Key figures of mobility

This Special Issue on ‘Key Figures of Human Mobility’, edited by Jamie Coates and EASA’s former president Noel Salazar, comes at a highly appropriate moment. The papers interrogate the concept of mobility, which Salazar refers to as ‘a complex assemblage of movement, social imaginaries and experience’. Such a refusal to isolate mobility as being solely about people physically moving from one place to the next, but equally importantly, as referring to what is imagined and what is experienced as being somehow something to do with movement, is important. For example, migrants only physically move for a very short time, and yet they are often described and imagined as being mobility personified. The fact that they are imagined to have moved from somewhere else to‘here’ is their defining feature. The trope of the ‘figure’ that Salazar and his six authors draw on is apt here, given how strongly imaginaries of mobility tend to personify the concept. At the same time, the drawing together of a range of different figures – the nomad, exile, tourist, flâneur, pedestrian, pilgrim – demonstrates the impossibility of there being one kind of mobility: it depends on what makes people mobile, their relations with the places they come from and those to which or through which they move as well as the reasons that they move.No ISBNnrpages: 96status: publishe