Recent urban studies have increasingly recognized public transport and transit spaces as important public spaces, yet the specific nature of their publicness remains underexplored. This paper examines bus stops in Malmö, Sweden, focusing on how their function as waiting spaces intersects with their role in urban public life. Through ethnographic observations, travel diaries, and interviews, the study investigates waiting as a social activity and the dynamics it generates. Findings show that waiting at bus stops involves a subtle negotiation between privacy and collectivity, especially in diverse and spatially constrained settings. Individuals employ tacit strategies, such as strategic placement, temporary withdrawal, and selective interaction, to manage their presence among others. The sociality of bus stops is marked not by overt interaction but by a shared experience, an ‘indifferent togetherness’ that reflects the nuanced relationality of public space. Encounters with non-transit users, including marginalized individuals, further contribute to the publicness of bus stops by fostering awareness of urban diversity. These fleeting interactions expand the social scope of transit spaces, highlighting their role in everyday enactments of publicness. The study contributes to ongoing debates about the social life of transit environments and their significance in contemporary urban settings.

This article develops the concept of A People’s Map by (re)mapping the San Diego/Tijuana borderlands through migrant drywall workers’ collective efforts to reach jobs while navigating immigration enforcement. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with mixed-status drywall work crews, I used drifting as a mobile method—shadowing commutes, conducting interviews, and tracing the messages, sketches, and route knowledge workers circulate in transit. As they travel between jobsites, workers confront a shifting enforcement landscape shaped by Border Patrol checkpoints, roving patrols, and local police partnerships with federal immigration authorities. In response, workers assemble an everyday counter-cartography through stories, drawings, and phone alerts that mark chokepoints, safe corridors, and patterns of patrol activity. I argue that the border operates less as a fixed boundary than as an uneven, evolving landscape of policing, space, and overlapping jurisdictions that fractures mobility across race, class, and legal status. A People’s Map names this collective mapping work and shows how shared navigational knowledge functions as an infrastructure for sustaining employment while reducing exposure to detention and job loss.

Temporary labour migration, a form of human mobility contingent on the performance of labour, creates conditions of considerable precarity. These conditions expose women to a range of gendered insecurities affecting mobility while leaving them susceptible to harm. This scoping review examined the state of evidence on gendered harms faced by women involved in labour migration across the Asia Pacific and identified how these harms shaped women’s im/mobilty. The review included 43 studies published between 2014–2024 and found that a broad spectrum of gender-based violence is perpetrated against women engaged in temporary labour migration. Violence influenced mobility across a range of socio-spatial scales and had significant health and wellbeing impacts. Findings implicated migration, health and social systems in creating conditions of indentured mobility for women. Involuntary immobility was found to be both an outcome of gendered harm as well as a contextual factor that interacted with precarious employment and visa conditions to contribute to violence. Findings highlight focal points for future research and emphasise the importance of developing transnational mechanisms to prevent gender-based violence and support women’s safety in the context of increasing global labour mobility.

Commuting is a significant contributor to transport-related greenhouse gas emissions and a central pinnacle of car-dependent mobility practices. Despite numerous efforts to encourage the adoption of more sustainable commuting practices, the car continues to be the predominant commute mode. In this paper, we present results from a practice-theory inspired real-world laboratory, conducted in the Rhine-Main region in Germany from August 2022 until February 2023. Forty participants tested alternatives to commuting by petrol-car for a period of several months, including e-bikes, public transport and electric vehicles. Additionally, they were supported through integrated mobility counselling and exchange formats. The real-world laboratory highlighted how the performance of commuting practices, their constituent elements and their inter-practice links, change in response to the adoption of new commute modes. The analysis indicates that the adoption of new commuting practices involves a complex interplay of competences, meanings, material arrangements and the related network of practices. Material arrangements and the practice network frequently constitute obstacles to the adoption of new commuting practices. However, newly acquired competencies and meanings can serve as coping mechanisms or motivations for adopting and maintaining new practices. Our findings provide meaningful insights into the development of policies for sustainable commuting.

Offloading practices in the Philippines deny boarding to passengers suspected of seeking illegal work or being trafficking victims. These practices exemplify what mobilities scholars term ‘constrained mobilities’, the differential regulation of movement that creates hierarchies of legitimate and illegitimate travellers. Departing from existing scholarship that predominantly examines labour migrants and destination country controls, this study uniquely focuses on tourists, revealing how anti-trafficking measures penetrate previously protected domains of autonomous leisure travel. This investigates the lived experiences of fourteen Filipino tourists who were offloaded at airports, revealing instruments of mobility control that disadvantage populations based on class, gender, appearance, and travel history. Using qualitative methodology with semi-structured interviews, this study reveals how offloading practices create profound disruptions to embodied expectations of movement, transforming anticipated journeys into trauma and exclusion. The findings demonstrate how documentary requirements prioritise social capital over economic capacity, transforming individual tourism into socially mediated mobility dependent on third-party validation. This contributes to critical mobilities scholarship by advancing constrained mobilities theory through four innovations: ‘paternalistic constrained mobilities’, ‘bureaucratic capture’, temporal ‘mobility stigma’, and intersectional biosocial profiling, revealing how protective anti-trafficking discourse masks constraining effects on legitimate movement.

Migration studies have discussed the regime of (im)mobility and the impacts of COVID-19 on temporary migrants’ life chances. Fewer studies, however, have examined the potential opportunities, challenges, and consequences based on timescales and spatialities in unusual times, such as COVID-19. This paper focuses on the Australian government’s COVID-19 temporary activity visa (subclass 408)—a contingent visa that allowed temporary migrants whose visas were expiring, and who were unable to depart Australia, to stay and work in Australia until they could return to their home country. Drawing on interviews with 22 temporary migrant workers from China and Taiwan who shifted to this visa for an extended stay, I show how the extended stay in Australia during the lockdowns could be reconfigured into desirable social mobility, yet the extended temporariness and spatial containment also led temporary migrants to be ‘stuck’ in certain jobs and hindered their accumulation of needed capital for the next stage. As a contingent policy response, the migration regime revealed the intent of filling workforce needs without considering policy impacts on migrants’ lives in the longer term. This paper proposes a concept of ‘immobility-mobility nexus’, to illustrate the unique temporariness and spatial experiences associated with the COVID-19 visa.

Adopting a mobility justice lens, this review paper brings together the often-fragmented literature on walking and wheeling with children and develops a ‘Walking/Wheeling With’ framework to understand and address the infrastructural, social, and cultural barriers that constrain these mobilities, and celebrate the many benefits they bring at the individual, family, community and planetary levels. Rooted in the everyday realities of caregiving mobilities, and adopting a disability-conscious lens, this framework emphasises that the removal of barriers to mobility enhances inclusion for all. Drawing from history, geography, disability studies, environmental planning, social policy, mental health, physical activity, and early childhood studies, we argue for a more cohesive, inclusive, and cross-sectoral research and policy agenda that recognises walking or wheeling with children as a site of both challenge and possibility. Ultimately, the ‘Walking/Wheeling With’ framework demands from researchers and policy makers alike that they systematically consider family/caring mobilities in relation to broader questions of access, inclusion, and movement in contemporary society. In practice, this might mean decentering speed and car-commuting while centering physical safety, slowness, health, civic engagement, environmental justice and inclusivity.

By developing a socio-anthropological approach to intra-urban residential (im)mobility, this paper examines the contribution of ethnographic methods to understanding of the multifaceted and intertwined motivations and practices shaping migrants’ integration and neighborhood choices. Drawing on evidence from Filipino migrants in Italy’s two main metropolitan areas, their experiences of intra-urban residential movement are analyzed in relation to other process of mobility and immobility occurring through national and transnational networks over the life course. Findings reveal that in Rome, propensities toward (im)mobility are primarily linked to domestic work, religious affiliation, family and friendship networks, and changes in household management, whereas in Milan, transport accessibility, housing market dynamics, kinship ties, and personal aspirations play a more central role. The study argues that a socio-anthropological lens challenges conventional quantitative approaches to intra-urban residential mobility, by integrating an ethnographic perspective that offers multiple levels of analysis. This perspective provides a more holistic understanding of the dynamics and challenges related to movement, relocation, and integration of migrants and their family groups within urban contexts of living.

Setting against the background of the Spectacle 2.0 society, this article investigates Chinese social media’s role in shaping the image-saturated aesthetics of urban lives by focusing on the Internet buzzword #citywalk and city walk activities in Guangzhou. Drawing on topic modelling analysis of social media narratives and qualitative analysis of mobile ethnographic materials, this article finds that urban walking is now superimposed with digital layers. Urban walking is quantified/datafied as routes and meeting/stopping points, gamified and touristified as a way to move between tourist attractions, and aestheticised as an approach to deeply understand the history and culture of a city by social media-driven lifestyles. Although some city walkers tend to bypass the algorithmic system of social media, they are still alienated as consumers of urban cultures or tourists who walk with social media. These findings have developed the recent understanding of digitally mediated walking by providing empirical evidence of how urban walking experiences are fetishised and alienated by daily human-technology interactions. This article appeals to future digital and media studies to pay more attention to the actual practices with social media culture in the more-than-real world.

The private car is widely used by parents as a technology to cocoon their children from car-dominated environments while facilitating structured opportunities for their development. Outside the car, parents travelling by active or public modes must intensively regulate their child’s mobilities. These parent-child mobilities can help to develop a child’s independent mobility in the future, without the car. In this study, I explore the unique experiences and practices of parent-child mobility with the e-cargo bike in the low-cycling context of Ireland. This analysis uncovers how e-cargo cycle parenting reproduces practices fundamental to car-parenting: providing mobility for children and confining mobility of children. As a (temporary) technology for providing mobility, the e-cargo bike was experienced as a superior form of automobility than the car for meeting everyday parental mobility demands. By segregating children from the street and immobilising them in a vehicle, the e-cargo bike functioned as a space of confinement. Unlike the car, the e-cargo bike afforded a unique sensitivity to the natural world and local environment. This enabled parents to train their children in local geography and responsible mobility, thereby building their competences for independent mobility in the future while normalising everyday mobility without the car.