Re‐working mobilities: Emergent geographies of employment‐related mobility

Abstract

Over the last decade, an increasing number of geographers and other social science researchers have deployed the insights of the new mobilities paradigm to study work, labour, and employment. These insights include attention to the meanings, practices, and politics of work‐related movement as well as to multiple spatial and temporal scales and types of im/mobility for and at work. In a review of this literature, we find five different vantage points on “re‐working” mobility: articulations of labour migration with other forms of mobility; geometries of power in the daily journey to work; embodiment and affect in work‐related movement; mobility and labour across the life course; and co‐mobilities of workers, ideas, and things. We argue that on whole, a mobility lens offers a “critical phenomenology” of the dynamic relations between the everyday lifeworlds and broader political, social, and economic contexts of both paid and unpaid work. This is especially important as work involves ever more complex patterns and experiences of mobility and is more deeply entwined with the mobilities of other domains of social life. We conclude by considering the rich implications of “re‐working mobilities” for methodological diversity and for animating both mobilities studies and labour studies as critical geographical endeavors.