On the Move

Architecture, history, photography, labor, dance, women’s suffrage, airport … 《On the Move》 explores the geographic imagination in various contexts. What kinds of meanings do mobility have within the context of socio-cultural power structures? How mobility has emerged as an object of knowledge in a range of practices from physiology to international law, dance notation to architecture, and simultaneously, how imaginations of mobility have informed judgments about people and their practices over the last several centuries in the Western world? This book sheds light on the interaction between the embodiment and representation of mobility.
The right to move (the right to mobility) is a virtually unconditional personal right guaranteed by the Constitution. Just as Marey and Muybridge constructed mobility through representation, and Victor Silvester opposed shimmy dance to codify ballroom dancing, Supreme Court judges also were involved in producing mobility. Judgment gives meaning to a particular movement. Mobility at this time refers to the mobility of citizens.
Also, mobility is the only geographic right acknowledged as a basic right. However, mobility can be evaluated as valuable not through the exclusion of its negative aspects, but through ways bound to be relational. That is to say, “pathological” mobility is created with mobility that is defined as the center of a certain identity or has a close relationship with each other. Examples of these cases include Arab-Americans blocked at airport immigration offices, Hispanic laborers in American agricultural sectors, and African Americans subject to racial profiling while driving. The gist of this book is mobility is a socially produced movement; and it operates and is practiced through specific relational opportunities.