Nurturing Mobilities employs new empirical material and an innovative theoretical framing to bring new clarity to why families travel today – and what happens when they do. The authors argue that an imperative to ‘think with mobility’ and to ‘aspire to be mobile’ shapes identities, futures, and family practices. Drawing on data that examines family travel practices – typically short-term trips – across the working-, middle-, and globally mobile middle-classes, Nurturing Mobilities describes how families travel, why they travel, and the role young family members play in curating family travel. Vitally, it examines the two biggest contemporary issues in global mobility: COVID-19 and climate change. How has COVID-19 changed travel motivations in a world beset by lockdowns and diminished finances? How are concerns around climate change, and engagements with global citizenship education, changing family travel practices? Nurturing Mobilities illuminates new ways in which social class divergence is forged through movements across borders. The authors’ theoretically inter-disciplinary approach delivers a full analysis of the apparently divergent processes that differentiate family travel along social class lines, yet also allow travel to play a core role in social mobility. This book is a vital resource for scholars and students studying mobility, globalisation, social class, and climate change engagement.

This book investigates how practices of community carsharing are influencing everyday mobility. It argues that hegemonic practices of automobility are reconfigured through practices of community carsharing, thereby challenging capitalist mobilities in the realm of everyday life. Through a detailed empirical study of practices of community carsharing and its practitioners in the rural regions around Munich, Germany, this book reveals how the practice contributes to the emergence of alternative automobile practices, meanings, identities and subjectivities. It also explores the embedding of automobility into its ecological context, the connection of function and community in practices of community carsharing and the changing of ownership relations through a process of commoning mobility. This reconfiguration of everyday practices of automobility takes place through processes of everyday resistance, re-embedding and commoning, and ultimately results in the emergence of an alternative mobility culture, thereby facilitating the dissemination of an alternative common sense of community carsharing. This book on community carsharing provides a valuable insight into carsharing in rural settings and exemplifies how carsharing specifically, and sharing mobilities in general, can contribute to a social–ecological mobility transition. The work will be of particular interest to scholars and practitioners working in mobility studies and mobilities.

Leading mobilities theorist Mimi Sheller offers an up-to-date, comprehensive analysis of the complex mobility disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath in this timely Advanced Introduction. It outlines the formation of the interdisciplinary field of mobility studies, arguing that mobilities theory is crucial to planning post-pandemic recovery, sustainable communities, and low-carbon transitions. From tourism to migration to urban infrastructure, to informal and reproductive mobilities, Sheller reveals how multiple im/mobilities are interconnected, as the novel coronavirus reminds us as it hitchhikes across the globe through its human hosts.

Reviewing diverse sites, including the US, Cambodia, Israel, Poland, Chile, Australia, and Brazil, this book considers how schooling systems are being influenced by the rise of external actors who increasingly determine the content, delivery, and governance of education.

Mobility aims to take the pulse of this enormously expanded and energetic field. It explores the breadth of the disciplinary areas mobility studies now encompass, examining the diverse conceptual and methodological approaches wielded within the field, and explores the utility of mobility to illuminate a cornucopia of mobile lives: from the mass movements of individuals within global processes such as migration and tourism, to homelessness and war; from the entangled relations caught up in the movement of disease, people and aid across borders, to the inability of someone to cross over a road. The new edition explores the more sustained elaboration of mobility studies within a wide variety of disciplinary approaches and subject matters. It echoes the growing internationalization of mobility research, reflected in diverse case studies from the Global South, South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and so far under-represented perspectives from China, Australasia, post-socialist Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. The book also features an additional chapter on mobility studies, to survey and explore the diverse quality of the field, and methodologies, in order to reflect the growing diversity of methodological approaches to mobilities, from walk-alongs and critical cartography to the mobile arts. The book offers an accessible reading of the way mobility has been tackled and understood, neatly exploring and summarizing a topic that has exploded into different variations and nuances. The text allows scholars and students alike to grasp the central importance of ‘mobility’ to social, cultural, political, economic and everyday terrains by providing accessible writings on key authors within key ideas and case study boxes, suggested further readings and summaries, while at the same time making a significant contribution to scholarly writings and debates.

Americans like to believe that theirs is the land of opportunity, but the hard facts are that children born into poor families in the United States tend to stay poor and children born into wealthy families generally stay rich. Other countries have shown more success at lessening the effects of inequality on mobility—possibly by making public investments in education, health, and family well-being that offset the private advantages of the wealthy. What can the United States learn from these other countries about how to provide children from disadvantaged backgrounds an equal chance in life? Making comparisons across ten countries, Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting brings together a team of eminent international scholars to examine why advantage and disadvantage persist across generations. The book sheds light on how the social and economic mobility of children differs within and across countries and the impact private family resources, public policies, and social institutions may have on mobility. In what ways do parents pass advantage or disadvantage on to their children? Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting is an expansive exploration of the relationship between parental socioeconomic status and background and the outcomes of their grown children. The authors also address the impact of education and parental financial assistance on mobility. Contributors Miles Corak, Lori Curtis, and Shelley Phipps look at how family economic background influences the outcomes of adult children in the United States and Canada. They find that, despite many cultural similarities between the two countries, Canada has three times the rate of intergenerational mobility as the United States—possibly because Canada makes more public investments in its labor market, health care, and family programs. Jo Blanden and her colleagues explore a number of factors affecting how advantage is transmitted between parents and children in the United States and the United Kingdom, including education, occupation, marriage, and health. They find that despite the two nations having similar rates of intergenerational mobility and social inequality, lack of educational opportunity plays a greater role in limiting U.S. mobility, while the United Kingdom’s deeply rooted social class structure makes it difficult for the disadvantaged to transcend their circumstances. Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook examine cognitive and behavioral school readiness across income groups and find that pre-school age children in both the United States and Britain show substantial income-related gaps in school readiness—driven in part by poorly developed parenting skills among overburdened, low-income families. The authors suggest that the most encouraging policies focus on both school and home interventions, including such measures as increases in federal funding for Head Start programs in the United States, raising pre-school staff qualifications in Britain, and parenting programs in both countries. A significant step forward in the study of intergenerational mobility, Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting demonstrates that the transmission of advantage or disadvantage from one generation to the next varies widely from country to country. This striking finding is a particular cause for concern in the United States, where the persistence of disadvantage remains stubbornly high. But, it provides a reason to hope that by better understanding mobility across the generations abroad, we can find ways to do better at home.