Free public lecture: Mobility Justice with professor Mimi Sheller

When: March 29, 7 p.m.

Where: SFU Vancouver, 515 West Hastings St. (Harbour Centre). Room 1400 

Cost: Free

For more information, see the event website.

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day, when the entire world faces the urgent question of how to make the transition to more environmentally sustainable and socially just mobilities. All around the planet urban, regional, and international governing bodies are grappling with a series of crises related to how we move: an urban crisis of pollution and congestion, a global refugee crisis of borders and humanitarianism, and a climate crisis of global warming and decarbonisation. This talk will seek to think across these crises showing how each is part of a wider disturbance in prevailing institutions concerned with the management of mobilities and immobilities. Mobility justice offers a new way to think across the micro and macro scale of transitioning toward more just mobilities.

Mimi Sheller

Mimi Sheller is professor of sociology and founding director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities; Associate Editor of the journal Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies; and serves on the Scientific Board of the Mobile Lives Forum, SNCF, France. She also serves on the editorial boards of Cultural Sociology and the International Journal of African and Black Diaspora Studies. She has held recent Visiting Fellowships at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2008-09); Media@McGill in Montreal, Canada (2009); the Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); and the Penn Humanities Forum (on Virtuality) at the University of Pennsylvania (2010-11).

She is the author of several books and numerous articles in the field of Caribbean Studies, including Democracy After Slavery (Macmillan, 2000); Consuming the Caribbean (Routledge, 2003); and Citizenship from Below (Duke University Press, 2012). As co-editor, with John Urry, of Mobile Technologies of the City (Routledge, 2006), Tourism Mobilities (Routledge, 2004), and a special issue of the journal Environment and Planning A on ‘Materialities and Mobilities’, she helped to establish the new field of mobilities research. Her work in progress includes the forthcoming book Aluminum Dreams: Lightness, Speed and Modernity (MIT Press, 2014); the co-edited volume Handbook of Mobilities (Routledge, 2013); the co-edited book Local and Mobile; and a special issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac on mobile locative art.

Co-presented with the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, with support from the FASS Dean's Speakers Series Fund