In contrast to tourism studies, which is largely based in geography, mobilities research is transdisciplinary in nature, drawing from the insights of several disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, geography, history, communication and cultural studies (Adey et al., 2014: 3). John Urry (2007) has particularly shifted the emphasis in sociological research to the concept of ‘mobilities’, as a framework which recognises that social relations stretch across geographical spaces, while also being attentive to physical and material geography. Research into mobilities shot to prominence with the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006) and the ‘mobilities turn’ in social sciences
6 Scott Cohen and colleagues’ later work (Cohen et al., 2015) on ‘lifestyle mobilities’ aligns with the
mobilities literature in weaving together lifestyle, mobility and identity in forms of travel. Hence, their concept of lifestyle mobilities will be discussed in section 2.2.3
(Hannam et al., 2006), establishing new research dimensions related to mobility – of people, spaces, information, and communication.
Mobilities research is influenced by globalisation studies and the recognition of the increasing normalisation of movement of people, goods, and services. Expanding on Bauman’s emphasis on movement in contemporary society (1998) it sees space and movement as intrinsic to social relations. Such an all-encompassing approach to mobility means that migrants and tourists become subcategories/components of a wider phenomenon, rather than opposites. A downside of this is that the emphasis on fluidity and movement risks neglecting the inequalities that charter mobility. This is not to argue that mobilities scholars have not discussed the dimension of inequalities. Tim Cresswell, for example, argues that scholars must pay close attention to the politics of mobility, and how mobilities manifest within existing relations of power (Adey, 2006; Cresswell, 2010).
Earlier I mentioned that mobilities research came to prominence with the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006), staking out claims to be distinct from existing sociological theories, which are accused of ‘sedentarism’ or static conceptions of the world. The mobilities approach has been criticised in turn for claiming that the static and sedentary is of the past and that the contemporary world is readily mobile. Cresswell (2010) argues against this critique, however, claiming that the field ‘brings together a diverse array of forms of movement across scales ranging from the body (or, indeed parts of the body) to the globe’ (2010: 18). The paradigm does not claim that the study of mobilities is new, instead it is a new way of systematising mobilities with a social lens. For example, Cresswell argues that when theories of migration examine how and why people move between countries (2010: 18), they put excessive emphasis on places, instead of focusing the act of moving and the social relations that get constituted as part of movement.
I contend that the mobilities approach is promising in its focus on how social relations get constituted through movement, although I would exercise caution. The mobilities approach makes the mistake of paying inadequate attention to what I call ‘fixed and immobile identities’. For example, identities in relation to the nation state – a person’s country of origin, citizenship7, whether the person is from a country that allows double
citizenship, the level of affluence and the power of the state in global geopolitics of a given period. Fixed and immobile identities in relation to the nation state contribute to differential structural inclusion and exclusion in terms of donning mobile identities. In a similar vein, Russel King cautions against an exaggeration of contemporary mobility by pointing to the ‘increasingly stringent regime of migration control imposed by the rich countries of the global north’ (2012: 136). Feminist theorists have also criticised mobilities scholarship for its lack of inclusion of embodiment in understanding mobilities. For example, the rights discourse of who can travel is highly uneven between countries and is at the heart of mobility (Gogia, 2006). Similarly, they have criticised the ‘romanticisations of mobility’ in social theory, whereby the dangers in mobility are rarely discussed, holding mobility as the ideal opposite to a sedentary life (Kaplan, 2006: 395), often neglecting the realities of refugee mobility that are linked to ‘persecution, displacement, and claims for protection’(Mountz, 2011: 255).
Nonetheless, mobilities approach continues to be used to understand forms of youth mobility on working holidays. Anika Haverig argues that the ‘working holiday is a peculiar form of global movement’ (2011: 103). Her paper published in the journal
Mobilities focusses on the aspirations of young New Zealanders to go on a ‘New Zealand working holiday phenomenon’, which ‘is commonly called “Overseas Experience”’ (OE). Her findings show that despite its association with travel and tourism, OE is a ‘specific form of temporary labour migration’ (Haverig, 2011: 104). While presenting important insights on the motivations for youths taking up overseas working holidays, Haverig (2011) also assumes that the working holiday is prevalent only among Anglophone countries. Indeed, this assumption is common in the corpus of literature on forms of youth travel from/within rich Anglophone countries.
Developments in tourism research to incorporate the importance of lifestyle, in congruence with increased receptiveness to the ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller & Urry, 2006), later crystallised in the conceptual framework of ‘lifestyle mobilities’ (Cohen et al., 2015). This framework is used to understand forms of travel that are at the intersection of work, tourism and leisure, building on Cohen’s earlier conception of ‘lifestyle traveller’ (2011) to highlight patterns of mobility that blur into migration (Cohen et al., 2015: 158). Cohen et al. argue that the concept of lifestyle mobilities is better at capturing the intersections of tourism, mobility, and migration, by defining lifestyle mobility as ‘an ongoing fluid process, carrying on as everyday practice
over time’ (2015: 158). However, in this conceptualisation, they place excessive importance on ongoing and continuous mobility as central to conceptualising ‘mobile subjects’. The concept also readily links lifestyle mobility to the realm of privileged citizens (Cohen et al., 2015: 157), excluding mobile populations who are marginalised – such as the Roma, and other gypsy communities who embody a lifestyle on the move. The conceptualisation of ‘lifestyle mobilities’ is thereby problematic, since by identifying privilege with a ‘continuous intention to move on’ (2015: 160) it is unable to explain marginalised identities. Nor does it pay sufficient attention to inequalities in mobility, taking privileged mobility for granted and not exploring the nuances in privilege. In this way, an image of continuous mobility is not accurate if it is unable to account for unevenness and exclusions in mobility (King, 2012).
To summarise the discussions so far (section 2.2), the amorphous category of working holiday maker is at the interface of the binaries of sojourner/resident, visitor/host, and worker/tourist. I argue that these binaries point to the disciplinary boundaries of migration8 and tourism research. For example, tourism research has focussed on short-
term periods of travel that are distinct from everyday life in the destination country, while migration has been understood as a singular movement which involves relocation (until transnationalism became the dominant approach of migration studies in the 1990s). This bifurcated understanding of tourism and migration contribute to the difficulty in classifying forms of mobility that involve large portions of both movement and staying. Here mobilities research holds the potential to better understand contemporary youth mobility, although without a rigorous critical infusion from migration studies it is unable to weed out exclusive associations of mobility with mobile subjects from the global North and their taken-for-granted location of privilege. It is to this critical contribution from migration studies that I turn next.