Mobile (Dis)order and Migratory Disobedience in a Neoliberal World

There are more boats and ‘live-aboard’ boaters on the inland waterways of Great Britain than there were in the late nineteenth century. Their history experienced seismic shifts throughout the twentieth century, but most recently competitive and corresponding desires have manipulated their past and contested their future. In short, neoliberalism has noticed them. Thinkers such as Wendy Brown account for neoliberalism’s insidious attack on subjectivities. But boaters exist outside of what remains of the polis and disrupt its ideology. Carter defines this as a freedom, but it can also be seen as disobedience: if they are not already antagonistic to neoliberalist ideology, their mobilities mark them as such. The future histories of canal boaters are now being curtailed, by a charitable organisation disguised as a regulatory agency that wishes to ascribe on its people boundaries, movement restrictions and reclassification of “place” in the term “neighbourhoods”. The ‘responsibilisation’ these social controls would force on boaters would result in the eradication of the subject – two things that these mobile peoples would view as both a threat to their inherent freedom, as Hobbes considered it, and as an injustice to their way of life as Article 8 of the European Court of Human Rights and legal scholars configure it. Drawing from ethnography and action-based methods, this paper considers an often forgotten migratory people whose integrated heritage history is about to be lost to the spatial ordering in the urban and rural scape. The measures threatening their continuous movement across the 3,000 mile linear village that is their home are devices of management, social cleansing, and control of nomadic bodies that the regulatory authority deems to be a liberal “excess” in a neoliberal world.