Introduction: Mobility and the Making of Memories
DOI.
Special Issue
By.
Lynne Pearce
Pages.
1-6
Date.
31. Jul. 2022
Abstract
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
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
