Mobility Humanities

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.