社會科學中的「移動轉向」：Sheller 與 Urry《新移動範式》之批判性回顧 The “Mobility Turn” in Social Sciences: A Critical Review of Sheller and Urry’s New Mobilities Paradigm

English Version of my critique-

Before I begin my presentation, I have to say that I feel like these two authors were almost like prophets from Greek mythology. Looking back at what they wrote in 2006, their vision was so far ahead of its time that it feels like a clear prophecy of the world we live in today.

To understand why I feel this way, I want to take you back about twenty years. I want to talk about what the world was like when this article was actually being written. At that time, the world was still recovering from 9/11 and the SARS outbreak. The internet had only been around for about ten years, and Google was just starting to become something everyone used every day.

I remember clearly when Gmail launched in 2004. Back then, it was “invite-only.” Having a Gmail account was a big deal. I was the only one in my circle of friends who had one, and everyone else had to wait for me to send them an invitation just to get a mailbox with a lot of storage.

In those days, we didn’t have smartphones. We had PDAs, or Personal Digital Assistants. I remember this so well because my husband is known as the “PDA Godfather” in Taiwan. He was a perfect example of a “mobile person.” He was always connected and, in a way, he was “kidnapped” by the fast flow of digital information before anyone else was.

Back then, phones from Nokia or Sony Ericsson could get online, but they weren’t very good yet. It wasn’t until I bought my first iPhone 3GS in 2009 that we truly entered the age of the mobile web. This is also the reason why Facebook suddenly became so popular in Taiwan in 2009. Because we finally had the right devices in our pockets, everyone started using Facebook to stay connected and play games like “Happy Farm.”

I know this history so well because I lived through every bit of it. I didn’t learn about these changes from a textbook; I was there on the front lines. My entire career has been built on these two pillars: the internet and travel. For more than twenty years, I have worked as a professional travel blogger, and for over ten years, I have been a licensed tour leader. I have seen the world of travel and the world of the internet grow up together. I have watched how a better network and a smarter phone changed how people see the world and how they move through it.

This change happened because internet speeds got faster and mobile devices became something everyone could own. At the same time, travel was also becoming much faster and easier because of the rise of budget airlines, or LCCs.

This is why, when I look at the newest data from 2025, I am not surprised, but I am still amazed. According to the World Tourism Barometer from UN Tourism in January 2026, we reached 1.52 billion international arrivals last year. This is more than double the number from 2006. At the same time, internet users have grown from 1 billion to 6 billion.

These numbers tell the same story I have lived: mobility is no longer just a small part of our lives; it is the core of everything we do. Sheller and Urry already understood this. Even before the iPhone existed, they saw that our identity was becoming less about where we live and more about how we move.

Finally, I want to thank the professor for choosing this article. Through this paper, I was introduced to these sociologists and their important work. Their research on mobilities fits perfectly with my own interests and research direction.

Now, let’s move into the core analysis of their framework…

 

The “Mobility Turn” in Social Sciences: A Critical Review of Sheller and Urry’s New Mobilities Paradigm

I. Introduction

In this influential 2006 paper, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Mimi Sheller and John Urry argue for a fundamental shift in the social sciences, moving away from static, territory-bound analyses toward a comprehensive understanding of a world constantly “on the move”. By observing the significant scale of contemporary travel, including tourists, commuters, and business people as well as refugees and asylum seekers, the authors argue that mobility is no longer a marginal phenomenon but the very core of modern social life. Historically, the social sciences have treated travel as a “black box (Sheller & Urry 2006:208),” a mere neutral process of getting from point A to point B that is subservient to more “causally powerful processes” such as economics or politics. Sheller and Urry propose the “new mobilities paradigm” to transcend this limitation. This paradigm is not only about people moving more often or more quickly. More importantly, it asks the social sciences to rethink what should count as an object of analysis. It calls for a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from geography, sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, to examine the complex intersections of physical travel, virtual communication, imaginative travel, and the movement of materials.

Comparing these historical figures to current realities shows a significant rate of growth. According to《World Tourism Barometer》announced by the UN Tourism (UNWTO 2026), international tourist arrivals reached an estimated 1.52 billion in 2025, representing a 4% increase over the previous year. Europe remains the global leader in mobility, accounting for 793 million (approximately 800 million) of these international arrivals. This figure is more than double the 700 million arrivals recorded in 2006, merely two decades ago. Simultaneously, the expansion of digital connectivity has outpaced any prior technology. While Sheller and Urry observed a world where internet users were “soon to reach 1 billion,” by 2025, this figure has surged to 6 billion people (ITU 2025), representing 74% of the global population and a six-fold increase in less than two decades. These changes make Sheller and Urry’s argument even more convincing: mobility is no longer peripheral, but central to modern social life. The social sciences, therefore, can no longer treat travel as a neutral “black box” process of moving from point A to point B; instead, it must be recognized as a critical lens for understanding modern social relations and the mechanisms of power.

II. Core Theoretical Framework

1. Critique of Sedentarism and Romantic Nomadism: The paradigm primarily challenges “sedentarism,” which treats stability, meaning, and place as normal while viewing distance and change as abnormal. This static view, often rooted in Heideggerian philosophies of “dwelling,” blinded early researchers to the impact of systems like the automobile. Conversely, the authors critique “nomadic theories” that celebrate a completely boundaryless world, arguing that such “romantic readings” ignore the harsh realities of power and inequality.
2. The Interdependence of Mobilities and Immobilities (Moorings): A central tenet of this framework is that fluidity cannot exist without fixity. The massive flows of people and information require highly embedded and exceptionally immobile infrastructures, termed “moorings”. For instance, the hyper-mobility of global air travel is only made possible by massive “airport-cities,” thousands of workers, and extensive security and software systems. Similarly, the explosion of mobile telephony relies on a vast, static network of microwave channels and transmitters.
3. Theoretical Hybridity: The Six Bodies of Theory: The authors enroll six distinct bodies of theory to construct this paradigm —
   • Simmel’s Urban Sociology: Provides the early framework for understanding the “tempo” of city life and the necessity of punctuality.
   • Science and Technology Studies (STS): Views the social as “materially heterogeneous,” where humans and machines form hybrid geographies.
   • The Spatial Turn: Reconceptualizes places as relational assemblages and dynamic “places of movement”.
   • The Corporeal Turn: Recognizes travel as a sensuous and affective experience, centering the human body as an active vehicle.
   • Topologies of Social Networks: Examines the “weak ties” and “small worlds” that enable long-distance connectivity.
   • Complex Systems Theory: Analyzes the “orderly disorder” of mobile systems and their vulnerability to sudden “tipping points”.

4. Methodological Innovations: Research on the Move

To study a moving world, research methods must also simulate intermittent mobility. These include the observation of face-to-face copresence to understand the timing of physical encounters, and mobile ethnography, where researchers participate in movement alongside their subjects. Additionally, the use of time-space diaries allows for the mapping of trajectories, while cyber-research explores virtual mobilities. Finally, the study of “transfer points,” such as lounges and stations, reveals the significance of “in-between” spaces where movement is paused.

III. Theoretical Implications and Significance

The Power-Geometries of Mobility: A key point of this paradigm is that mobility is distributed unequally. The world is divided into “fast and slow lanes.” Within this system, a “kinetic elite” enjoys seamless movement, while many others remain restricted by surveillance and gated borders. The paradigm examines how institutional infrastructures guarantee movement for certain groups. At the same time, these systems actively restrict or limit mobility for others. This demonstrates that the control over who gets to move both reflects and reinforces existing power structures.

Redefining Place and Presence: This paradigm also changes how we think about place. Instead of fixed containers, places are seen as products of movement and interaction. Within networks of human and non-human agents, places themselves are described as “travelling” at various speeds and distances. Furthermore, mobile technologies are blurring the boundary between “presence” and “absence,” allowing individuals to be “present while apparently absent.”

Systemic Vulnerability and Risk: The interdependence of mobile systems makes them inherently fragile. Because these systems are “tightly coupled,” a single failure can cascade rapidly into a global crisis. This is most evident in the way global air travel facilitates the rapid spread of infectious diseases—such as SARS—bringing the whole world dramatically closer through unintended and dangerous configurations of time-space.

IV. Limitations and Critique

Despite its major theoretical contributions, the new mobilities paradigm also has important limitations. First, in challenging sedentarism and redefining place as relational and mobile, Sheller and Urry offer a powerful rethinking of social life. Yet this shift may also weaken the anthropological importance of place, locality, and thick description. When places are treated too readily as nodes within movement, the lived density of attachment, memory, and situated experience risks being thinned out.

Second, the methodological proposals are innovative and intellectually compelling, particularly for researchers interested in movement itself. However, they often remain more programmatic than operational. The paradigm encourages research “on the move,” but it offers less guidance on how such methods can consistently capture the uneven temporalities of movement, waiting, interruption, and enforced stillness in actual fieldwork. So while the framework points researchers in a useful direction, it does not always show clearly how to carry this out in practice.

Third, when revisited from the perspective of the 2020s, the paradigm still appears highly insightful, yet its account of digital mobility is now historically limited. Formulated before the rise of platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, large-scale data extraction, and today’s accelerated digital infrastructures, it does not fully explain how mobility is increasingly shaped by platforms, predictive systems, and less visible forms of digital control. The paradigm is still useful, but it needs to be updated if it is to explain contemporary conditions more fully.

A further limitation becomes visible when the paradigm is read from an Austronesian perspective. Although Sheller and Urry were quite forward-looking about digital surveillance and systemic fragility, their framework still reflects a largely Western way of thinking about movement and circulation. If social life is conceptualized primarily through mobility, relatively immobile forms of memory, ancestral attachment, and the sacred significance of land may be pushed to the margins. Can a paradigm centered on movement fully account for spatio-temporal ontologies in which place is not merely a point within circulation, but a living ground of kinship, memory, and cosmological relation? From an Austronesian perspective, mobility is important, but it cannot be separated from emplacement, ancestral continuity, and culturally specific understandings of land and sea. In this sense, the mobility paradigm is not irrelevant, but insufficient on its own; it must be placed in dialogue with other ontological frameworks that do not privilege movement as the primary condition of social life.

 

V. Conclusion: A Twenty-Year Re-assessment on the Mobility Turn

Sheller and Urry’s “The new mobilities paradigm” successfully challenges the archaic, static assumptions of traditional social science. By positing that social life is constituted through intersecting physical, virtual, communicative, and imaginative movements, the authors provide a foundational framework for analyzing contemporary globalization.

The continuing relevance of this text lies in its refusal to adopt a utopian view of a “borderless” world. Instead, it systematically maps the heavy, immobile infrastructures and the strict power hierarchies that dictate who gets to move and who is forced to stay still. Reading this text two decades later, its forward-looking nature remains evident. Their warnings about global diseases traveling via jet planes were tragically validated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which illustrated how “tightly coupled” and vulnerable our global systems have become.

Furthermore, as global connectivity has surged from 1 billion users in 2006 to over 6 billion in 2026, the authors’ early insights into the spread of digital “traces” of the self—monitored by automated surveillance and algorithmically-driven systems—now perfectly describe our modern reality. The “cloud” we rely on today is not a weightless entity but remains anchored to the massive, energy-intensive “moorings” of data centers and physical networks that Sheller and Urry so incisively pointed out.

In conclusion, the new mobilities paradigm shows that travel should not be treated as empty time between more important events. Movement itself, together with the infrastructures and technologies that make it possible, is one of the key sites where power, identity, and social life take shape.

 

References

ITU

2025  Measuring digital development: Facts and Figures 2025. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2025/

 

Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry

2006  The New Mobilities Paradigm. In Environment and Planning A, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 207-226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268

 

UN Tourism

2026  World Tourism Barometer. Vol. 24, Issue 1 (January). https://www.untourism.int/un-tourism-world-tourism-barometer-data