Sociologists of disasters and those agencies dedicated to disaster risk reduction and emergency relief tend to fix disasters, to confine them in time and space. This article argues for the necessity of a mobilities turn within mainstream disaster studies, demonstrating what the new mobilities paradigm (NMP) can contribute to disaster scholarship. Disasters should be seen as mobile agents with spatially and temporally dispersed effects. They are mobile because people, nonhuman life-forms, information, and commodities move. The ecosystems and earth systems that sustain us are also always in flux. Instead of focusing on isolated disaster cases, this article calls for a “big picture” ecological sensibility that recognizes the complexity and interconnectivity of our world, and addresses the new forms of mobility, temporality, spatiality, and potency inherent to today’s disasters. This task is urgent: while previous eras may have announced the apocalypse, ours may well be the last one to do so.

The name of our journal, Transfers, suggests a wide and even proliferating number of ways of thinking about movement and researching mobilities. What is transferred, how, and between whom? As things “cross over,” how are they changed? And how are contexts changed by that which moves through them? In this issue, we present a series of articles that indirectly take up the concept of transfers in different ways. Transfers, they suggest, might be thought of in terms of circulations, assemblages, entanglements, mobile social practices, networks of movement, moving onward, migrations, and the choreographies of bodies within practices of transport. But it also might be conceived of in terms of more temporal processes: instabilities, transformations, subtly shifting performances, and changing representations. We welcome this wide range of understandings of practice and processes of “transference,” as we might call this kind of conceptual transformation across mobilities. They all share an emphasis on relationality and the ongoing making of meaning.

Despite a surge of multidisciplinary interest in transition studies on low-carbon mobilities, there has been little evaluation of the current state of the field, and the contributions of different approaches such as the multi-level perspective (MLP), theories of practice, or the new mobilities paradigm. As a step in this direction, this contribution brings together scholars representing different theoretical perspectives and disciplinary fields in order to discuss processes and uneven geographies of mobility transitions as they are currently theorized. First, we reflect upon the role of geographers and other social scientists in envisioning, enabling, and criticizing mobility transitions. Second, we discuss how different theoretical approaches can develop mobility transitions scholarship. Finally, we highlight emerging issues in mobility transitions research.

Book ReviewsPeter Cox, ed. Cycling Cultures (Chester, UK: University of Chester, 2015) - James LonghurstDaniel Owen Spence, Colonial Naval Culture and British Imperialism, 1922–67 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) - Sheila DwyerColin Divall, ed., Cultural Histories of Sociabilities, Spaces and Mobilities (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015) - John LennonChristopher Kopper and Massimo Moraglio, eds., Th e Organization of Transport: A History of Users, Industry, and Public Policy (New York: Routledge, 2014) - Zhenhua ChenPaul Ingrassia, Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012) - Rudi VoltiHagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) - Gopalan BalachandranBernd Stiegler, Traveling in Place: A History of Armchair Travel. Trans. Peter Filkins. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) - Katarina GephardtThomas Buhler, Déplacements urbains: sortir de l’orthodoxie. Plaidoyer pour une prise en compte des habitudes (Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 2015) - Mathieu FlonneauRuth A. Miller, Snarl: In Defense of Stalled Traffi c and Faulty Networks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015) - Kyle SheltonNovel ReviewEmily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (London: Picador, 2014) - Fiona Wilkie

In this article we present a theoretical framework for an understanding of the relationship between the material design of mobilities technologies and the multisensorial human body. Situating our work in the emerging field of “mobilities design” within the broader so-called mobilities turn, we focus on two very different aircraft types and their design (the large passenger jet Boeing 737 and the small propeller aircraft DHC-2) in order to explore the sensuousness of in-flight experience and atmosphere. We focus on the interior design of the aircraft as well as on their technical capacities, and end with a conclusion that offers a fl at ontological view of mobilities design. We argue that according the material design of mobilities technologies must be inscribed on equal terms with the sensing human subject if we are to claim that we have reached a better understanding of how mobility feels.

As a result of removal and custody of Noongar children from their families and lands—forced mobilities and immobilties over decades, and within days and nights—a distinctive and beautiful artistic heritage emerged. Th is material heritage, too, was moved through and from Noongar country. Illustrated by the art of Carrolup, the culture and identity of the Noongar people has been transcendent and a “spiritual geography” mapped. As “heart returns home” to Noongar country, there are opportunities for new approaches to the reconciliation of the past for the future. Th e beauty of the art and the story of Carrolup teach, inspire, and provoke. Th ese mobilities and immobilities hold lessons that continue to travel.

Ghana ThinkTank has been “Developing the First World” since 2006. We collect problems in the so-called developed world, and send them to think tanks we established in Cuba, Ghana, Iran, Mexico, El Salvador, and the U.S. prison system to analyze and solve. Our network continues to grow . . .

Th is article takes an autoethnographic approach in exploring the micropolitics of mobility with particular reference to race, class, and identity on one South African bus service. For his daily commute between an inner-city Cape Town suburb and a worksite near the metropolitan edge, the author explores personal, embodied, and political dimensions of mobility in a context where race continues to dictate the expected parameters of mobility practice. When socioeconomics might allow for private car ownership and use (and when timegeographies almost require it), the autoethnography at the heart of this article requires the author to question the politics of choosing not to drive; to be a public transport passeng er when one is expected to be a driver. In spite of the author’s intentional status in the member group of bus passengers, experience of six months of everyday bus use sheds light on hidden dimensions of mobility inequality. It contributes toward filling a gap in empirical evidence on contemporary bus passengering and the continuing role of race in contexts of visibly differentiated and differentiating everyday mobility.

Race matters. “Too often scholars discuss mobility in the abstract, assuming or omitting the highly consequential matter of the identity of those who move and its effects on how they move.” This special issue on Mobility and Race has invited contributors to rethink how unequal relations of power inherent in both mobility and race shape a racialized mobility politics. Th e articles that follow examine what Cotten Seiler has called the “racialization of mobility,”2 meaning the ways in which “the modern practices and institutions of mobility have been and remain highly racialized.”