Mimi Sheller
Mimi Sheller, AB Harvard University (1988), MA (1993) and PhD (1997) New School for Social Research, is Professor of Sociology and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel University. She is author and co-editor of ten books, including Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018); Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014); The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (Routledge, 2014); Mobility and Locative Media (Routledge, 2014); Citizenship from Below (Duke UP, 2012); Consuming the Caribbean (Routledge International Library of Sociology, 2003); Democracy After Slavery (Macmillan Caribbean, 2000). Her forthcoming book is Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2019).
As founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, co-editor with John Urry of Mobile Technologies of the City (2006) and Tourism Mobilities (2004), and author of several highly cited articles, she helped to establish the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. Mobilities research entails interdisciplinary study of the infrastructures, flows, and policies that create the contexts for contemporary mobility (and immobility), including attention to mobility rights, mobility justice, and the new social inequalities being produced by the uneven distribution of “mobility capital.”
Sheller 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.
As founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, co-editor with John Urry of Mobile Technologies of the City (2006) and Tourism Mobilities (2004), and author of several highly cited articles, she helped to establish the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. Mobilities research entails interdisciplinary study of the infrastructures, flows, and policies that create the contexts for contemporary mobility (and immobility), including attention to mobility rights, mobility justice, and the new social inequalities being produced by the uneven distribution of “mobility capital.”
Sheller 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.
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Books by Mimi Sheller
This Handbook explores and critically evaluates the debates, approaches, controversies and methodologies, inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. It brings together leading specialists from range of backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessible way whilst giving detailed grounding in the evolution of past debates on mobilities. It illustrates disciplinary trends and pathways, from migration studies and transport history to communications research, featuring methodological innovations and developments and conceptual histories - from feminist theory to tourist studies. It explores the dominant figures of mobility, from children to soldiers and the mobility impaired; the disparate materialities of mobility such as flows of water and waste to the vectors of viruses; key infrastructures such as logistics systems to the informal services of megacity slums, and the important mobility events around which our world turns; from going on vacation to the commute, to the catastrophic disruption of mobility systems.
The text is forward-thinking, projecting the future of mobilities as they might be lived, transformed and studied, and possibly, brought to an end. International in focus, the book transcends disciplinary and national boundaries to explore mobilities as they are understood from different perspectives, different fields, countries and standpoints.
This is an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in mobility across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.
“This is a stimulating, thought-provoking book of lasting significance to scholarship on the Caribbean, citizenship, sexuality, and embodiment. The way that Mimi Sheller puts the literatures on embodiment and citizenship into dialogue is impressive and important. After reading her analysis of these two bodies of scholarship, I will never again be able to think about one without considering the other. Citizenship from Below is a very distinguished book, one which will be widely read and discussed.”—Diana Paton, co-editor of Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing
Papers by Mimi Sheller
This Handbook explores and critically evaluates the debates, approaches, controversies and methodologies, inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. It brings together leading specialists from range of backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessible way whilst giving detailed grounding in the evolution of past debates on mobilities. It illustrates disciplinary trends and pathways, from migration studies and transport history to communications research, featuring methodological innovations and developments and conceptual histories - from feminist theory to tourist studies. It explores the dominant figures of mobility, from children to soldiers and the mobility impaired; the disparate materialities of mobility such as flows of water and waste to the vectors of viruses; key infrastructures such as logistics systems to the informal services of megacity slums, and the important mobility events around which our world turns; from going on vacation to the commute, to the catastrophic disruption of mobility systems.
The text is forward-thinking, projecting the future of mobilities as they might be lived, transformed and studied, and possibly, brought to an end. International in focus, the book transcends disciplinary and national boundaries to explore mobilities as they are understood from different perspectives, different fields, countries and standpoints.
This is an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in mobility across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.
“This is a stimulating, thought-provoking book of lasting significance to scholarship on the Caribbean, citizenship, sexuality, and embodiment. The way that Mimi Sheller puts the literatures on embodiment and citizenship into dialogue is impressive and important. After reading her analysis of these two bodies of scholarship, I will never again be able to think about one without considering the other. Citizenship from Below is a very distinguished book, one which will be widely read and discussed.”—Diana Paton, co-editor of Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing
The artists and researchers involved in this publication and associated symposium, the Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium held 3 July 2018 at the Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster University are: Kaya Barry, Tess Baxter, Bruce Bennett, Clare Booker, Natalie Bowers, Monika Büscher, Owen Chapman, Jocelyn Cunningham, Malé Lujan Escalante, Nick Ferguson, Bernard Guelton, Peter Merrington, Elia Ntaousani, Kat Jungnickel, Linda O Keeffe, Sven Kesselring, Carlos Lopez, Serena Pollastri, Nikki Pugh, Emma Rose, Kim Sawchuk, Mimi Sheller, Richard Smith, Jen Southern, Bron Szerszynski, Kai Syng Tan, Sam Thulin, Emma Whittaker and Louise Ann Wilson
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CONTEXTS
Kai was a 2017-2018 Centre for Mobilities Research CEMORE Visiting Fellow, Lancaster University. She worked closely with the Director of Mobilities Lab Dr Jen Southern, as well as Professor Emma Rose and Dr Linda O Keefe of the Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts, and successfully co-curated the Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium. The study and practice of Art & Mobilities has been gaining momentum in the past decade. This includes pioneering solo and collaborative work led by Jen, a key player in the field. The Art & Mobilities network consolidates, celebrates and develops this work. On 3rd July, nearly thirty artists, writers, curators and researchers gathered - physically and via Skype - at the Peter Scott Gallery. UK participants brought with them objects, images or texts for a pop-up exhibition. We wrote our big ideas on a ‘manifesto wall’ and considered the histories of mobilities in art practice through a timeline running across the Gallery. Jen gave a keynote packed full of information and provocations covering creative research methods, the aesthetics of mobility and so on. We closed the colloquium with a role and ‘next step’ that each of us intends to perform to get the group going. In the longer term, we will seek funding to build this network internationally and to facilitate collaborations and activities such as conferences, exhibitions and publications.
Kai helped to collate and design an ‘instant journal’, an experimental platform which documents some of our activities and thoughts, and which we will continue to edit and develop. You can see the full publication in the link above.
Kai also gave a keynote lecture which was a performance-lecture of how art and mobilities collide for her as an artist, curator and woman. See a version of it here in the form of an online story through 100 slides. https://bit.ly/2Ob34Ha
OTHER LINKS
See next steps here: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/cemore/mobilities-lab/art/
Flickr album: https://bit.ly/2vdIkri
Twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/hashtag/artmobs?src=hash
Timeline: https://bit.ly/2vhQSgB
We follow this narrative through the machinic LIDAR gaze, a three-dimensional aesthetic point cloud play of colors, shapes, dimensions, and movements infused with glitches, deflections, and disruptions. The film plays with not only the top-down logics and aesthetics of LIDAR mediality through its visual effects and story line, but also the creative bottom-up means of countering them within the film narrative, as well as in the film-maker’s own hacks of LIDAR cameras.
In this chapter, we critically explore Where the City Can’t See as an artistic “anti-environment” that illuminates LIDAR technology not only as an emerging mobile media infrastructure but also a new visual aesthetic and cultural medium. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from mobile communication, media ecology, and mobilities research, we discuss how this LIDAR artwork both situates and unsettles such an emerging media environment. In doing so, our analysis also speaks to scholarship into contemporary and emerging mobile communication and mobile media art.