Uneven Mobility Futures: Inequality, Justice, and Power

Mimi Sheller will discuss "Uneven Mobility Futures: inequality, justice, and power" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 1, 2017, in Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101.

In the global south, on the margins of global cities everywhere, the challenges of precarious access to mobility (and unsafe or risky mobilities) produce the sharpest contours of uneven mobility. Addressing the injustices of inequality in this area requires that we develop a deeper understanding of how mobility relates to colonial histories, global geographies, neoimperialism, and the material resource bases of mobility in extractive industries such as mining and energy production. This talk will introduce the concept of "differential mobility" and discuss the global dimensions of uneven qualities of experience, uneven access to infrastructure, uneven materialities, uneven subjects of mobility, and uneven events or temporalities of stopping, going, passing, pausing, and waiting.

Mimi Sheller has a bachelor's from Harvard University (1988) and a master's  (1993) and doctrorate (1997) from New School for Social Research. She is a professor of sociology and founding director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is author and co-editor of nine books, including most recently Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014); The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (Routledge, 2014); and Citizenship from Below  (Duke UP, 2012). 

As author of the highly-cited "The New Mobilities Paradigm," founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, associate editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, and co-editor of Mobile Technologies of the City (2006) and Tourism Mobilities (2004), she established the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research.  She was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa from Roskilde University, Denmark (2015) and has held visiting fellowships at the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University (2008); Media@McGill, Canada (2009); Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); and Penn Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania (2010).

In the fall of 2016 she was the inaugural distinguished visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Sheller's visit is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities.