contexts of modernity since the eighteenth century. Davies focuses on the subregion of the English Midlands where he grew up, and to which he repeatedly returns during the book. In the process, he offers numerous comparisons which function as different means of understanding that region in global contexts of power and the enforcement of inequality. While the place context of the Potteries area surrounding Stoke-on-Trent, in the northern Midlands, is a central setting for Davies, the book’s mobility tracks that of the British Empire, taking in for instance the campaign that culminated in a statue’s removal at the University of Cape Town in South Africa on 9 April 2015 (119–22).