Rethinking mobile methods
Mobilities 9(2), pp.167-187.
Dr Peter Merriman,
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences,
Aberystwyth University
Aberystwyth,
Ceredigion
SY23 3DB
United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0) 1970 622606
Fax: +44 (0) 1970 622659
E-mail: prm@aber.ac.uk
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Rethinking mobile methods
Abstract
Over the past few years a broad range of scholars have been emphasising the vital importance
of methodological innovation and diversification to mobilities research. While welcoming
this pluralisation of research methods, this paper encourages a note of caution amongst
researchers who wholly embrace the call for mobile methods, which are frequently justified
by an assumption that ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ methods have failed. I outline some of
the explanations which are given for the development of ‘mobile methods’ – including their
inevitable emergence from a ‘new mobilities paradigm’, the importance of innovation and
political relevance for social science methods, and their importance for apprehending elusive
practices – before identifying a number of problems with this work: namely the assumption
that mobilities research is necessarily a branch of social science research, the production of
over-animated mobile subjects and objects, the prioritising of certain kinds of research
methods and practices, and the overreliance on certain kinds of technology. Particular
attention is paid to the use of ‘non-representational theories’ and theories of practice in
mobilities research, wherein academics frequently suggest that we must adopt certain
performative, participative, or ethnographic techniques to enable researchers to be, see or
move with research subjects, and to more effectively or accurately understand those practices
and subjects. In the final section, I draw upon historical research on early driving practices to
highlight the diverse methods and sources which can be useful for mobilities scholars seeking
to apprehend particular practices, events, subjects and spaces.
Keywords:
Mobilities; mobile methods; non-representational theory; practices; history; geography;
sociology
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Rethinking mobile methods
Introduction
…the mobilities paradigm is… transformative of social science, generating an
alternative theoretical and methodological landscape. …this paradigm brings to the
fore and enacts theories, methods and exemplars of research that so far have been
mostly out of sight (Büscher et al., 2011, p.4).
Over the past few years a broad range of scholars have been emphasising the vital importance
of methodological innovation and diversification to mobilities research, with a particular
emphasis being placed on methods that enable researchers to ‘be’ or ‘see’ with mobile
research subjects (Fincham et al., 2010). As the above quotation by Büscher et al. (2011, see
also Büscher & Urry, 2009) infers, methodological innovation and diversification is often
positioned as a necessary result of the epistemological shifts ushered in with the ‘new
mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006), with the result that mobilities researchers are
frequently looking for new ways to ‘capture, track, simulate, mimic, parallel and “go along
with” the kinds of moving systems and experiences that seem to characterise the
contemporary world’ (Büscher et al., 2011, p.7). Methodological innovation is seen to be a
natural and necessary response to the emergence of new theories, technologies and practices
of mobility in the world, as well as to the challenges posed by the extensive (if often crude)
large-scale geo-demographic surveys of human movements and financial transactions which
are undertaken by public and private bodies of various kinds (Savage & Burrows, 2007;
Büscher et al., 2011; Merriman et al., 2012).
This diversification and pluralisation of research methods and methodologies is a welcome
occurrence, fuelling some of today’s most innovative and exciting mobilities research, but in
this paper I want to encourage a note of caution amongst researchers who wholly embrace
such calls for innovative ‘mobile methods’. Whereas a significant number of these calls
appear to be founded upon a desire for methodological diversity, plurality and mixedmethods approaches, some scholars justify a push for methodological innovation by
emphasising the failures of ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’1 methods to provide ‘effective’,
‘close’ or ‘accurate’ apprehensions of movements and events (Fincham et al., 2010). The
push to promote innovative ‘mobile methods’ is in danger of encouraging researchers to
abandon methods labelled ‘conventional’ – such as interviews, questionnaires, discourse
analysis or archival research – rather than rethinking and reworking these methods, or
expanding and diversifying their repertoire of approaches. The debate about ‘mobile
methods’ is in danger of shifting from a discussion of the diverse array of methods which can
facilitate mobilities research in different ways to a focus on methods where the researcher
must move with their research subjects. This difference appears to arise from the conflation of
‘methods for mobilities research’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p.217) with ‘mobile methods’
(Büscher et al., 2011), a reduction which is in danger of obscuring the valuable contributions
of a diverse array of social science and humanities researchers to mobilities research. In this
paper I identify a series of problems with this move. In section one, I provide an initial
exploration of how this conflation may have come about, tracing some of the theoretical
inspirations for current waves of mobilities research. I examine how mobile methods are seen
to be a natural and necessary complement to the emergence of a ‘new mobilities paradigm’,
and a powerful way of developing novel approaches which can help advance a relevant and
engaged social science, as well as reflecting a contemporary fascination with theories of
practice and non-representational theories. In the following section, I examine how many
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mobile methods are associated with a range of performative, participative, and ethnographic
techniques which enable researchers to more effectively move, be or see with their research
subjects and objects. While acknowledging that such methods clearly have their uses, I
suggest that the power of ‘mobile methods’ is sometimes exaggerated, particularly when it is
claimed that they provide a more accurate or close knowledge of particular practices and
events. I show how mobile methods frequently focus on mobile and active subjects at the
expense of a broader understanding of materialities, practices and events, and I trace how
mobile methods are all-too-frequently associated with technological solutions to
methodological questions, as well as valorising certain kinds of participative and
ethnographic research above other kinds of empirical research or theoretical enquiry. In the
final section, I draw upon some of my own historical research on driving in late Victorian and
Edwardian Britain, to point to some of the diverse methods and sources which mobilities
scholars could draw upon when attempting to understand particular practices of mobility.
Towards a genealogy of mobile methods
People do not stay in one place. Hence research methods need also to be on the move,
to simulate this intermittent mobility (Bærenholdt et al., 2004, p.148).
Within the current wave of writing on ‘mobile methods’, methodological experimentation,
innovation and pluralisation are not merely positioned as inevitable or desirable occurrences
within a new and expanding interdisciplinary field, rather they are seen as necessary
strategies to enable researchers to more accurately track, know and represent the embodied
actions, practices and experiences of mobile research subjects (Urry, 2007; Hein et al., 2008;
Büscher & Urry, 2009; Fincham et al., 2010; Büscher et al., 2011; D’Andrea et al., 2011). As
the interdisciplinary field of mobilities research rapidly expands – in a world where new
forms of mobility and communication also appear to be continuously emerging – new
techniques are said to be required to enable social scientists to effectively grasp the feeling
and meanings of certain embodied practices. As Justin Spinney has put it in a review of
research on cycling, there is a need ‘to move towards methods that have the ability to make
visible some of the less tangible aspects of daily mobility’:
Throughout this review, I have commented upon what I see as the inadequacy of
particular research methods to highlight the more intangible and ephemeral meanings
of mobility (Spinney, 2009, p.826).
Spinney’s research on cycling is an important example of the kinds of methodologically
innovative and exploratory mobilities research which has emerged over the past five to ten
years; research which has seen scholars drawing upon video, ethnographic and participative
methods, ‘go-alongs’, and a host of other techniques in an attempt to apprehend and
understand the mobile practices of cyclists, walkers, ferry passengers, drivers, and other
mobile subjects (Anderson, 2004; Laurier, 2004, 2010, 2011; Laurier et al., 2008; Spinney,
2006, 2009, 2011; Watts, 2008; Vannini, 2012; Middleton, 2011). Many of these studies are,
indeed, reinvigorating the research field, but what are the motives for such developments, and
are such methodological developments essential for the field of mobilities research?
The story of the emergence of mobile methods often follows one of a number of standard
templates. It is often suggested that the development of new methodologies, and particularly
‘mobile methods’, is a natural or inevitable complement to the emergence of a ‘new
mobilities paradigm’ (Bærenholdt et al., 2004, p.148), whereby social scientists have realised
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that the distinctive nature of their research subjects and objects – ‘shifting, morphing and
mobile’ (Hannam et al., 2006, p.10) – requires the development of dynamic and mobile
research methods. New research foci are seen to require new research methods, but not only
does this rely upon a problematic assumption that pre-existing research methods will
inevitably fail to capture or trace some-thing (particular mobilities) (cf. Letherby et al., 2010),
it also appears to assume that new research projects and problematics emerge in a vacuous
world of non-sense and unknowing: viz., social scientists have not undertaken detailed
investigations of the embodied practices of cycling, walking or driving, so how could existing
social science methods shed light on these practices? For me, there is a distinct danger of
overstating the newness of the research topics, mobile experiences and sensations, and indeed
of these mobile methods (cf. Letherby et al., 2010; Middleton, 2011), just as there is a danger
of overstating the newness of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006) or the
extent of a ‘mobilities turn’ (Hannam et al., 2006; cf. Merriman, 2007, 2009a, 2009b;
Cresswell, 2010). A number of further concerns follow from these points. While the
proliferation of mobile telephones, wearable computing and GPS technologies is relatively
recent, enabling new practices and patterns of mobility and communication to emerge, many
other practices and technologies of mobility are long-established (even if they are changing),
including practices such as commuting, migrating, exploring and holidaymaking, and modes
such as cycling, motor-car driving, walking, sailing, rail travel, air travel, and many
‘alternative’ mobile practices such as canoeing or horse-riding (see Vannini, 2009; Evans &
Franklin, 2010). While mobilities scholars frequently approach such technologies and
practices with a pioneering spirit, there is a long history of both mobile subjects actively
experiencing and knowingly reflecting upon and representing their mobile embodied
practices (see Schivelbusch, 1980; O’Connell, 1998; Duncan & Gregory, 1999; Cresswell &
Merriman, 2011; Merriman, 2012a), and academics exploring the social relations, embodied
experiences and practices of travel and mobility (see Appleyard et al., 1964; Hollowell, 1968;
Goffman, 1971; Dannefer, 1977; Schivelbusch, 1980; Hawkins, 1986; Thrift, 1994; Katz,
1999). Furthermore, exploratory and innovative social science research methods are
frequently positioned in opposition to older approaches (often quantitative approaches) which
are deemed to be outdated and unable to adequately describe mobile embodied practices and
experiences. This most commonly surfaces in a dichotomy which is constructed between
what are perceived to be the quantitative research methods deployed within transport
geography and transport studies, and the qualitative methods deployed by mobility scholars.
The two sets of methods are regularly presented as polar opposites:
The methodological toolkit of transport geography has been dominated by costbenefit analysis, stated preference surveys and modelling. While these tools might tell
us something about the “rational(ised)” push and pull factors of cycling, they fail to
unlock the more “unspeakable” and “non-rational(ised)” meanings of cycling that
often reside in the sensory, embodied and social nature of its performance (Spinney,
2009, p.826; also Spinney, 2011).
In some ways Spinney is right. Quantitative methods were and still are predominant within
the fields of transport geography and transport studies, and the qualitative methods deployed
by the majority of mobility researchers clearly do offer something different. However, as
recent commentaries by Shaw and Hesse (2010) and Shaw and Sidaway (2011) argue, such
statements tend to stereotype and caricature the kinds of research being undertaken in the
fields of transport geography and mobility studies, overlooking the diversity of research
being undertaken in these multi-disciplinary fields, as well as the large volume of research
which cannot easily be placed into one or other domain. This includes the many qualitative
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studies which have been published in journals such as Transportation Research and the
Journal of Transport Geography (e.g. Lyons & Urry, 2005; Adey et al., 2011), studies which
combine quantitative and qualitative research methods (e.g. Pooley et al., 2005), studies
which might be conducted under banners such as transport history, mobility history or
migration studies, and a large number of studies which utilise fairly conventional qualitative
research methods, ranging from archival research and textual analysis (Schivelbusch, 1980;
O’Connell, 1998; Cresswell, 2001a, 2006; Merriman, 2007; Ganser, 2009; Adey, 2010), to
focus groups (Redshaw, 2008), oral histories (Pooley et al., 2005), interviews (Middleton,
2009, 2010), diaries (Middleton, 2009, 2010), and autobiographical reflections (Letherby &
Shaw, 2009; Letherby, 2010). What’s more, many scholars, past and present, inevitably draw
upon a combination of more-or-less conventional and tailored research methods, whether
textual analysis and ethnography (Cresswell, 2006), interviews and photo-diaries (Middleton,
2009, 2010, 2011), archival research, oral histories and questionnaires (O’Connell, 1998), or
large-scale surveys and oral histories (Pooley et al., 2005).
A more fundamental problem with a significant number of these calls for innovative and
experimental ‘mobile methods’ is the frequent assumption that mobilities research is
conceptualised and undertaken as a particular kind of social science research. In some ways,
this is not surprising. Sociologists, anthropologists, and human geographers working within
social science traditions have been at the forefront of research which constitutes the ‘new
mobilities paradigm’, but there are many long-established approaches to/studies of mobility,
travel and transport which might be more usefully positioned in a humanities tradition, or
certainly in an extended realm of humanities and social science research which is less
concerned with adhering to some of the disciplinary and methodological conventions of the
core social science disciplines. Indeed, historians, historical geographers, literary theorists,
philosophers, art historians, architects and arts practitioners have had a long-standing interest
in practices, experiences, representations and technologies of mobility, travel and transport,
whether in writing histories of mobility, transport, travel writing and exploration, or in
developing philosophical approaches which value movement, flux and change (see, for
example, Schivelbusch, 1980; Kaplan, 1996; Pearce, 2000, 2012a, 2012b; Merriman, 2007,
2012a; Merriman & Webster, 2009). The danger is that ‘mobile methods’ are only envisioned
as a specific set of social science methods which enable the researcher to travel with their
research participants/subjects and develop a more clear and accurate understanding and
knowledge of their experiences. While developments in ‘mobile methods’ have seen
something of an expansion in their approaches – beyond traditional social science methods –
drawing upon creative approaches from the arts and humanities – there is a danger that these
(often high-tech) methods are co-opted in an attempt to more accurately know one’s research
subjects and objects, rather than for more creative, experimental and open-ended reasons.
What’s more, there are an extensive range of other social science and humanities methods
which are frequently overlooked or cast to one side (although see Cresswell, 2006, 2011,
2012; Merriman, 2009b, 2012a; Sheller, 2011).2 What I am saying, then, is that there is a
distinct danger that the expanding literature on mobilities – and particularly mobile methods
– is read not as promoting a critical interrogation of how mobilities research is proceeding or
could proceed, but as how mobilities research should and must proceed. What’s more, there is
a danger that key texts calling for ‘mobile methods’ are read as manifestoes promoting
specialisation in a few fashionable methodological areas rather than as calls for mixedmethods, innovation and pluralisation. It is important, then, that published statements (cumgenealogies) of the ‘mobilities paradigm’ and ‘methods for mobilities research’ recognise
that research on mobility and movement has a long history, taking in many different
disciplines, approaches and methods, even if this work has amassed into a more-or-less
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coherent inter-disciplinary field in the past decade (cf. Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller & Urry,
2006; Cresswell, 2001b; Merriman, 2009b). A range of research practices can be invaluable
for the investigation of experiences and feelings of movement and mobility, from the use of
archival research, textual analysis, interviews and oral histories, to video ethnography, focus
groups, photo-diaries, cyber-ethnographies, autobiographical reflections, and creative and/or
documentary forms such as painting, poetry, photography and performance (Latham, 2003;
Sheller & Urry, 2006; Büscher & Urry, 2009; Merriman & Webster, 2009; Fincham et al.,
2010; Büscher et al., 2011; Sheller, 2011).
A further justification for developing innovative and sophisticated mobile methods also arises
from the assumption that mobilities research is social science research, and this is the
argument made by Büscher et al. (2011), following Savage and Burrows (2007), that as ‘huge
corporations, fashionable consultancies and fearful states are likely to dominate future
mobilities research’, so social scientists (including mobilities scholars) need to decide
whether they ‘should join in, get left behind or try to find ways to critique and engage
constructively’ (Büscher et al., 2011, p.14). This argument combines a series of important
observations about the mapping and engineering of movement, affect and feeling by powerful
governments and corporate bodies (Thrift, 2004a), with a series of disciplinary-specific fears
and concerns about the role and authority of sociologists and social scientists in the twentyfirst century (Savage & Burrows, 2007). Writing in Economy and Society in 2004,
geographer Nigel Thrift observed that as computing and software are becoming increasingly
ubiquitous in our everyday spaces in the West, so environments are taking on a new
character, with background calculations being used to make real-time qualitative judgements,
and new sensibilities and apprehensions of space emerging which might more usefully be
conceived as apprehensions of ‘movement-space’ (Thrift, 2004a; Merriman, 2012b). As
Savage and Burrows (2007) and Büscher et al. (2011) recognise, the implication is that
powerful governments and corporate bodies are central to the engineering of these calculative
backgrounds, affects and movement-spaces, having access to a large amount of ‘data’ about
our movements, financial transactions and lifestyles; and the key question for social scientists
and mobility researchers is whether they should try and compete with such agencies, or
whether their task must be to develop more critical and novel research methods (Savage &
Burrows, 2007, pp.895-896; Büscher et al., 2011, pp.14-15). Savage and Burrows conclude
that sociologists must develop an interest in the ‘politics of method’, ‘renewing their interests
in methodological innovation,… reporting critically on new digitalizations’ and adopting
‘radical mixture[s] of methods coupled with renewed critical reflection’ (2007, pp.895-896),
and Büscher et al. advance similar concerns about ‘being left behind in the slow lane of
research’, arguing for ‘a similar call to arms’ (2011, pp.14, 15). While Savage and Burrows’
(2007) call, in part, stems from concerns about the role of sociologists in a changing world,
the implications of their observations – as well as those of Thrift (2004a) – clearly extend
beyond the social sciences, and these calls for methodological innovation and critical
methods clearly resonate with debates in the arts and humanities as well as the social
sciences. What I want to argue, though, is that a conceptualisation of mobilities research and
mobile methods as social science research is in danger of limiting academic work to
interventions in the social, economic and political realms, whereas a broader understanding of
mobilities underpinned by the arts and humanities (as well as social sciences) might highlight
the diverse ways in which critical research and practice might unfold, ranging from creative
artistic interventions and walks, to the production of performances and plays (Wylie, 2005;
Verstraete, 2010; Johnston & Pratt, 2010; Lorimer & Wylie, 2010; Büscher et al., 2011).
Critical, creative, practical and academic interventions can occur in all manner of ways, and
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the work of arts and humanities scholars and practitioners provides excellent examples of
critical mobilities research practice.3
A final context and impetus for the increasing push to develop innovative mobile methods, is
the widespread engagement of mobilities scholars with anti-essentialist, post-structuralist
theoretical approaches which value embodied mobile practices; approaches which Nigel
Thrift has grouped together under the heading of ‘non-representational theories’ (Thrift,
1996, 2008; see also Schatzki et al., 2001). Writing in his book Spatial Formations, Thrift
(1996) described how ‘non-representational theories’ were a fairly broad array of theories –
arising from strands of post-structuralism, actor-network theory, social psychology,
phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, conversational analysis and sociology – which
took ‘practices’, ‘performance’ and ‘things’ seriously, focussing on practical action and
experimentation, context, embodiment, affect, and presentation rather than representation. At
the heart of many ‘non-representational theories’ is a focus on movement and mobility.
Indeed, Thrift (2000a, p.556) has termed ‘non-representational theory’ a ‘theory of mobile
practices’, while he described his 2008 book Non-Representational Theory as ‘a book based
on the leitmotif of movement in its many forms’ (p.5). Movement and mobility take on a twin
role in this work, for while, on the one hand, Thrift observes that there appears to be a broad
‘structure of feeling’ and ‘an almost/not quite ontology which is gradually gathering
momentum around the key trope of “mobility”’ – emerging within Western societies through
a reshaping of environments, technologies and subjectivities in the past few centuries – on the
other hand, academics need to respond to these shifts and find new techniques, vocabularies
and methods for apprehending and articulating these mobilities (Thrift, 1996, p.258). In some
of his earliest discussions of non-representational theories, Thrift hinted at the ‘practical
methodological problems’ associated with a focus on mobility and movement (Thrift, 1993,
p.98), and in a series of subsequent publications he would go on to criticise cultural
geographers for relying upon a limited range of qualitative methods in their research, and
utilising a narrow range of (largely written and verbal) technologies for articulating their
work to academic colleagues and students (Thrift, 2000b, 2000c; 2004b; Thrift & Dewsbury,
2000):
Current work in cultural studies and cultural geography still draws on a remarkably
limited number of methodologies – ethnography, focus groups, and the like – which
are nearly always cognitive in origin and effect. Nonrepresentational work, in
contrast, is concerned with multiplying performative methodologies which allow their
participants equal rights to disclosure, through relation rather than representation
(Thrift, 2000b, p.244).
Experimentation, openness, creativity, participation and performance become the watchwords of a broad array of methods and techniques which are undertaken as part of nonrepresentational research practices, where the aim is to learn how to move with a range of
research subjects and objects in new or established ways, as ‘the world calls us to witness it
into being’, and ‘in the performances that make us, the world comes about’ (Dewsbury et al.,
2002, p.439). What is noticeable is that this work on embodied mobile practices came to have
a significant influence on research upon mobility and transport (see, for example, Jones,
2005; Adey, 2006, 2010; Spinney, 2006, 2009, 2011; Bissell, 2007, 2008, 2009; Cresswell,
2010; Merriman, 2007, 2012a; McCormack, 2008; Brown & Spinney, 2010; Fincham et al.,
2010; Middleton, 2010).
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Mobility scholars have engaged with these theoretical writings about practice in different
ways, showing different levels of engagement and commitment is their theoretical and
methodological stances, but the broad push underpinning some of these engagements appears
to be an attempt to more ‘accurately interpret, represent and understand a world increasingly
constituted in mobilities’ (Fincham et al., 2010, p.5):
Can existing social scientific research methods that slow down and freeze experiences
(the interview, the focus group, the survey) adequately capture mobile experiences,
practices where the context of movement itself may be crucial to understanding the
significance of the event to the participant, rather than being simply “read off” from
the destination points and origins? (Fincham et al., 2010, p.2).
The inevitable and necessary solution outlined by a number of mobility scholars is to
construct studies and utilise methods which enable the researcher to apprehend and
experience the mobilities of their research subjects/objects in more direct and multi-sensuous
ways – moving, being or seeing with their research subjects – but in the next section I argue
that this imperative is frequently underpinned by a rather problematic assumption that these
methods enable the researcher to more accurately know and represent the experiences of their
research subjects.
The imperative to move, be, and see with
…as a consequence of allowing themselves to move with and to be moved by
subjects, researchers can become tuned into the social organisation of “moves”. …By
immersing themselves in the fleeting, multi-sensory, distributed, mobile and multiple,
yet local, practical and ordered making of social and material realities, researchers
come to understand movement not as only governed by rules but as methodologically
generative (Büscher et al., 2011, p.7).
There are clearly good reasons why a researcher might want to adopt any number of
participative, performative, ethnographic techniques which enable them to move along with,
be with, or sense with their research subjects. The long-standing interest of researchers in
ordinary and mundane practices, gestures, conversations and experiences in different cultural
contexts has meant that researchers have often sought to adapt or develop methods which
enable them to either observe the everyday activities of others in context or to learn and
experience embodied cultural practices as an aid to understanding particular cultures. In
situations where the research subjects are moving, and their spatial, social and material
contexts and relations are ever-changing, it would seem that new techniques and technologies
must be adopted in order to ‘keep as much of the context of practice as possible’ (Spinney,
2009, p.827). In situations where it is either impossible, impractical, or undesirable for the
researcher to move along with or be with their research subjects – e.g. in research on car
travel or cycling – video methods may well provide a very useful way of recording visual and
aural aspects of the mobile practices under study (see Laurier, 2004, 2010, 2011; Laurier et
al., 2008; Spinney, 2009, 2010, 2011; Brown & Spinney, 2010). Mobile methods such as ‘goalongs’, ‘ride-alongs’, and video ethnography may also provide useful strands to a multimethods approach, facilitating discussions with research participants or forming the basis for
interviews, while video recordings can enable detailed micro-scale sociological analyses of
gesture, speech and conversation which might otherwise be impossible, as well as providing a
valuable record of events which can be archived and re-analysed in the future (Laurier et al.,
2008; Spinney, 2009, 2011). Mobile methods clearly have their uses, but what I want to
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question is some of the claims which are made about the ‘power’ of these methods, less as
creative or experimental tools, than the claims made about their ability to let researchers more
successfully and accurately apprehend or represent certain meanings, feelings, emotions and
kinaesthetic sensibilities.
Within the ‘mobile methods’ literature there is an assumption that many conventional
methods ‘hold down and dissect’ phenomena, whereas we should be ‘trying to move with,
and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and
kinaesthetic’ (Büscher et al., 2011, p.1). Rather than fix or represent these dynamic, mobile,
embodied, non-cognitive practices, academics should be seeking to apprehend and appreciate
these subtle performances in more embodied and responsive ways, moving with and being
with their research subjects, and developing kinaesthetic, synaesthetic and proprioceptive
sensibilities of the movements, affects and materialities constituting events (cf. Järvinen,
2006). Participation, performance and movement with others is seen to foster forms of
knowing and understanding which are either obscured or erased by traditional
methodological techniques for representing situations, events and practices, but these
arguments are frequently underpinned by some rather problematic assumptions about what
mobile methods are and can do:
Firstly, it is often assumed that these methods enable the researcher to witness events ‘firsthand’, bringing about a ‘closeness’, immediacy and ‘proximity’ which is all-too-often
associated with an authentic experience which can enable the researcher to more accurately
know and interpret the practices in question (Fincham et al., 2010, pp.4-5; McGuinness et al.,
2010). As McGuinness et al. (2010, p.171) point out, mobilities researchers do vary in the
extent to which they assert that there are ‘such things as accurate measured accounts’, but
there is no question that many studies adopting mobile methods are still driven by a social
scientific ‘notion of bringing back the “data”’ (Thrift, 2000c, p.3), adopting the ‘“know-andtell” politics of much sociological methodology’ (Dewsbury, 2010, p.321). As J.D. Dewsbury
explains in an essay on ‘Performative, non-representational, and affect-based research’
methods:
Often when confronted with the desire to do performative research the knee-jerk
reaction is to speed fast into devising a research project that involves animating
knowledge by using video capture of one form or another: the “only way” to get at
practice and performance, and any other present-tense action (2010, p.325).
Video-recording technologies and participative techniques are valorised for their ability to
enable the researcher to witness or capture the unfolding of live events and the contexts of
action, but such manoeuvres often appear to assume that such practices, contexts, spaces and
events are singular, whereas I would argue that there is ‘no one world out there’ which can be
accurately witnessed, captured, represented or portrayed (Dewsbury, 2010, p.330). Video
technologies can only present specific aspects of the visual and aural dimensions of
environments and contexts,4 and an excessive faith in such technologies is in danger of
obscuring the many complex (often invisible) social and political practices and relations
which co-constitute spaces, events and contexts. My experience of driving or passengering
along a particular stretch of road is unlikely to be fully aligned with someone else’s
experiences, whether they are travelling along with me, or not. Physical proximity and copresence present an illusion of ‘first-handedness’, closeness, accuracy and authenticity.
Clearly other kinds of mediated presence and contact can facilitate similar effects, and I do
not see why video recordings or autobiographical reflections on being in a physical
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environment are more effective at portraying, capturing or representing some-thing, some
feeling about a situation, event or environment, than a written or verbal record. Indeed, a
number of scholars are beginning to challenge the assumption that scholars need to adopt
participative and performative methods in order to apprehend habitual, everyday, un-thought
practices, feelings and sensations which are said to be unspeakable and to elude
representation (Hitchings, 2012). As Dewsbury has persuasively argued:
A well conceived set of interview questions might well be far more effective [than a
video recording] at capturing the tension of the performing body as witnessed by the
body of the interviewee (2010, p.325).
In the multi-sensual approaches of a number of mobility researchers, conventional methods
such as interviews have been usefully combined with techniques such as video recordings,
with video playbacks being used as the basis for interviews and discussions with participants
(Spinney, 2009; Brown & Spinney, 2010), but I am not entirely convinced about what the
broader conclusions of such investigations could be, unless such studies actually
acknowledge that the world is multiple, open-ended and ‘more elusive than we can theorise’,
as ‘the world does not add-up’ (Dewsbury et al., 2002, p.437). Some scholars seem to be
trying to capture the liveliness of embodied movements and the unfolding event, chasing after
something that has already escaped them. Indeed, as many theorists of practice would argue,
‘you cannot directly signify that which is past’ (Dewsbury, 2010, p.332), and social scientists
could perhaps learn from the way in which humanities scholars draw upon and experiment
with mobile methods. Specific ways of moving with – and technologies such as video – may
provide excellent aids to experimentation and presentation, but they should not be upheld as
the only techniques for capturing, recording or representing an event, context, experience, or
world. Such attitudes tend to be underpinned by the assumption that researchers must seek to
apprehend a singular world, and that the message and data are what really counts, over-andabove the practices undertaken. The challenge presented by non-representational thinkers
such as JD Dewsbury (2010) is incisive, for as he suggests, we should not adopt innovative
mobile methods in an attempt to (or belief that we can) more accurately know or represent
practices, contexts and events. Rather, innovation and experimentation are important
processes in themselves – aiding self-discovery and facilitating discussion – and the practices
of making a video, riding-along, and moving-with are perhaps more instructive or
informative than the images, data or experiences gathered.
Secondly, there is a danger that the focus on mobile methods and non-representational
approaches to movement, performance, ‘liveliness and the body-in-action’ generates ‘an
overanimated mobile subject’, highlighting movement, action and dynamism above ‘other
ways of experiencing mobilities’ (Bissell, 2010, p.56, 58). Stillness, waiting, slowness and
boredom may be just as important to many situations, practices and movements as sensations
and experiences of speed, movement, excitement and exhilaration (see Bissell, 2007, 2008;
Bissell & Fuller, 2011), but many of these mobile methodologies and approaches do not seem
to be very good at registering the more passive practices, engagements and affective relations
which gather around movements and mobilities (Bissell, 2010, p.62). Mobilities research and
mobile methods, then, have frequently focussed on the active embodied movements of the
cyclist, walker, and driver, and it is only more recently that close attention is being paid to the
seemingly more passive mobilities of these same individuals, as well as the embodied
practices of such figures as ‘the passenger’ (Watts, 2008; Bissell, 2007, 2008, 2009; Adey et
al., 2011). Mobilities researchers also focus much of their attention on particular kinds of
mobilities and mobile subjects, reinforcing a number of problematic binaries, and ultimately
11
constructing a rather limited sense of what movement and mobility are. For example, many
mobility researchers draw a distinction between mobilities and moorings, or mobility and
stasis (Hannam et al., 2006), utilising mobile methods to understand the practices and actions
associated with one side of this binary while paying less attention to the infrastructures,
technologies, materialities, and spaces which are integral to the embodied movements of
human subjects (and which are perceived to change very little), or indeed questioning the
binaries which underpin their work. A symmetrical sociology of mobilities might well
question the mobility/moorings binary, adopting a range of methods – including video
methods, ethnography, and participative techniques – to trace the social relations,
materialities and practices relating to cycle paths, scenic roads, motorways, railway lines, and
airline cabins, in addition to the experiences of the active traveller in such spaces. Of course,
some researchers have focussed on the history and politics of airport design (Pascoe, 2001;
Adey, 2008), the production and consumption of modern roads (Merriman, 2007; Mauch &
Zeller, 2008), and other matters, but few mobility scholars have attempted to utilise mobile
(or static) methods to produce the kinds of symmetrical sociologies that have been advanced
by scholars in Science and Technology Studies (see Latour, 1996; Law, 2001, 2002). As
Bruno Latour once put it in a critique of Marc Augé’s (1986) ethnology of the Paris metro:
… he has limited himself to studying the most superficial aspects of the metro (Augé,
1986), interpreting some graffiti on the walls of subway corridors, intimidated this
time by the evidence of his own marginality in the face of Western economics,
technologies and science. A symmetrical Marc Augé would have studied the
sociotechnological network of the metro itself: its engineers as well as its drivers, its
directors and its clients, the employer-State, the whole shebang – simply doing at
home what he had always done elsewhere (Latour, 1993, pp.100-101).
While I do not want to suggest that mobility scholars should stop what they are doing in order
to focus on the fine-grained detail of everyday, micro-scale social and material relations – or
to try and provide symmetrical sociologies, geographies or anthropologies of the coproduction of mobility subjects, objects, practices and infrastructures – there is no doubt that
mobile methods have mainly been deployed to understand the experiences and movements of
embodied, mobile human subjects, which are increasingly praised and celebrated over-andabove studies of transport spaces, infrastructures, and policies. What’s more, I would
encourage mobility scholars to challenge the rather simplistic binary of mobility/moorings,
for as Peter Adey has suggested, ‘everything is mobile’, ‘there is never any absolute
immobility’, and ‘moorings are indeed mobile too’ (Adey, 2006, p.76, 83 and 86). As process
philosophers have long argued,5 movement, flux and flow are primary and ubiquitous, but
just because all matter is seen to be in flux, movement and becoming, it does not mean that
everything moves in the same way or at the same speed (Merriman, 2012a). Thus, while
critics of process philosophy and nomadic metaphysics may argue that ‘if everything is
mobile, then the concept has little purchase’ (Adey, 2006, p.76), process philosophers do not
necessarily suggest that all movements are equal – indeed, movements have different
qualities and speeds, and are underpinned by very different political, physical and aesthetic
processes (Merriman, 2012a). Mobile methods, then, could be utilised much more than at
present to understand the ‘vibrant materialities’ and mobilities of the world (Bennett, 2010),
while acknowledging the fact that things move and vibrate with different rhythms, speeds and
affects. To understand these materialities, movements, affects, sensations and worlds,
scholars could utilise a range of methods, from textual and discourse analysis, to interviews,
focus groups, video ethnography, participant observation and much more.
12
Thirdly, in their attempts to develop experimental and innovative research methods with
research subjects and objects, mobility scholars are in danger of reinforcing distinctions
between ‘field-based’ and ‘desk-based’ research, in which ‘field-based’ ethnographic and
participative techniques are frequently seen to provide first-hand access and a close
engagement with particular practices and events. Within disciplines such as geography,
anthropology, sociology and archaeology there have been long-standing debates about the
appropriate ‘sites’ for undertaking academic research, and about what counts as rigorous and
valuable research, as well as the relationship between theoretical and empirical research. My
concern is that in utilising novel participative techniques to track movements in new places,
mobility scholars naturalise a certain style of mobilities research as being ‘pioneering’ and
‘innovative’.
Fourthly, too many approaches to mobile methods appear to be founded upon a faith in new
technologies which are seen to provide a more accurate and close apprehension of practices
and experiences of movement (Dewsbury, 2010; Vergunst, 2011). Video cameras, GIS, GPS
and an array of other data-gathering and analytical techniques are advocated as the means to
effectively capture and trace particular movements, practices and experiences, but not only
does this turn to modern technologies overlook the many well-established and effective
means of tracing and understanding mobilities, but it can also ‘tempt researchers into
claiming a scientific, universal authority on the basis of that technology rather than in the
scope and content of their work’ (Vergunst, 2011, p.212). Unlike Jo Vergunst, my concern is
not that ‘turning too readily to high technology has the danger that we actually distance
ourselves from the experience of movement, in the very act of trying to get closer to it’
(2011, p.210). Indeed, it is precisely such allusions to phenomenological closeness and
distance which I want to avoid and critique, for witnessing something or engaging with
someone face-to-face, on-the-ground, does not provide some authentic or singular way of
understanding, witnessing, or knowing a subject, thing or event. Rather it provides a
particular kind of engagement which is different from (but not superior to) other embodied
practices of engagement – e.g. reading about an event, watching a video recording of it, etc.
My concern with the current turn to new technologies is not with the way they might
transform a researcher’s engagements with the world (although that is interesting), rather it is
with assumptions that new methods or new technologies are necessary to capture some-thing
that established methods can’t apprehend, and suggesting that mobility researchers have
failed to innovate. It is these kinds of claims which underpin a recent paper by Phil Jones and
James Evans:
This paper identifies a failure by mobilities scholars to engage with the
methodological and analytical challenges offered by qualitative GIS. … bringing
together mobilities and qualitative GIS is not simply an intellectual exercise, but
offers decisionmakers rigorously analysed understandings of how spaces are produced
through movement and the implications of this for everyday life (Jones & Evans,
2012, p.92, 98).
Now, given the fairly recent history of qualitative GIS, the problems some scholars have with
its approaches and claims, and the genealogy of recent work on mobilities – emerging from
traditions of research in sociology, cultural geography, anthropology and history – it is not
surprising that mobility scholars have not engaged with the techniques of qualitative GIS, and
neither do I think it constitutes some kind of ‘failure’ (on qualitative GIS, see Cope &
Elwood, 2009). What’s more, Jones and Evans appear to exaggerate the ‘analytic power’ of
GIS, and the importance of ‘spatial transcript[s]’, which they claim ‘do not simply spatialise
13
qualitative data, but show how space shapes data’ (p.92, 97). Qualitative GIS may be an
illuminating and powerful way of visualising and mapping qualitative data, but these
techniques can only aid rather than provide qualitative data analysis, and they are ultimately
underpinned by rather conventional, neo-Euclidean, ‘physical’ conceptualisations of space
and location. Space is reified as absolute or relative location, and as a thing with constitutive
power, but while the aesthetic effects of these modes of visualising and mapping data may
appeal to many, they do not provide an authoritative and definitive solution to the display and
analysis of data, and neither should mobilities scholars be criticised for failing to engage with
this or any other new or emerging technique.
Methods for apprehending mobile practices: historical research on driving
In this paper I have advanced a number of arguments about methods for researching practices
of mobility. I have examined how ‘mobile methods’ have come to be associated with
innovative, experimental, non-representational approaches, and new techniques and
technologies for tracking, tracing and recording movement. I have shown how a ‘practice
turn’ (Schatzki et al., 2001) in the social sciences and humanities has led to a focus on
performative and participative methods, and on the unfolding of events and mobile embodied
practices ‘in the now’. I have specified how mobilities research has frequently been framed as
social science research, overlooking other approaches to mobility developed by scholars and
practitioners in the arts and humanities. Indeed, mobilities research is and always has been a
diverse field, taking in a range of methods, approaches and disciplines, and in this final
section of the paper I want to outline a single case study to demonstrate the diverse range of
methods, including so-called ‘conventional methods’, which can and have been used to trace
embodied mobile practices, actions and events. My example is a historical one relating to the
embodied practices and sensations of motoring in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
The Victorian and Edwardian eras are beyond our living memory, and one could argue that
archival sources, visual materials and written records are important because they are one of
the only ways we can access people’s views and representations of the period.6 This may be
true, but I do not want to suggest that if other methods were available they would somehow
be more desirable or useful for the social science or humanities scholar. Written accounts and
visual representations – official or unofficial, personal or public – provide a valuable insight
into the embodied practices, events, spaces and experiences of a particular period, or relating
to a particular activity. Take the embodied sensations and experiences of driving. A number
of academics and cultural commentators have remarked on how the practices, sensations and
experiences of driving elude easy representation or description, and how experienced
motorists drive their cars in an automatic, detached, distracted or ‘non-cognitive’ manner
(Seamon, 1980; Crary, 1999; Thrift, 2004c; Merriman, 2007, 2009a, 2012a; cf. Laurier,
2011). Driving is characterised by highly distinctive, kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, haptic,
spatial and visual sensibilities which are difficult to describe and are rarely reflected upon,
but this does not mean that motorists are unable to present or describe their embodied
experiences, and indeed the novelty and intensity of these affects and sensations led many
early motorists to talk and write about the sensations, feelings and emotions which emerged
when driving or being passengers in motor cars. Here is one journalist’s description of the
sensations of motoring between London and Brighton on ‘Emancipation Day’, 14 November
1896:7
To rush through the air at the speed of a torpedo-boat destroyer, down a narrow,
curving road, enclosed with hedges, and without being able to see what was to the
14
front of us, was a novel and thrilling experience. The gradient is very steep. One
minute we were 500 feet above the sea level, and the next 300 feet only. We had
accomplished this rapid descent of 200 feet in a few seconds of breathless suspense,
when the slightest error of steering would have landed us into one bank or the other,
or plunged us into the midst of cyclists who were waiting at the bottom of the hill to
see how we should take this admittedly awkward piece of country. We did it
magnificently, without a swerve. And all the while our motor was actively impelling
us onward, adding to the velocity which had been already imparted to the vehicle by
the momentum. It was a grand sensation… (The Automotor and Horseless Vehicle
Journal, 1896, p.69).
This experience and sensation of descending a hill is described in a manner which clearly
pictures a scene and describes events for dramatic effect, but early motoring magazines were
full of similar accounts which described the embodied sensations of motoring in general, as
well as experiences on specific motor tours and trips (see Merriman, 2012a). As Louis
Vincent remarked in The Car (Illustrated) in April 1905:
To the man who does not motor – that unfortunate man who has never known the joy
of spinning… across wild moorlands with a screaming wind to face,… a wind that
fires you with the exhilaration of life and the joy of life – to such a man the motor-car
can be nothing more than an unimaginative, moving mass of metal that smells of
petrol and makes evil noises. There are even some motorists who have never absorbed
the spirit of the car as a thing of life and feeling, a genie of Pegasean potency
encircling the world in a breath. The sensation of soaring through space, the sense of
power and velocity, gives one kinship with the eagle… (Vincent, 1905, p.308).
These first-hand experiences and reflections may sensationalise the experience – dramatising
the events for poetic or literary effect, and reflecting on remarkable events and experiences
rather than mundane occurrences – but the practices of writing, reflecting and presenting
these sensations tells us a lot about how motoring was perceived at the time, and motorists
were clearly able to articulate a series of embodied practices, affects and sensations which
some have suggested are fleeting, non-cognitive, non-representational, and simply elude
presentation.
These written accounts might provide us with some understanding or sense of what it was
like to travel on an early motor-car, on unmade roads, at a time when motorists were
frequently vilified by the public, the press and authorities, but there are many other sources,
methods and perspectives which might also allow us to understand the practices, events and
spaces of motoring in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Motorists did not drive or travel
as passengers in a cultural, political or spatial ‘vacuum’, and as soon as motor-cars arrived on
the roads and streets of Britain then cultural commentators, politicians, civil servants,
magistrates, the police, and members of the public started to discuss the benefits and negative
aspects of motoring – ranging from the impact of motor vehicles on the surfaces of roads, the
physical sensations, effects and dangers of motoring, and the way in which motorists
conducted themselves, to discussions about how to tax motorists and regulate their conduct.
Academic accounts of contemporary mobility which utilise mobile methods frequently ignore
such broader discourses and discursive contexts, but the historically-minded mobilities
scholar cannot avoid such contextual debates (and neither should, I argue, mobilities scholars
focussed on practices today).
15
When new motor-cars started arriving in Britain in the early 1890s, they fell subject to a
classification system created in the 1860s whereby motor vehicles were classed as a road
locomotive and were subject to speed restrictions of 4mph in the countryside and 2mph in
towns (Plowden, 1971, p.22; Merriman, 2012a). Despite the introduction of the Locomotives
on Highways Act of 1896 – which freed motorists from the harsh restrictions, raising the
maximum speed limit to 12mph – the late 1890s and 1900s saw ongoing struggles between
politicians, the police, motoring organisations, motorists and the public about the rights,
responsibilities, freedom and control of motorists (see Merriman, 2012a). Motoring became
associated with a diverse array of practices which exceeded the actions, experiences, and
sensations of the motor-car driver, including practices of legislating (by politicians), timing,
identifying and trapping (by the police), prosecuting (lawyers and judges), paving (by
engineers), producing (by manufacturers, retailers and publishers), and warning and
informing (by motor scouts).
Conclusions
…whilst fleeting movements may be representational – that is to say they are
fundamental to the creation and reproduction of meaning – their transient nature does
not readily lend itself to apprehensions through quantitative or verbal accounts. One
reason for this is that even if we acknowledge the importance of such factors, we lack
the technologies, skills and vocabularies necessary to elicit and evoke sensory
experiences in registers other than the visual and aural precisely because they often
reside in the realm of the habitual and unconscious. As a result there has been a
corresponding post-mortem of existing methods with queries being raised about
whether the new research questions arising through the mobilities turn require a
wholesale re-thinking of methodological approach (Spinney, 2011, p.162).
Over the past few years, an increasing number of mobilities scholars have argued that
practices and sensations of human embodied movement are fleeting occurrences which elude
representation, and it is suggested that new research techniques, methods and theoretical
stances are necessary to allow academics to apprehend such practices and experiences of
embodied movement. As Justin Spinney (2011, p.162) suggests in the quotation above, some
scholars have undertaken a ‘post-mortem of existing methods’, calling for a rethinking of
approaches, but the epistemological assumptions and claims of some of these studies is
frequently confused. Indeed, while many mobility scholars and non-representational theorists
adopt the kinds of multi-dimensional methodology, ‘weak ontology’, and partial and ‘situated
epistemology’ advocated by Nigel Thrift (1996, pp.32-33), Donna Haraway and other antiessentialist and post-structuralist thinkers, some ‘post-mortems’ of conventional methods are
underpinned by the problematic belief that experimental and improvisational ‘mobile
methods’ provide the means to enable the research to get ‘close-to’, ‘grasp’ or witness the
here-ness, now-ness and live-ness of particular practices and events – providing some ‘Godlike’ position from which the researcher can gain a more accurate or authentic knowledge of
a situation. My plea, then, is for scholars to provide more balanced discussions of the
advantages and powers of ‘mobile methods’ and to maintain a plural sense of what mobilities
research is, has been, can be and should be: expanding the number of disciplinary
perspectives on movement and mobility; working across disciplinary boundaries; developing
different theoretical and empirical avenues; drawing upon a plurality of methodological
approaches; and above all adopting modest, ‘weak’, open, non-representational
epistemologies and ontologies – not as a means to grasp and represent elusive practices, but
as a means to experiment and move with.
16
Acknowledgments
The initial research underlying this paper was undertaken during a period of research leave
funded by the AHRC, Award Reference AH/H00243X/1.
Notes
I use scare quotes because words such as ‘conventional’ and ‘traditional’ are all-too-often
associated with pejorative judgments, where such methods are seen as being simplistic,
ineffective, outdated and conservative. Of course, such methods are not singular or fixed, and
scholars continuously rework them, innovating ‘around the edges’.
2
For example, there are a broad range of creative, experimental and practise-based
approaches which have a lot in common with ‘mobile methods’ and mobilities research but
are rarely included under such banners, including work in geography, performance studies,
literature and creative writing (see, for example, Pearce, 2000, 2012a, 2012b; Wylie, 2005;
Merriman et al., 2008; Lorimer & Wylie, 2010; Pearson, 2006, 2010).
3
Many examples spring to mind, but some recent examples are reviewed in the journal
Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies which features special sections on
‘mobility and art’ and ‘museums reviews’. See also Merriman & Webster (2009).
4
I appreciate that practices and technologies associated with senses and sensations are
complex, multiple and do not function in simple or independent ways. What’s more, I also
accept that technologies such as video might be able to articulate or conjure up other auras
and sensibilities which are not traditionally confined to the visual or aural domains.
5
Processual thinking and process philosophy have a long and more-or-less distinguished
history – from ancient thinkers such as Heraclitus and Lucretius, to modern process
philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Brian Massumi, Jane Bennett,
and Deleuze and Guattari (see Merriman, 2012a).
6
Of course, one could try to track down early film recordings or oral history interviews with
people that lived through or remembered the period, although such sources and methods
would present their own methodological challenges and limitations.
7
‘Emancipation Day’, 14 November 1896, was the day when the Locomotives on Highways
Act, 1896 came into force, lifting the restrictions which severely limited the use of motor cars
in the UK (see Plowden, 1971; Merriman, 2012a).
1
17
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