A research field that spans ‘studies of corporeal movement, transportation and communications infrastructures, capitalist spatial restructuring, migration and immigration, citizenship and transnationalism, and tourism and travel’ (Hannam et al. (2006) Mobilities 1, 1). T. Cresswell (2006) addresses ‘how the fact of movement becomes mobility. How, in other words, movement is made meaningful, and how the resulting ideologies of mobility become implicated in the production of mobile practices.’ T. Cresswell and P. Merriman ‘provide a foundational understanding of work that is ongoing across mobilities scholarship’ (Shaw (2012) Area 44, 1, 128).

The mobilities paradigm emphasizes that all places are tied into at least thin networks of connections that stretch beyond each such place, and mean that nowhere can be an ‘island’. It goes beyond the imagery of ‘terrains’ as spatially fixed geographical containers for social processes, and calls into question ‘scalar logics such as local/global as descriptors of regional extent’, and suggests a set of questions, theories, and methodologies ‘rather than a totalizing or reductive description of the contemporary world’ (Sheller and Urry (2006) Env. & Plan. A 38, 2). Thus, McNeill (2008) PHG 32, 3 considers the hotel as a space ‘operating between fixity and flow, locating and refreshing mobile bodies, [and] embedding them in relatively fixed networks within particular cities’.