Mimi Sheller – författare

How aluminum enabled a high-speed, gravity-defying American modernity even as other parts of the world paid the price in environmental damage and political turmoil.

Aluminum shaped the twentieth century. It enabled high-speed travel and gravity-defying flight. It was the material of a streamlined aesthetic that came to represent modernity. And it became an essential ingredient in industrial and domestic products that ranged from airplanes and cars to designer chairs and artificial Christmas trees. It entered modern homes as packaging, foil, pots and pans and even infiltrated our bodies through food, medicine, and cosmetics. In Aluminum Dreams, Mimi Sheller describes how the materiality and meaning of aluminum transformed modern life and continues to shape the world today.

Aluminum, Sheller tells us, changed mobility and mobilized modern life. It enabled air power, the space age and moon landings. Yet, as Sheller makes clear, aluminum was important not only in twentieth-century technology, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum''s shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum''s widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences?

Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions.

Crossing Borders examines how translocal, transnational, and internal borders of various kinds distribute uneven capabilities for moving, dwelling, and circulating. The contributors offer nuanced understandings of the politics of mobility across various kinds of borders and forms of cultural circulation, showing how people experience and practice crossing many different borders. Several chapters draw on interviews and ethnographic methods to analyze transnational migration, while others focus on material relations and cultural practices. Rather than the usual narrative of mobility as a kind of freedom, border crossing emerges here as an instrumental practice for building translocal livelihoods, a tactic for simply getting by, and a material practice potentially generating new forms of future sociality. Ultimately these diverse perspectives on crossing borders offer new ways to think about the mobility of political relations and the politics of mobile relations in a world of growing circulation across borders, but also flexible forms of (re)bordering. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.

The new ‘mobilities turn’ has become a powerful perspective in social theory. John Urry’s oeuvre has been very influential in the emergence of this new field and has had lasting impacts on many scholars. This collection presents originally commissioned essays from leading scholars in the field who reflect on how Urry’s writing influenced the course of their research and theorizing.

This volume gathers contributions in relation to John Urry’s path-breaking work. The new ‘mobilities turn’ made a strong imprint in European social theory and is beginning to make an impact in the Americas and Asia as well. It challenges mainstream theoretical and empirical approaches that were grounded in a sedentary and bounded view of states. It propels innovative thinking about social and media ecologies, complex systems and social change. It bridges many disciplines and methodologies, leading to new approaches to existing problems while also resonating with questions about both history and the future. Mobilities research marks the rise of academic and intellectual cooperation and collaboration ‘beyond societies’, as nations around the world face the ecological limits of contemporary mobility and energy systems.

The contributors represent several national contexts, including England, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Taiwan, Brazil, Canada, Australia and the USA. This book collects personal essays and gives insight into a vivid network of scientists who have connections of various degrees to the late John Urry as an academic figure, an author and a person.

The new ‘mobilities turn’ has become a powerful perspective in social theory. John Urry’s oeuvre has been very influential in the emergence of this new field and has had lasting impacts on many scholars. This collection presents originally commissioned essays from leading scholars in the field who reflect on how Urry’s writing influenced the course of their research and theorizing.

This volume gathers contributions in relation to John Urry’s path-breaking work. The new ‘mobilities turn’ made a strong imprint in European social theory and is beginning to make an impact in the Americas and Asia as well. It challenges mainstream theoretical and empirical approaches that were grounded in a sedentary and bounded view of states. It propels innovative thinking about social and media ecologies, complex systems and social change. It bridges many disciplines and methodologies, leading to new approaches to existing problems while also resonating with questions about both history and the future. Mobilities research marks the rise of academic and intellectual cooperation and collaboration ‘beyond societies’, as nations around the world face the ecological limits of contemporary mobility and energy systems.

The contributors represent several national contexts, including England, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Taiwan, Brazil, Canada, Australia and the USA. This book collects personal essays and gives insight into a vivid network of scientists who have connections of various degrees to the late John Urry as an academic figure, an author and a person.

Attending to the hidden linkages among intimate realms and the public sphere, Sheller explores specific struggles for freedom, including women''s political activism in Jamaica; the role of discourses of "manhood" in the making of free subjects, soldiers, and citizens; the fiercely ethnonationalist discourses that excluded South Asian and African indentured workers; the sexual politics of the low-bass beats and "bottoms up" moves in the dancehall; and the struggle for reproductive and LGBT rights and against homophobia in the contemporary Caribbean. Through her creative use of archival sources and emphasis on the connections between intimacy, violence, and citizenship, Sheller enriches critical theories of embodied freedom, sexual citizenship, and erotic agency in all post-slavery societies.

In this book leading social science and humanities contributors in the field of mobilities research address the multiple issues generated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermaths. Contributors examine how the pandemic intensified the existing and uneven ways that we move at multiple scales, from the mobilities of viruses to global planetary movements.

As the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world, outpacing public health efforts to contain it, many everyday human mobilities were brought to an abrupt halt in the emergency, while others were drastically reorganized. Viral mobilities unleashed not just a disruption of human mobilities, but also a vast intensification of the existing and uneven ways that we move or don’t move: such as in the contexts of tourism and international travel; in how mobilities are governed in cities, or through migration controls at and away from borders; in relation to climate change policies and transitions to net zero; in forms of transportation through which everyday life and work practices are undertaken and reproduced and, ultimately, in the way mobility is (re)valued and felt during and after a global crisis. Chapters in this book address the multiple issues generated by the pandemic and its relation to complex (im)mobilities and the ways they are governed and lived, at many scales, as well as deeper theoretical and methodological issues that arise, such as how to tell stories and visualise (im)mobilities of life under lockdown.

The book was originally published as a special issue of the Mobilities journal.

In this book leading social science and humanities contributors in the field of mobilities research address the multiple issues generated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermaths. Contributors examine how the pandemic intensified the existing and uneven ways that we move at multiple scales, from the mobilities of viruses to global planetary movements.

As the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world, outpacing public health efforts to contain it, many everyday human mobilities were brought to an abrupt halt in the emergency, while others were drastically reorganized. Viral mobilities unleashed not just a disruption of human mobilities, but also a vast intensification of the existing and uneven ways that we move or don’t move: such as in the contexts of tourism and international travel; in how mobilities are governed in cities, or through migration controls at and away from borders; in relation to climate change policies and transitions to net zero; in forms of transportation through which everyday life and work practices are undertaken and reproduced and, ultimately, in the way mobility is (re)valued and felt during and after a global crisis. Chapters in this book address the multiple issues generated by the pandemic and its relation to complex (im)mobilities and the ways they are governed and lived, at many scales, as well as deeper theoretical and methodological issues that arise, such as how to tell stories and visualise (im)mobilities of life under lockdown.

The book was originally published as a special issue of the Mobilities journal.

Mobile communications technologies are taking off across the world, while urban transportation and surveillance systems are also being rebuilt and updated. Emergent practices of physical, informational and communicational mobility are reconfiguring patterns of movement, co-presence, social exclusion and security across many urban contexts. This book brings together a carefully selected group of innovative case studies of these mobile technologies of the city, tracing the emergence of both new socio-technical practices of the city and of a new theoretical paradigm for mobilities research.

Mobile communications technologies are taking off across the world, while urban transportation and surveillance systems are also being rebuilt and updated. Emergent practices of physical, informational and communicational mobility are reconfiguring patterns of movement, co-presence, social exclusion and security across many urban contexts. This book brings together a carefully selected group of innovative case studies of these mobile technologies of the city, tracing the emergence of both new socio-technical practices of the city and of a new theoretical paradigm for mobilities research.

Many places around the world are being produced, converted, interpreted and made fit for tourist consumption. This fascinating book analyzes tourist performances such as walking, shopping, sunbathing, photographing, eating and clubbing, and studies why, and indeed how, some places become global centres whilst others don’t. Arranged in four distinct parts, Sheller and Urry consider:

Incorporating a wide array of empirical research and innovative international case studies, this fascinating book illuminates the tourist performance phenomenon: from Eco-tourism on the beach to shopping in Hong Kong, from the making of ''Cool Reykjavik'' to tourism in high-rise suburbs in Paris, and from Inca heritage to medical tourism.

Edited by two world authorities in tourism studies, this revealing book deploys a range of theories related to the ''mobility turn'' in the social sciences in order to analyze the contingent and networked nature of how places are stabilized as fit for playful performances. Well-written and researched, with coherent analysis and presentation, this book will appeal to academics, students and those interested in the complex character of global change.