GEOG 317 - Mobility Justice

Two decades ago, geographers heralded a ‘new mobilities’ paradigm that had captivated the social sciences. Now it seems that all the world is, indeed, on the move. Using the framework of mobility justice, students consider what it means to assert “the right to move” and “the right to remain,” and what it looks like to claim these rights in practice. Students examine mobility—and its flip-side, immobility—through examples and approaches from geographies of tourism, transportation, im/migration, dis/ability, commodity circulation and economic geography, and demography. Diverse examples may include unsanctioned mobilities, like the figure of the tramp or the vagabond, nomadic populations like the Roma and seasonal migrant workers; subversive and surveilled mobilities, like transnational drug trafficking; and the politics of transportation infrastructures, like the transcontinental railroad and its role in expanding settler colonial power. Students also consider how the mobility of commodities, objects, and materials makes and remakes our world, and what kinds of mobilities—human and nonhuman—climate change produces and inhibits. Finally, we ask: how do geographers of various backgrounds theorize, study, map, and write about mobility? What tools does geography offer us to better understand contemporary mobilities and their larger sociopolitical significance?

Credits: 1.00
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: No First-year
Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents
Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges and The Process of Writing
Core Component: None

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