Mobility Justice:The Politics of Movement in An Age of Extremes

Mobility as politics: the inequality of movement from transport to climate change.

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day. We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and extreme challenges of urbanization. At the same time it is difficult to ignore the deaths of thousands of migrants at sea or in deserts, the xenophobic treatment of foreign-born populations, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the persistence of racist violence and ethnic exclusions on our front doorstep. This, in turn, is connected to other kinds of uneven mobility: relations between people, access to transport, urban infrastructures and global resources such as food, water, and energy.

In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of mobility. She shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, connecting these scales of the body, street, city, nation, and planet into one overarching theory of mobility justice. This can be seen on a local level in the differential circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and 'the right to the city'. On the planetary scale, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other kinetic elites are able to roam freely, the military origins of global infrastructure, and the contested politics of migration and restricted borders.

Mobility Justice offers a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility of a world in which the mobility commons has been enclosed.