This article was downloaded by: [University of Delaware]

On: 07 October 2014, At: 01:08

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Mobilities
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmob20

Rethinking Mobile Methods

a
Peter Merriman
a
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth
University, Ceredigion, UK.
Published online: 07 May 2013.

To cite this article: Peter Merriman (2014) Rethinking Mobile Methods, Mobilities, 9:2, 167-187,
DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2013.784540

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2013.784540

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
 Mobilities, 2014
Vol. 9, No. 2, 167–187, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2013.784540

Rethinking Mobile Methods

PETER MERRIMAN*
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Ceredigion, UK
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

ABSTRACT Over the past, few years a broad range of scholars have been emphasising
the vital importance of methodological innovation and diversification to mobilities research.
Whilst welcoming this pluralisation of research methods, this paper encourages a note of
caution amongst researchers who wholly embrace the call for mobile methods, which are
frequently justified by an assumption that ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ methods have
failed. I outline some of the explanations that are given for the development of ‘mobile
methods’ – including their inevitable emergence from a ‘new mobilities paradigm’, the
importance of innovation and political relevance for social science methods, and their
importance for apprehending elusive practices – before identifying a number of problems
with this work: namely the assumption that mobilities research is necessarily a branch of
social science research, the production of over-animated mobile subjects and objects, the
prioritising of certain kinds of research methods and practices, and the overreliance on
certain kinds of technology. Particular attention is paid to the use of ‘non-representational
theories’ and theories of practice in mobilities research, wherein academics frequently sug-
gest that we must adopt certain performative, participative, or ethnographic techniques to
enable researchers to be, see or move with research subjects, and to more effectively or
accurately understand those practices and subjects. In the final section, I draw upon his-
torical research on early driving practices to highlight the diverse methods and sources
that can be useful for mobilities scholars seeking to apprehend particular practices, events,
subjects and spaces.

KEY WORDS: Mobilities, Mobile methods, Non-representational theory, Practices, History,

Geography, Sociology

Introduction

[T]he mobilities paradigm is … transformative of social science, generating an

alternative theoretical and methodological landscape. … this paradigm brings
to the fore and enacts theories, methods and exemplars of research that so far
have been mostly out of sight. (Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011, 4)

Correspondence Address: Peter Merriman, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth
University, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3DB, UK. Email: prm@aber.ac.uk
Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis
 168 P. Merriman

Over the past few years, a broad range of scholars have been emphasising the vital
importance of methodological innovation and diversification to mobilities research,
with a particular emphasis being placed on methods that enable researchers to ‘be’
or ‘see’ with mobile research subjects (Fincham, McGuinness, and Murray 2010).
As the above quotation by Büscher, Urry, and Witchger (2011) infers, methodologi-
cal innovation and diversification are often positioned as a necessary result of the
epistemological shifts ushered in with the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and
Urry 2006), with the result that mobilities researchers are frequently looking for
new ways to ‘capture, track, simulate, mimic, parallel and “go along with” the
kinds of moving systems and experiences that seem to characterise the contempo-
rary world’ (Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011, 7). Methodological innovation is
seen to be a natural and necessary response to the emergence of new theories, tech-
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

nologies and practices of mobility in the world, as well as to the challenges posed
by the extensive (if often crude) large-scale geo-demographic surveys of human
movements and financial transactions that are undertaken by public and private
bodies of various kinds (Savage and Burrows 2007; Büscher, Urry, and Witchger
2011; Merriman et al. 2012).
This diversification and pluralisation of research methods and methodologies are
a welcome occurrence, fuelling some of today’s most innovative and exciting
mobilities research, but in this paper I want to encourage a note of caution amongst
researchers who wholly embrace such calls for innovative ‘mobile methods’.
Whereas a significant number of these calls appear to be founded upon a desire for
methodological diversity, plurality and mixed-methods approaches, some scholars
justify a push for methodological innovation by emphasising the failures of ‘con-
ventional’ or ‘traditional’1 methods to provide ‘effective’, ‘close’ or ‘accurate’
apprehensions of movements and events (Fincham, McGuinness, and Murray
2010). The push to promote innovative ‘mobile methods’ is in danger of encourag-
ing researchers to abandon methods labelled ‘conventional’ – such as interviews,
questionnaires, discourse analysis or archival research – rather than rethinking and
reworking these methods, or expanding and diversifying their repertoire of
approaches. The debate about ‘mobile methods’ is in danger of shifting from a dis-
cussion of the diverse array of methods which can facilitate mobilities research in
different ways to a focus on methods that the researcher must move with their
research subjects. This difference appears to arise from the conflation of ‘methods
for mobilities research’ (Sheller and Urry 2006, 217) with ‘mobile methods’
(Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011), a reduction which is in danger of obscuring
the valuable contributions of a diverse array of social science and humanities
researchers to mobilities research.
In this paper I identify a series of problems with this move. In section one, I pro-
vide an initial exploration of how this conflation may have come about, tracing
some of the theoretical inspirations for current waves of mobilities research. I exam-
ine how mobile methods are seen to be a natural and necessary complement to the
emergence of a ‘new mobilities paradigm’, and a powerful way of developing novel
approaches that can help advance a relevant and engaged social science, as well as
reflecting a contemporary fascination with theories of practice and non-representa-
tional theories. In the following section, I examine how many mobile methods are
associated with a range of performative, participative and ethnographic techniques
that enable researchers to more effectively move, be or see with their research sub-
jects and objects. Whilst acknowledging that such methods clearly have their uses, I
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 169

suggest that the power of ‘mobile methods’ is sometimes exaggerated, particularly

when it is claimed that they provide a more accurate or close knowledge of particu-
lar practices and events. I show how mobile methods frequently focus on mobile
and active subjects at the expense of a broader understanding of materialities, prac-
tices and events, and I trace how mobile methods are all-too-frequently associated
with technological solutions to methodological questions, as well as valorising cer-
tain kinds of participative and ethnographic research above other kinds of empirical
research or theoretical enquiry. In the final section, I draw upon some of my own
historical research on driving in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, to point to
some of the diverse methods and sources that mobilities scholars could draw upon
when attempting to understand particular practices of mobility.
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

Towards a Genealogy of Mobile Methods

People do not stay in one place. Hence, research methods need also to be on
the move, to simulate this intermittent mobility. (Bærenholdt et al. 2004, 148)

Within the current wave of writing on ‘mobile methods’, methodological experi-

mentation, innovation and pluralisation are not merely positioned as inevitable or
desirable occurrences within a new and expanding interdisciplinary field, rather they
are seen as necessary strategies to enable researchers to more accurately track,
know and represent the embodied actions, practices and experiences of mobile
research subjects (Urry 2007; Hein, Evans, and Jones 2008; Büscher and Urry
2009; Fincham, McGuinness, and Murray 2010; Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011;
D’Andrea, Ciolfi, and Gray 2011). As the interdisciplinary field of mobilities
research rapidly expands – in a world where new forms of mobility and communi-
cation also appear to be continuously emerging – new techniques are said to be
required to enable social scientists to effectively grasp the feeling and meanings of
certain embodied practices. As Justin Spinney has put it in a review of research on
cycling, there is a need ‘to move towards methods that have the ability to make vis-
ible some of the less tangible aspects of daily mobility’:

Throughout this review, I have commented upon what I see as the inadequacy
of particular research methods to highlight the more intangible and ephemeral
meanings of mobility. (Spinney 2009, 826)

Spinney’s research on cycling is an important example of the kinds of methodologi-

cally innovative and exploratory mobilities research that has emerged over the past
five to ten years; research that has seen scholars drawing upon video, ethnographic
and participative methods, ‘go-alongs’, and a host of other techniques in an attempt
to apprehend and understand the mobile practices of cyclists, walkers, ferry passen-
gers, drivers and other mobile subjects (Anderson 2004; Laurier 2004, 2010, 2011;
Spinney 2006, 2009, 2011; Laurier et al. 2008; Watts 2008; Middleton 2011; Van-
nini 2012). Many of these studies are, indeed, reinvigorating the research field, but
what are the motives for such developments and are such methodological
developments essential for the field of mobilities research?
The story of the emergence of mobile methods often follows one of a number
of standard templates. It is often suggested that the development of new
 170 P. Merriman

methodologies, and particularly ‘mobile methods’, is a natural or inevitable comple-

ment to the emergence of a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Bærenholdt et al. 2004,
148), whereby social scientists have realised that the distinctive nature of their
research subjects and objects – ‘shifting, morphing and mobile’ (Hannam, Sheller,
and Urry 2006, 10) – requires the development of dynamic and mobile research
methods. New research foci are seen to require new research methods, but not only
does this rely upon a problematic assumption that pre-existing research methods
will inevitably fail to capture or trace something (particular mobilities) (cf. Letherby,
Shaw, and Middleton 2010), it also appears to assume that new research projects
and problematics emerge in a vacuous world of non-sense and unknowing: viz.
social scientists have not undertaken detailed investigations of the embodied prac-
tices of cycling, walking or driving, so how could existing social science methods
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

shed light on these practices? For me, there is a distinct danger of overstating the
newness of the research topics, mobile experiences and sensations, and indeed of
these mobile methods (cf. Letherby, Shaw, and Middleton 2010; Middleton 2011),
just as there is a danger of overstating the newness of the ‘new mobilities para-
digm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) or the extent of a ‘mobilities turn’ (Hannam, Sheller,
and Urry 2006; cf. Merriman 2007, 2009a, 2009b; Cresswell 2010).
A number of further concerns follow from these points. Whilst the proliferation
of mobile telephones, wearable computing and Global Positioning System (GPS)
technologies is relatively recent, enabling new practices and patterns of mobility
and communication to emerge, many other practices and technologies of mobility
are long-established (even if they are changing), including practices such as com-
muting, migrating, exploring and holidaymaking, and modes such as cycling,
motor-car driving, walking, sailing, rail travel, air travel, and many ‘alternative’
mobile practices such as canoeing or horse-riding (see Vannini 2009; Evans and
Franklin 2010). Whilst mobilities scholars frequently approach such technologies
and practices with a pioneering spirit, there is a long history of both mobile subjects
actively experiencing and knowingly reflecting upon and representing their mobile
embodied practices (see Schivelbusch 1980; O’Connell 1998; Duncan and Gregory
1999; Cresswell and Merriman 2011; Merriman 2012a), and academics exploring
the social relations, embodied experiences and practices of travel and mobility (see
Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer 1964; Hollowell 1968; Goffman 1971; Dannefer
1977; Schivelbusch 1980; Hawkins 1986; Thrift 1994; Katz 1999). Furthermore,
exploratory and innovative social science research methods are frequently posi-
tioned in opposition to older approaches (often quantitative approaches) that are
deemed to be outdated and unable to adequately describe mobile embodied prac-
tices and experiences. This most commonly surfaces in a dichotomy which is con-
structed between what are perceived to be the quantitative research methods
deployed within transport geography and transport studies, and the qualitative meth-
ods deployed by mobility scholars. The two sets of methods are regularly presented
as polar opposites:

The methodological toolkit of transport geography has been dominated by

cost-benefit analysis, stated preference surveys and modelling. Whilst these
tools might tell us something about the ‘rational(ised)’ push and pull factors
of cycling, they fail to unlock the more ‘unspeakable’ and ‘non-rational(ised)’
meanings of cycling that often reside in the sensory, embodied and social
nature of its performance. (Spinney 2009, 826; also Spinney 2011)
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 171

In some ways, Spinney is right. Quantitative methods were predominant within

the fields of transport geography and transport studies, and the qualitative methods
deployed by the majority of mobility researchers clearly do offer something differ-
ent. However, as recent commentaries by Shaw and Hesse (2010) and Shaw and
Sidaway (2011) argue, such statements tend to stereotype and caricature the kinds
of research being undertaken in the fields of transport geography and mobility stud-
ies, overlooking the diversity of research being undertaken in these multi-disciplin-
ary fields, as well as the large volume of research which cannot easily be placed
into one or other domain. This includes the many qualitative studies that have been
published in journals such as Transportation Research and the Journal of Transport
Geography (e.g. Lyons and Urry 2005; Adey, Bissell, and Laurier 2011), studies
that combine quantitative and qualitative research methods (e.g. Pooley, Turnbull,
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

and Adams 2005), studies that might be conducted under banners such as transport
history, mobility history or migration studies, and a large number of studies that uti-
lise fairly conventional qualitative research methods, ranging from archival research
and textual analysis (Schivelbusch 1980; O’Connell 1998; Cresswell 2001a, 2006;
Merriman 2007; Ganser 2009; Adey 2010), to focus groups (Redshaw 2008), oral
histories (Pooley, Turnbull, and Adams 2005), interviews (Middleton 2009, 2010),
diaries (Middleton 2009, 2010), and autobiographical reflections (Letherby and
Shaw 2009; Letherby 2010). What’s more, many scholars, past and present, inevita-
bly draw upon a combination of more-or-less conventional and tailored research
methods, whether textual analysis and ethnography (Cresswell 2006), interviews
and photo-diaries (Middleton 2009, 2010, 2011), archival research, oral histories
and questionnaires (O’Connell 1998), or large-scale surveys and oral histories (Poo-
ley, Turnbull, and Adams 2005).
A more fundamental problem with a significant number of these calls for innova-
tive and experimental ‘mobile methods’ is the frequent assumption that mobilities
research is conceptualised and undertaken as a particular kind of social science
research. In some ways, this is not surprising. Sociologists, anthropologists, and
human geographers working within social science traditions have been at the fore-
front of research that constitutes the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, but there are many
long-established approaches to/studies of mobility, travel and transport that might
be more usefully positioned in a humanities tradition, or certainly in an extended
realm of humanities and social science research that is less concerned with adhering
to some of the disciplinary and methodological conventions of the core social sci-
ence disciplines. Indeed, historians, historical geographers, literary theorists, philos-
ophers, art historians, architects and arts practitioners have had a long-standing
interest in practices, experiences, representations and technologies of mobility, travel
and transport, whether in writing histories of mobility, transport, travel writing and
exploration, or in developing philosophical approaches that value movement, flux
and change (see e.g. Schivelbusch 1980; Kaplan 1996; Pearce 2000, 2012a, 2012b;
Merriman 2007, 2012a; Merriman and Webster 2009). The danger is that ‘mobile
methods’ are only envisioned as a specific set of social science methods which
enable the researcher to travel with their research participants/subjects and develop
a more clear and accurate understanding and knowledge of their experiences.
Whilst developments in ‘mobile methods’ have seen something of an expansion
in their approaches – beyond traditional social science methods – drawing upon cre-
ative approaches from the arts and humanities – there is a danger that these (often
high-tech) methods are co-opted in an attempt to more accurately know one’s
 172 P. Merriman

research subjects and objects, rather than for more creative, experimental and open-
ended reasons. What’s more, there are an extensive range of other social science
and humanities methods which are frequently overlooked or cast to one side
(although see Cresswell 2006, 2011, 2012; Merriman 2009b, 2012a; Sheller 2011).2
What I am saying, then, is that there is a distinct danger that the expanding litera-
ture on mobilities – and particularly mobile methods – is read not as promoting a
critical interrogation of how mobilities research is proceeding or could proceed, but
as how mobilities research should and must proceed. What’s more, there is a danger
that key texts calling for ‘mobile methods’ are read as manifestoes promoting spe-
cialisation in a few fashionable methodological areas rather than as calls for mixed-
methods, innovation and pluralisation. It is important, then, that published state-
ments (cum-genealogies) of the ‘mobilities paradigm’ and ‘methods for mobilities
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

research’ recognise that research on mobility and movement has a long history, tak-
ing in many different disciplines, approaches and methods, even if this work has
amassed into a more-or-less coherent inter-disciplinary field in the past decade (cf.
Cresswell 2001b; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Merri-
man 2009b). A range of research practices can be invaluable for the investigation
of experiences and feelings of movement and mobility, from the use of archival
research, textual analysis, interviews and oral histories, to video ethnography, focus
groups, photo-diaries, cyber-ethnographies, autobiographical reflections, and creative
and/or documentary forms such as painting, poetry, photography and performance
(Latham 2003; Sheller and Urry 2006; Büscher and Urry 2009; Merriman and Web-
ster 2009; Fincham, McGuinness, and Murray 2010; Büscher, Urry, and Witchger
2011; Sheller 2011).
A further justification for developing innovative and sophisticated mobile meth-
ods also arises from the assumption that mobilities research is social science
research, and this is the argument made by Büscher, Urry, and Witchger (2011), fol-
lowing Savage and Burrows (2007), that as ‘huge corporations, fashionable consult-
ancies and fearful states are likely to dominate future mobilities research’, so social
scientists (including mobilities scholars) need to decide whether they ‘should join
in, get left behind or try to find ways to critique and engage constructively’
(Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011, 14). This argument combines a series of impor-
tant observations about the mapping and engineering of movement, affect and feel-
ing by powerful governments and corporate bodies (Thrift 2004a), with a series of
disciplinary-specific fears and concerns about the role and authority of sociologists
and social scientists in the twenty-first century (Savage and Burrows 2007). Writing
in Economy and Society in 2004, geographer Nigel Thrift observed that as comput-
ing and software are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday spaces in
the West, so environments are taking on a new character, with background calcula-
tions being used to make real-time qualitative judgements, and new sensibilities and
apprehensions of space emerging which might more usefully be conceived as appre-
hensions of ‘movement-space’ (Thrift 2004a; Merriman 2012b). As Savage and
Burrows (2007) and Büscher, Urry, and Witchger (2011) recognise, the implication
is that powerful governments and corporate bodies are central to the engineering of
these calculative backgrounds, affects and movement-spaces, having access to a
large amount of ‘data’ about our movements, financial transactions and lifestyles;
and the key question for social scientists and mobility researchers is whether they
should try and compete with such agencies, or whether their task must be to
develop more critical and novel research methods (Savage and Burrows 2007,
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 173

895–896; Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011, 14–15). Savage and Burrows conclude
that sociologists must develop an interest in the ‘politics of method’, ‘renewing
their interests in methodological innovation, … reporting critically on new digitali-
sations’ and adopting ‘radical mixture[s] of methods coupled with renewed critical
reflection’ (2007, 895–896), and Büscher, Urry, and Witchger advance similar con-
cerns about ‘being left behind in the slow lane of research’, arguing for ‘a similar
call to arms’ (2011, 14, 15). Whilst Savage and Burrows’ (2007) call, in part, stems
from concerns about the role of sociologists in a changing world, the implications
of their observations – as well as those of Thrift (2004a) – clearly extend beyond
the social sciences, and these calls for methodological innovation and critical meth-
ods clearly resonate with debates in the arts and humanities as well as the social
sciences. What I want to argue, though, is that a conceptualisation of mobilities
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

research and mobile methods as social science research is in danger of limiting aca-
demic work to interventions in the social, economic and political realms, whereas a
broader understanding of mobilities underpinned by the arts and humanities (as well
as social sciences) might highlight the diverse ways in which critical research and
practice might unfold, ranging from creative artistic interventions and walks, to the
production of performances and plays (Wylie 2005; Johnston and Pratt 2010; Lori-
mer and Wylie 2010; Verstraete 2010; Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011). Critical,
creative, practical and academic interventions can occur in all manner of ways, and
the work of arts and humanities scholars and practitioners provides excellent exam-
ples of critical mobilities research practice.3
A final context and impetus for the increasing push to develop innovative mobile
methods, is the widespread engagement of mobilities scholars with anti-essentialist,
post-structuralist theoretical approaches that value embodied mobile practices;
approaches that Nigel Thrift has grouped together under the heading of ‘non-repre-
sentational theories’ (Thrift 1996, 2008; see also Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and Von
Savigny 2001). Writing in his book Spatial Formations, Thrift (1996) described
how ‘non-representational theories’ were a fairly broad array of theories – arising
from strands of post-structuralism, actor-network theory, social psychology, phe-
nomenology, symbolic interactionism, conversational analysis and sociology –
which took ‘practices’, ‘performance’ and ‘things’ seriously, focussing on practical
action and experimentation, context, embodiment, affect, and presentation rather
than representation. At the heart of many ‘non-representational theories’ is a focus
on movement and mobility. Indeed, Thrift (2000a, 556) has termed ‘non-representa-
tional theory’ a ‘theory of mobile practices’, whilst he described his 2008 book
Non-Representational Theory as ‘a book based on the leitmotif of movement in its
many forms’ (5). Movement and mobility take on a twin role in this work, for
whilst, on the one hand, Thrift observes that there appears to be a broad ‘structure
of feeling’ and ‘an almost/not quite ontology which is gradually gathering momen-
tum around the key trope of “mobility”’ – emerging within Western societies
through a reshaping of environments, technologies and subjectivities in the past few
centuries – on the other hand, academics need to respond to these shifts and find
new techniques, vocabularies and methods for apprehending and articulating these
mobilities (Thrift 1996, 258).
In some of his earliest discussions of non-representational theories, Thrift hinted
at the ‘practical methodological problems’ associated with a focus on mobility and
movement (Thrift 1993, 98), and in a series of subsequent publications he would
go on to criticise cultural geographers for relying upon a limited range of qualitative
 174 P. Merriman

methods in their research, and utilising a narrow range of (largely written and ver-
bal) technologies for articulating their work to academic colleagues and students
(Thrift 2000b, 2000c, 2004b; Thrift and Dewsbury 2000):

Current work in cultural studies and cultural geography still draws on a

remarkably limited number of methodologies – ethnography, focus groups,
and the like – which are nearly always cognitive in origin and effect. Nonrep-
resentational work, in contrast, is concerned with multiplying performative
methodologies which allow their participants equal rights to disclosure,
through relation rather than representation. (Thrift 2000b, 244)

Experimentation, openness, creativity, participation and performance become the

Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

watch-words of a broad array of methods and techniques that are undertaken as part
of non-representational research practices, where the aim is to learn how to move
with a range of research subjects and objects in new or established ways, as ‘the
world calls us to witness it into being’, and ‘in the performances that make us, the
world comes about’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, 439). What is noticeable is that this
work on embodied mobile practices came to have a significant influence on research
upon mobility and transport (see e.g. Jones 2005; Adey 2006, 2010; Spinney 2006,
2009, 2011; Bissell 2007, 2008, 2009; Merriman 2007, 2012a; McCormack 2008;
Brown and Spinney 2010; Cresswell 2010; Fincham, McGuinness, and Murray
2010; Middleton 2010).
Mobility scholars have engaged with these theoretical writings about practice in
different ways, showing different levels of engagement and commitment in their
theoretical and methodological stances, but the broad push underpinning some of
these engagements appears to be an attempt to more ‘accurately interpret, represent
and understand a world increasingly constituted in mobilities’ (Fincham, McGuin-
ness, and Murray 2010, 5):

Can existing social scientific research methods that slow down and freeze
experiences (the interview, the focus group, the survey) adequately capture
mobile experiences, practices where the context of movement itself may be
crucial to understanding the significance of the event to the participant, rather
than being simply ‘read off’ from the destination points and origins?
(Fincham, McGuinness, and Murray 2010, 2)

The inevitable and necessary solution outlined by a number of mobility scholars is

to construct studies and utilise methods that enable the researcher to apprehend and
experience the mobilities of their research subjects/objects in more direct and multi-
sensuous ways – moving, being or seeing with their research subjects – but in the
next section I argue that this imperative is frequently underpinned by a rather prob-
lematic assumption that these methods enable the researcher to more accurately
know and represent the experiences of their research subjects.

The imperative to move, be, and see with

[A]s a consequence of allowing themselves to move with and to be moved by

subjects, researchers can become tuned into the social organisation of ‘moves’.
… By immersing themselves in the fleeting, multi-sensory, distributed, mobile
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 175

and multiple, yet local, practical and ordered making of social and material
realities, researchers come to understand movement not as only governed by
rules but as methodologically generative. (Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011,
7)

There are clearly good reasons why a researcher might want to adopt any number
of participative, performative, ethnographic techniques that enable them to move
along with, be with, or sense with their research subjects. The long-standing interest
of researchers in ordinary and mundane practices, gestures, conversations and expe-
riences in different cultural contexts has meant that researchers have often sought to
adapt or develop methods that enable them either to observe the everyday activities
of others in context or to learn and experience embodied cultural practices as an aid
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

to understanding particular cultures. In situations where the research subjects are

moving, and their spatial, social and material contexts and relations are ever-chang-
ing, it would seem that new techniques and technologies must be adopted in order
to ‘keep as much of the context of practice as possible’ (Spinney 2009, 827). In sit-
uations where it is either impossible, impractical, or undesirable for the researcher
to move along with or be with their research subjects – for example, in research on
car travel or cycling – video methods may well provide a very useful way of
recording visual and aural aspects of the mobile practices under study (see Laurier
2004, 2010, 2011; Laurier et al. 2008; Spinney 2009, 2010, 2011; Brown and
Spinney 2010). Mobile methods such as ‘go-alongs’, ‘ride-alongs’, and video
ethnography may also provide useful strands to a multi-methods approach, facilitat-
ing discussions with research participants or forming the basis for interviews, whilst
video recordings can enable detailed micro-scale sociological analyses of gesture,
speech and conversation which might otherwise be impossible, as well as providing
a valuable record of events which can be archived and re-analysed in the future
(Laurier et al. 2008; Spinney 2009, 2011). Mobile methods clearly have their uses,
but what I want to question is some of the claims which are made about the
‘power’ of these methods, less as creative or experimental tools, than the claims
made about their ability to let researchers more successfully and accurately appre-
hend or represent certain meanings, feelings, emotions and kinaesthetic sensibilities.
Within the ‘mobile methods’ literature there is an assumption that many conven-
tional methods ‘hold down and dissect’ phenomena, whereas we should be ‘trying
to move with, and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal,
sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic’ (Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011, 1). Rather
than fix or represent these dynamic, mobile, embodied, non-cognitive practices, aca-
demics should be seeking to apprehend and appreciate these subtle performances in
more embodied and responsive ways, moving with and being with their research
subjects, and developing kinaesthetic, synaesthetic and proprioceptive sensibilities
of the movements, affects and materialities constituting events (cf. Järvinen 2006).
Participation, performance and movement with others is seen to foster forms of
knowing and understanding which are either obscured or erased by traditional meth-
odological techniques for representing situations, events and practices, but these
arguments are frequently underpinned by some rather problematic assumptions
about what mobile methods are and can do.
Firstly, it is often assumed that these methods enable the researcher to witness
events ‘first-hand’, bringing about a ‘closeness’, immediacy and ‘proximity’ which
is all-too-often associated with an authentic experience that can enable the
 176 P. Merriman

researcher to more accurately know and interpret the practices in question (Fin-
cham, McGuinness, and Murray 2010, 4–5; McGuinness, Fincham, and Murray
2010). As McGuinness, Fincham, and Murray (2010, 171) point out, mobilities
researchers do vary in the extent to which they assert that there are ‘such things as
accurate measured accounts’, but there is no question that many studies adopting
mobile methods are still driven by a social scientific ‘notion of bringing back the
“data”’ (Thrift 2000c, 3), adopting the ‘“know-and-tell” politics of much sociologi-
cal methodology’ (Dewsbury 2010, 321). As J.D. Dewsbury explains in an essay
on ‘Performative, non-representational, and affect-based research’ methods:

Often when confronted with the desire to do performative research the knee-
jerk reaction is to speed fast into devising a research project that involves ani-
mating knowledge by using video capture of one form or another: the ‘only
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

way’ to get at practice and performance, and any other present-tense action.
(2010, 325)

Video-recording technologies and participative techniques are valorised for their abil-
ity to enable the researcher to witness or capture the unfolding of live events and the
contexts of action, but such manoeuvres often appear to assume that such practices,
contexts, spaces and events are singular, whereas I would argue that there is ‘no one
world out there’ which can be accurately witnessed, captured, represented or por-
trayed (Dewsbury 2010, 330). Video technologies can only present specific aspects
of the visual and aural dimensions of environments and contexts,4 and an excessive
faith in such technologies is in danger of obscuring the many complex (often invisi-
ble) social and political practices and relations which co-constitute spaces, events
and contexts. My experience of driving or passengering along a particular stretch of
road is unlikely to be fully aligned with someone else’s experiences, whether they
are travelling along with me, or not. Physical proximity and co-presence present an
illusion of ‘first-handedness’, closeness, accuracy and authenticity.
Clearly, other kinds of mediated presence and contact can facilitate similar
effects, and I do not see why video recordings or autobiographical reflections on
being in a physical environment are more effective at portraying, capturing or repre-
senting some-thing, some feeling about a situation, event or environment, than a
written or verbal record. Indeed, a number of scholars are beginning to challenge
the assumption that scholars need to adopt participative and performative methods
in order to apprehend habitual, everyday, un-thought practices, feelings and sensa-
tions that are said to be unspeakable and to elude representation (Hitchings 2012).
As Dewsbury has persuasively argued:

A well conceived set of interview questions might well be far more effective
[than a video recording] at capturing the tension of the performing body as
witnessed by the body of the interviewee. (2010, 325)

In the multi-sensual approaches of a number of mobility researchers, conventional

methods such as interviews have been usefully combined with techniques such as
video recordings, with video playbacks being used as the basis for interviews and
discussions with participants (Spinney 2009; Brown and Spinney 2010), but I am
not entirely convinced about what the broader conclusions of such investigations
could be, unless such studies actually acknowledge that the world is multiple,
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 177

open-ended and ‘more elusive than we can theorise’, as ‘the world does not add-
up’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, 437). Some scholars seem to be trying to capture the
liveliness of embodied movements and the unfolding event, chasing after something
that has already escaped them.
Indeed, as many theorists of practice would argue, ‘you cannot directly signify
that which is past’ (Dewsbury 2010, 332), and social scientists could perhaps learn
from the way in which humanities scholars draw upon and experiment with mobile
methods. Specific ways of moving with – and technologies such as video – may
provide excellent aids to experimentation and presentation, but they should not be
upheld as the only techniques for capturing, recording or representing an event,
context, experience, or world. Such attitudes tend to be underpinned by the assump-
tion that researchers must seek to apprehend a singular world, and that the message
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

and data are what really counts, over-and-above the practices undertaken. The chal-
lenge presented by non-representational thinkers such as Dewsbury (2010) is inci-
sive, for as he suggests, we should not adopt innovative mobile methods in an
attempt to (or belief that we can) more accurately know or represent practices, con-
texts and events. Rather, innovation and experimentation are important processes in
themselves – aiding self-discovery and facilitating discussion – and the practices of
making a video, riding-along, and moving-with are perhaps more instructive or
informative than the images, data or experiences gathered.
Secondly, there is a danger that the focus on mobile methods and non-representa-
tional approaches to movement, performance, ‘liveliness and the body-in-action’
generates ‘an overanimated mobile subject’, highlighting movement, action and
dynamism above ‘other ways of experiencing mobilities’ (Bissell 2010, 56, 58).
Stillness, waiting, slowness and boredom may be just as important to many situa-
tions, practices and movements as sensations and experiences of speed, movement,
excitement and exhilaration (see Bissell 2007, 2008; Bissell and Fuller 2011), but
many of these mobile methodologies and approaches do not seem to be very good
at registering the more passive practices, engagements and affective relations which
gather around movements and mobilities (Bissell 2010, 62). Mobilities research and
mobile methods, then, have frequently focussed on the active embodied movements
of the cyclist, walker, and driver, and it is only more recently that close attention is
being paid to the seemingly more passive mobilities of these same individuals, as
well as the embodied practices of such figures as ‘the passenger’ (Bissell 2007,
2008, 2009; Watts 2008; Adey, Bissell, and Laurier 2011). Mobilities researchers
also focus much of their attention on particular kinds of mobilities and mobile sub-
jects, reinforcing a number of problematic binaries, and ultimately constructing a
rather limited sense of what movement and mobility are. For example, many mobil-
ity researchers draw a distinction between mobilities and moorings, or mobility and
stasis (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006), utilising mobile methods to understand the
practices and actions associated with one side of this binary whilst paying less
attention to the infrastructures, technologies, materialities, and spaces that are inte-
gral to the embodied movements of human subjects (and which are perceived to
change very little), or indeed questioning the binaries that underpin their work.
A symmetrical sociology of mobilities might well question the mobility/moorings
binary, adopting a range of methods – including video methods, ethnography and par-
ticipative techniques – to trace the social relations, materialities and practices relating
to cycle paths, scenic roads, motorways, railway lines and airline cabins, in addition
to the experiences of the active traveller in such spaces. Of course, some researchers
 178 P. Merriman

have focussed on the history and politics of airport design (Pascoe 2001; Adey 2008),
the production and consumption of modern roads (Merriman 2007; Mauch and Zeller
2008) and other matters, but few mobility scholars have attempted to utilise mobile
(or static) methods to produce the kinds of symmetrical sociologies that have been
advanced by scholars in Science and Technology Studies (see Latour 1996; Law
2001, 2002). As Bruno Latour once put it in a critique of Augé’s (1986) ethnology of
the Paris metro:

… he has limited himself to studying the most superficial aspects of the metro
(Augé 1986), interpreting some graffiti on the walls of subway corridors,
intimidated this time by the evidence of his own marginality in the face of
Western economics, technologies and science. A symmetrical Marc Augé
would have studied the sociotechnological network of the metro itself: its
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

engineers as well as its drivers, its directors and its clients, the employer-State,
the whole shebang – simply doing at home what he had always done else-
where. (Latour 1993, 100–101)

Whilst I do not want to suggest that mobility scholars should stop what they are
doing in order to focus on the fine-grained detail of everyday, micro-scale social
and material relations – or to try and provide symmetrical sociologies, geographies
or anthropologies of the co-production of mobility subjects, objects, practices and
infrastructures – there is no doubt that mobile methods have mainly been deployed
to understand the experiences and movements of embodied, mobile human subjects,
which are increasingly praised and celebrated over-and-above studies of transport
spaces, infrastructures, and policies.
What’s more, I would encourage mobility scholars to challenge the rather simplis-
tic binary of mobility/moorings, for as Peter Adey has suggested, ‘everything is
mobile’, ‘there is never any absolute immobility’, and ‘moorings are indeed mobile
too’ (Adey 2006, 76, 83 and 86). As process philosophers have long argued,5
movement, flux and flow are primary and ubiquitous, but just because all matter is
seen to be in flux, movement and becoming, it does not mean that everything
moves in the same way or at the same speed (Merriman 2012a). Thus, whilst critics
of process philosophy and nomadic metaphysics may argue that ‘if everything is
mobile, then the concept has little purchase’ (Adey 2006, 76), process philosophers
do not necessarily suggest that all movements are equal – indeed, movements have
different qualities and speeds, and are underpinned by very different political, physi-
cal and aesthetic processes (Merriman 2012a). Mobile methods, then, could be uti-
lised much more than at present to understand the ‘vibrant materialities’ and
mobilities of the world (Bennett 2010), whilst acknowledging the fact that things
move and vibrate with different rhythms, speeds and affects. To understand these
materialities, movements, affects, sensations and worlds, scholars could utilise a
range of methods, from textual and discourse analysis, to interviews, focus groups,
video ethnography, participant observation and much more.
Thirdly, in their attempts to develop experimental and innovative research methods
with research subjects and objects, mobility scholars are in danger of reinforcing dis-
tinctions between ‘field-based’ and ‘desk-based’ research, in which ‘field-based’ eth-
nographic and participative techniques are frequently seen to provide first-hand
access and a close engagement with particular practices and events. Within disci-
plines such as geography, anthropology, sociology and archaeology, there have been
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 179

long-standing debates about the appropriate ‘sites’ for undertaking academic research,
and about what counts as rigorous and valuable research, as well as the relationship
between theoretical and empirical research. My concern is that in utilising novel par-
ticipative techniques to track movements in new places, mobility scholars naturalise a
certain style of mobilities research as being ‘pioneering’ and ‘innovative’.
Fourthly, too many approaches to mobile methods appear to be founded upon a
faith in new technologies that are seen to provide a more accurate and close appre-
hension of practices and experiences of movement (Dewsbury 2010; Vergunst
2011). Video cameras, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), GPS and an array
of other data-gathering and analytical techniques are advocated as the means to
effectively capture and trace particular movements, practices and experiences, but
not only does this turn to modern technologies overlook the many well-established
and effective means of tracing and understanding mobilities, but it can also ‘tempt
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

researchers into claiming a scientific, universal authority on the basis of that tech-
nology rather than in the scope and content of their work’ (Vergunst 2011, 212).
Unlike Jo Vergunst, my concern is not that ‘turning too readily to high technology
has the danger that we actually distance ourselves from the experience of move-
ment, in the very act of trying to get closer to it’ (2011, 210). Indeed, it is precisely
such allusions to phenomenological closeness and distance which I want to avoid
and critique, for witnessing something or engaging with someone face-to-face, on
the ground, does not provide some authentic or singular way of understanding, wit-
nessing, or knowing a subject, thing or event. Rather it provides a particular kind
of engagement that is different from (but not superior to) other embodied practices
of engagement – for example, reading about an event, watching a video recording
of it, etc.
My concern with the current turn to new technologies is not with the way they
might transform a researcher’s engagements with the world (although that is inter-
esting), rather it is with assumptions that new methods or new technologies are nec-
essary to capture something that established methods cannot apprehend and
suggesting that mobility researchers have failed to innovate. It is these kinds of
claims that underpin a recent paper by Phil Jones and James Evans:

This paper identifies a failure by mobilities scholars to engage with the meth-
odological and analytical challenges offered by qualitative GIS. … bringing
together mobilities and qualitative GIS is not simply an intellectual exercise,
but offers decision-makers rigorously analysed understandings of how spaces
are produced through movement and the implications of this for everyday life.
(Jones and Evans 2012, 92, 98)

Now, given the fairly recent history of qualitative GIS, the problems some scholars
have with its approaches and claims, and the genealogy of recent work on mobili-
ties – emerging from traditions of research in sociology, cultural geography, anthro-
pology and history – it is not surprising that mobility scholars have not engaged
with the techniques of qualitative GIS, and neither do I think it constitutes some
kind of ‘failure’ (on qualitative GIS, see Cope and Elwood 2009). What’s more,
Jones and Evans appear to exaggerate the ‘analytic power’ of GIS, and the impor-
tance of ‘spatial transcript[s]’, which they claim ‘do not simply spatialise qualitative
data but show how space shapes data’ (92, 97). Qualitative GIS may be an
illuminating and powerful way of visualising and mapping qualitative data but these
 180 P. Merriman

techniques can only aid rather than provide qualitative data analysis, and they are
ultimately underpinned by rather conventional, neo-Euclidean, ‘physical’ conceptu-
alisations of space and location. Space is reified as absolute or relative location, and
as a thing with constitutive power, but whilst the aesthetic effects of these modes of
visualising and mapping data may appeal to many, they do not provide an authorita-
tive and definitive solution to the display and analysis of data, and neither should
mobilities scholars be criticised for failing to engage with this or any other new or
emerging technique.

Methods for Apprehending Mobile Practices: Historical Research on Driving

In this paper, I have advanced a number of arguments about methods for research-
ing practices of mobility. I have examined how ‘mobile methods’ have come to be
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

associated with innovative, experimental, non-representational approaches, and new

techniques and technologies for tracking, tracing and recording movement. I have
shown how a ‘practice turn’ (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and Von Savigny 2001) in the
social sciences and humanities has led to a focus on performative and participative
methods, and on the unfolding of events and mobile embodied practices ‘in the
now’. I have specified how mobilities research has frequently been framed as social
science research, overlooking other approaches to mobility developed by scholars
and practitioners in the arts and humanities. Indeed, mobilities research is and
always has been a diverse field, taking in a range of methods, approaches and disci-
plines, and in this final section of the paper I want to outline a single case study to
demonstrate the diverse range of methods, including so-called ‘conventional meth-
ods’, which can and have been used to trace embodied mobile practices, actions
and events. My example is a historical one relating to the embodied practices and
sensations of motoring in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
The Victorian and Edwardian eras are beyond our living memory, and one could
argue that archival sources, visual materials and written records are important
because they are one of the only ways we can access people’s views and represen-
tations of the period.6 This may be true, but I do not want to suggest that if other
methods were available they would somehow be more desirable or useful for the
social science or humanities scholar. Written accounts and visual representations –
official or unofficial, personal or public – provide a valuable insight into the embod-
ied practices, events, spaces and experiences of a particular period, or relating to a
particular activity. Take the embodied sensations and experiences of driving. A
number of academics and cultural commentators have remarked on how the prac-
tices, sensations and experiences of driving elude easy representation or description,
and how experienced motorists drive their cars in an automatic, detached, distracted
or ‘non-cognitive’ manner (Seamon 1980; Crary 1999; Thrift 2004c; Merriman
2007, 2009a, 2012a; cf. Laurier 2011). Driving is characterised by highly distinc-
tive, kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, haptic, spatial and visual sensibilities that are diffi-
cult to describe and are rarely reflected upon, but this does not mean that motorists
are unable to present or describe their embodied experiences, and indeed, the nov-
elty and intensity of these affects and sensations led many early motorists to talk
and write about the sensations, feelings and emotions which emerged when driving
or being passengers in motor cars. Here is one journalist’s description of the sensa-
tions of motoring between London and Brighton on ‘Emancipation Day’, 14
November 1896:7
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 181

To rush through the air at the speed of a torpedo-boat destroyer, down a nar-
row, curving road, enclosed with hedges, and without being able to see what
was to the front of us, was a novel and thrilling experience. The gradient is
very steep. One minute we were 500 feet above the sea level, and the next
300 feet only. We had accomplished this rapid descent of 200 feet in a few
seconds of breathless suspense, when the slightest error of steering would
have landed us into one bank or the other, or plunged us into the midst of
cyclists who were waiting at the bottom of the hill to see how we should take
this admittedly awkward piece of country. We did it magnificently, without a
swerve. And all the while our motor was actively impelling us onward,
adding to the velocity that had been already imparted to the vehicle by the
momentum. It was a grand sensation … (The Automotor and Horseless
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

Vehicle Journal 1896, 69)

This experience and sensation of descending a hill is described in a manner which

clearly pictures a scene and describes events for dramatic effect, but early motoring
magazines were full of similar accounts which described the embodied sensations
of motoring in general, as well as experiences on specific motor tours and trips (see
Merriman 2012a). As Louis Vincent remarked in The Car (Illustrated) in April
1905:

To the man who does not motor – that unfortunate man who has never known
the joy of spinning … across wild moorlands with a screaming wind to face,
… a wind that fires you with the exhilaration of life and the joy of life – to
such a man the motor-car can be nothing more than an unimaginative, moving
mass of metal that smells of petrol and makes evil noises. There are even
some motorists who have never absorbed the spirit of the car as a thing of life
and feeling, a genie of Pegasean potency encircling the world in a breath. The
sensation of soaring through space, the sense of power and velocity, gives one
kinship with the eagle … (Vincent 1905, 308)

These first-hand experiences and reflections may sensationalise the experience –

dramatising the events for poetic or literary effect, and reflecting on remarkable
events and experiences rather than mundane occurrences – but the practices of writ-
ing, reflecting and presenting these sensations tells us a lot about how motoring
was perceived at the time, and motorists were clearly able to articulate a series of
embodied practices, affects and sensations which some have suggested are fleeting,
non-cognitive, non-representational, and simply elude presentation.
These written accounts might provide us with some understanding or sense of
what it was like to travel on an early motor-car, on unmade roads, at a time when
motorists were frequently vilified by the public, the press and authorities, but there
are many other sources, methods and perspectives which might also allow us to
understand the practices, events and spaces of motoring in late Victorian and
Edwardian Britain. Motorists did not drive or travel as passengers in a cultural,
political or spatial ‘vacuum’, and as soon as motor-cars arrived on the roads and
streets of Britain then cultural commentators, politicians, civil servants, magistrates,
the police, and members of the public started to discuss the benefits and negative
aspects of motoring – ranging from the impact of motor vehicles on the surfaces of
roads, the physical sensations, effects and dangers of motoring, and the way in
 182 P. Merriman

which motorists conducted themselves, to discussions about how to tax motorists

and regulate their conduct. Academic accounts of contemporary mobility that utilise
mobile methods frequently ignore such broader discourses and discursive contexts,
but the historically minded mobilities scholar cannot avoid such contextual debates
(and neither should mobilities scholars focussed on practices today).
When new motor-cars started arriving in Britain in the early 1890s, they fell sub-
ject to a classification system created in the 1860s whereby motor vehicles were
classed as a road locomotive and were subject to speed restrictions of 4 mph in the
countryside and 2 mph in towns (Plowden 1971, 22; Merriman 2012a). Despite the
introduction of the Locomotives on Highways Act of 1896 – which freed motorists
from the harsh restrictions, raising the maximum speed limit to 12 mph – the late
1890s and 1900s saw ongoing struggles between politicians, the police, motoring
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

organisations, motorists and the public about the rights, responsibilities, freedom
and control of motorists (see Merriman 2012a). Motoring became associated with a
diverse array of practices which exceeded the actions, experiences, and sensations
of the motor-car driver, including practices of legislating (by politicians), timing,
identifying and trapping (by the police), prosecuting (lawyers and judges), paving
(by engineers), producing (by manufacturers, retailers and publishers), and warning
and informing (by motor scouts).

Conclusions

[W]hilst fleeting movements may be representational – that is to say they are

fundamental to the creation and reproduction of meaning – their transient nat-
ure does not readily lend itself to apprehensions through quantitative or verbal
accounts. One reason for this is that even if we acknowledge the importance
of such factors, we lack the technologies, skills and vocabularies necessary to
elicit and evoke sensory experiences in registers other than the visual and
aural precisely because they often reside in the realm of the habitual and
unconscious. As a result there has been a corresponding post-mortem of exist-
ing methods with queries being raised about whether the new research ques-
tions arising through the mobilities turn require a wholesale re-thinking of
methodological approach. (Spinney 2011, 162)

Over the past few years, an increasing number of mobilities scholars have argued
that practices and sensations of human embodied movement are fleeting occurrences
that elude representation, and it is suggested that new research techniques, methods
and theoretical stances are necessary to allow academics to apprehend such prac-
tices and experiences of embodied movement. As Spinney (2011, 162) suggests in
the quotation above, some scholars have undertaken a ‘post-mortem of existing
methods’, calling for a rethinking of approaches, but the epistemological assump-
tions and claims of some of these studies is frequently confused. Indeed, whilst
many mobility scholars and non-representational theorists adopt the kinds of multi-
dimensional methodology, ‘weak ontology’, and partial and ‘situated epistemology’
advocated by Thrift (1996, 32–33), Donna Haraway and other anti-essentialist and
post-structuralist thinkers, some ‘post-mortems’ of conventional methods are
underpinned by the problematic belief that experimental and improvisational
‘mobile methods’ provide the means to enable the research to get ‘close-to’, ‘grasp’
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 183

or witness the here-ness, now-ness and live-ness of particular practices and events –
providing some ‘God-like’ position from which the researcher can gain a more
accurate or authentic knowledge of a situation. My plea, then, is for scholars to pro-
vide more balanced discussions of the advantages and powers of ‘mobile methods’
and to maintain a plural sense of what mobilities research is, has been, can be and
should be: expanding the number of disciplinary perspectives on movement and
mobility; working across disciplinary boundaries; developing different theoretical
and empirical avenues; drawing upon a plurality of methodological approaches; and
above all adopting modest, ‘weak’, open, non-representational epistemologies and
ontologies – not as a means to grasp and represent elusive practices, but as a means
to experiment and move with.
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

Acknowledgement
The initial research underlying this paper was undertaken during a period of
research leave funded by the AHRC, Award Reference AH/H00243X/1.

Notes
1. I use scare quotes because words such as ‘conventional’ and ‘traditional’ are all-too-often associ-
ated with pejorative judgments, where such methods are seen as being simplistic, ineffective, out-
dated and conservative. Of course, such methods are not singular or fixed, and scholars
continuously rework them, innovating ‘around the edges’.
2. For example, there are a broad range of creative, experimental and practise-based approaches that
have a lot in common with ‘mobile methods’ and mobilities research but are rarely included under
such banners, including work in geography, performance studies, literature and creative writing
(see e.g. Pearce 2000, 2012a, 2012b; Wylie 2005; Merriman et al. 2008; Lorimer and Wylie 2010;
Pearson 2006, 2010).
3. Many examples spring to mind, but some recent examples are reviewed in the journal Transfers:
Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies which features special sections on ‘mobility and art’
and ‘museums reviews’. See also Merriman and Webster (2009).
4. I appreciate that practices and technologies associated with senses and sensations are complex,
multiple and do not function in simple or independent ways. What’s more, I also accept that tech-
nologies such as video might be able to articulate or conjure up other auras and sensibilities that
are not traditionally confined to the visual or aural domains.
5. Processual thinking and process philosophy have a long and more or less distinguished history –
from ancient thinkers such as Heraclitus and Lucretius, to modern process philosophers such as
Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Brian Massumi, Jane Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari
(see Merriman 2012a).
6. Of course, one could try to track down early film recordings or oral history interviews with people
that lived through or remembered the period, although such sources and methods would present
their own methodological challenges and limitations.
7. ‘Emancipation Day’, 14 November 1896, was the day when the Locomotives on Highways Act,
1896 came into force, lifting the restrictions which severely limited the use of motor cars in the
UK (see Plowden 1971; Merriman 2012a).

References
Adey, P. 2006. “If Mobility is Everything it is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobili-
ties.” Mobilities 1 (1): 75–94.
Adey, P. 2008. “Airports, Mobility, and the Calculative Architecture of Affective Control.” Geoforum
39 (1): 438–451.
Adey, P. 2010. Aerial Life. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
 184 P. Merriman

Adey, P., D. Bissell, and E. Laurier. 2011. “Introduction to the Special Issue on Geographies of the Pas-
senger.” Journal of Transport Geography 19: 1007–1009.
Anderson, J. 2004. “Talking Whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of Knowledge.” Area 36
(3): 254–261.
Appleyard, D., K. Lynch, and J. R. Myer. 1964. The View from the Road. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.
Augé, M. 1986. Un Ethnologue dans le Métro. Paris: Hachette. [Augé, M. 2002. In the Metro. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press].
Bærenholdt, J. O., M. Haldrup, J. Larsen, and J. Urry. 2004. Performing Tourist Places. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press.
Bissell, D. 2007. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2 (2): 277–298.
Bissell, D. 2008. “Comfortable Bodies: Sedentary Affects.” Environment and Planning A 40 (7):
1697–1712.
Bissell, D. 2009. “Visualising Everyday Geographies: Practices of Vision through Travel-time.” Trans-
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

actions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (1): 42–60.

Bissell, D. 2010. “Narrating Mobile Methodologies: Active and Passive Empiricisms.” In Mobile Meth-
odologies, edited by B. Fincham, M. McGuinness, and L. Murray, 53–68. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Bissell, D., and G. Fuller, eds. 2011. Stillness in a Mobile World. London: Routledge.
Brown, K., and J. Spinney. 2010. “Catching a Glimpse: The Value of Video in Evoking, Understanding
and Representing the Practice of Cycling.” In Mobile Methodologies, edited by B. Fincham, M.
McGuinness, and L. Murray, 130–151. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Büscher, M., and J. Urry. 2009. “Mobile Methods and the Empirical.” European Journal of Social The-
ory 12 (1): 99–116.
Büscher, M., J. Urry, and K. Witchger. 2011. “Introduction: Mobile Methods.” In Mobile Methods, edi-
ted by M. Büscher, J. Urry, and K. Witchger, 1–19. London: Routledge.
Cope, M., and S. Elwood, eds. 2009. Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach. London: Sage.
Crary, J. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. London: The MIT
Press.
Cresswell, T. 2001a. The Tramp in America. London: Reaktion.
Cresswell, T. 2001b. “The Production of Mobilities.” New Formations 43: 11–25.
Cresswell, T. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. London: Routledge.
Cresswell, T. 2010. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
28 (1): 17–31.
Cresswell, T. 2011. “Mobilities I: Catching up.” Progress in Human Geography 35 (4): 550–558.
Cresswell, T. 2012. “Mobilities II: Still.” Progress in Human Geography 36 (5): 645–653.
Cresswell, T., and P. Merriman, eds. 2011. Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects.
Farnham: Ashgate.
D’Andrea, A., L. Ciolfi, and B. Gray. 2011. “Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Mobilities
Research.” Mobilities 6 (2): 149–160.
Dannefer, W. 1977. “Driving and Symbolic Interaction.” Sociological Inquiry 47 (1): 33–38.
Dewsbury, J. D. 2010. “Performative, Non-representational and Affect-based Research.” In The SAGE
Handbook of Qualitative Research in Human Geography, edited by D. DeLyser, S. Aitken,
M. Crang, S. Herbert, and L. McDowell, 321–334. London: Sage.
Dewsbury, J. D., P. Harrison, M. Rose, and J. Wylie. 2002. “Enacting Geographies.” Geoforum 33 (4):
437–440.
Duncan, J., and D. Gregory, eds. 1999. Writes of Passage. London: Routledge.
Evans, R., and A. Franklin. 2010. “Equine Beats: Unique Rhythms (and Floating Harmony) of Horses
and their Riders.” In Geographies of Rhythm, edited by T. Edensor, 173–188. Farnham: Aldershot.
Fincham, B., M. McGuinness, and L. Murray. 2010. “Introduction.” In Mobile Methodologies, edited
by B. Fincham, M. McGuinness, and L. Murray, 1–10. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ganser, A. 2009. Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narra-
tives, 1970–2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Goffman, E. 1971. Relations in Public. London: Allen Lane.
Hannam, K., M. Sheller, and J. Urry. 2006. “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings.” Mobili-
ties 1 (1): 1–22.
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 185

Hawkins, R. 1986. “A Road Not Taken: Sociology and the Neglect of the Automobile.” California
Sociologist 8: 61–79.
Hein, J. R., J. Evans, and P. Jones. 2008. “Mobile Methodologies: Theory, Technology and Practice.”
Geography Compass 2 (5): 1266–1285.
Hitchings, R. 2012. “People can Talk About their Practices.” Area 44 (1): 61–67.
Hollowell, P. G. 1968. The Lorry Driver. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Järvinen, H. 2006. “Kinesthesia, Synesthesia and Le Sacre du Printemps: Responses to Dance Modern-
ism.” The Senses & Society 1 (1): 71–91.
Johnston, C., and G. Pratt. 2010. “Nanay (Mother): A Testimonial Play.” Cultural Geographies 17 (1):
123–133.
Jones, P. 2005. “Performing the City: A Body and a Bicycle Take on Birmingham, UK.” Social and
Cultural Geography 6 (6): 813–830.
Jones, P., and J. Evans. 2012. “The Spatial Transcript: Analysing Mobilities through Qualitative GIS.”
Area 44 (1): 92–99.
Kaplan, C. 1996. Questions of Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

Katz, J. 1999. How Emotions Work. London: The University of Chicago Press.
Latham, A. 2003. “Research, Performance, and Doing Human Geography: Some Reflections
on the Diary-photograph, Diary-interview Method.” Environment & Planning A 35 (11):
1993–2017.
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Latour, B. 1996. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. London: Harvard University Press.
Laurier, E. 2004. “Doing Office Work on the Motorway.” Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4–5):
261–277.
Laurier, E. 2010. “Being There/Seeing There: Recording and Analysing Life in the Car.” In Mobile
Methodologies, edited by B. Fincham, M. McGuinness, and L. Murray, 103–117. Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Laurier, E. 2011. “Driving: Pre-cognition and Driving.” In Geographies of Mobilities: Practices,
Spaces, Subjects, edited by T. Cresswell and P. Merriman, 69–81. Farnham: Ashgate.
Laurier, E., H. Lorimer, B. Brown, O. Jones, O. Juhlin, A. Noble, M. Perry, et al. 2008. “Driving and
Passengering: Notes on the Ordinary Organisation of Car Travel.” Mobilities 3: 1–23.
Law, J. 2001. Ladbroke Grove, or how to Think About Failing Systems. Published by the Centre for
Science Studies and the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University at http://www.comp.lancas-
ter.ac.uk/sociology/soc055jl.html (version: paddington5.doc, August 2000).
Law, J. 2002. Aircraft Stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Letherby, G. 2010. “Have Backpack will Travel: Auto/Biography as Mobile Methodology.” In Mobile
Methodologies, edited by B. Fincham, M. McGuinness, and L. Murray, 152–168. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Letherby, G., and J. Shaw. 2009. “Dear Diary: Auto/Biography, Respect, and Mobility.” In The Cul-
tures of Alternative Mobilities, edited by P. Vannini, 111–126. Farnham: Ashgate.
Letherby, G., J. Shaw, and J. Middleton. 2010. “Researching Mobility: The Implications for Method,
Methodology and Epistemology.” Unpublished Paper Presented at the 42nd Universities Transport
Study Group Conference, Plymouth, January 5–7.
Lorimer, H., and J. Wylie. 2010. “LOOP (a Geography).” Performance Research 15: 4–11.
Lyons, G., and J. Urry. 2005. “Travel Time Use in the Information Age.” Transportation Research 39:
257–276.
McCormack, D. 2008. “Geographies for Moving Bodies: Thinking, Dancing, Spaces.” Geography
Compass 2 (6): 1822–1836.
McGuinness, M., B. Fincham, and L. Murray. 2010. “Conclusions: Mobilising Methodologies.” In
Mobile Methodologies, edited by B. Fincham, M. McGuinness, and L. Murray, 169–173. Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mauch, C., and T. Zeller, eds. 2008. The World Beyond the Windshield: Driving and the Experience of
Landscape in 20th Century Europe and America. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Merriman, P. 2007. Driving Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell.
Merriman, P. 2009a. “Automobility and the Geographies of the Car.” Geography Compass 3 (2):
586–586.
Merriman, P. 2009b. “Mobility.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Volume 7), edi-
ted by R. Kitchin and N. Thrift, 134–143. London: Elsevier.
Merriman, P. 2012a. Mobility, Space and Culture. London: Routledge.
 186 P. Merriman

Merriman, P. 2012b. “Human Geography without Time-space.” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 37 (1): 13–27.
Merriman, P., M. Jones, G. Olsson, E. Sheppard, N. Thrift, and Y.-F. Tuan. 2012. “Space and Spatiality
in Theory.” Dialogues in Human Geography 2 (1): 3–22.
Merriman, P., G. Revill, T. Cresswell, H. Lorimer, D. Matless, G. Rose, and J. Wylie. 2008. “Land-
scape, Mobility and Practice.” Social and Cultural Geography 9 (2): 191–212.
Merriman, P., and C. Webster. 2009. “Travel Projects: Landscape, Art, Movement.” Cultural Geogra-
phies 16 (4): 525–535.
Middleton, J. 2009. “‘Stepping in Time’: Walking, Time, and Space in the City.” Environment & Plan-
ning A 41 (8): 1943–1961.
Middleton, J. 2010. “Sense and the City: Exploring the Embodied Geographies of Urban Walking.”
Social and Cultural Geography 11 (6): 575–596.
Middleton, J. 2011. “‘I’m on Autopilot, I Just Follow the Route’: Exploring the Habits, Routines, and
Decision-making Practices of Everyday Urban Mobilities.” Environment & Planning A 43 (12):
2857–2877.
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

O’Connell, S. 1998. The Car and British Society. Manchester, NH: Manchester University Press.
Pascoe, D. 2001. Airspaces. London: Reaktion.
Pearce, L. 2000. “Driving North/Driving South: Reflections upon the Spatial/Temporal Coordinates of
‘Home’.” In Devolving Identities: Feminist Readings in Home and Belonging, edited by L. Pearce,
162–178. London: Ashgate.
Pearce, L. 2012a. “The Urban Imaginary: Writing, Migration, Place.” Mobilities 7 (1): 1–11.
Pearce, L. 2012b. “Automobility in Manchester Fiction.” Mobilities 7 (1): 93–113.
Pearson, M. 2006. hhIn Comes Iii Performance, Memory and Landscape. Exeter: University of Exeter
Press.
Pearson, M. 2010. Site-specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Plowden, W. 1971. The Motor Car and Politics 1896–1970. London: The Bodley Head.
Pooley, C. G., J. Turnbull, and M. Adams. 2005. A Mobile Century? Changes in Everyday Mobility in
Britain in the Twentieth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Redshaw, S. 2008. In the Company of Cars. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Savage, M., and R. Burrows. 2007. “The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology.” Sociology 41:
885–899.
Schatzki, T. R., K. Knorr-Cetina, and E. Von Savigny, eds. 2001. The Practice Turn in Contemporary
Theory. London: Routledge.
Schivelbusch, W. 1980. The Railway Journey. Oxford: Blackwell.
Seamon, D. 1980. “Body-subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place-Ballets.” In The Human Experience
of Space and Place, edited by A. Buttimer and D. Seamon, 148–165. London: Croom Helm.
Shaw, J., and J. D. Sidaway. 2011. “Making Links: On (Re)engaging with Transport and Transport
Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 35: 502–520.
Sheller, M. 2011. Mobility. Sociopedia. http://www.isa-sociology.org/publ/sociopedia-isa/.
Sheller, M., and J. Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment & Planning A 38:
207–226.
Spinney, J. 2006. “A Place of Sense: A Kinaesthetic Ethnography of Cyclists on Mont Ventoux.” Envi-
ronment & Planning D: Society & Space 24 (5): 709–732.
Spinney, J. 2009. “Cycling the City: Movement, Meaning and Method.” Geography Compass 3 (2):
817–835.
Spinney, J. 2010. “Improvising Rhythms: Re-reading Urban Time and Space through Everyday
Practices of Cycling.” In Geographies of Rhythm, edited by T. Edensor, 113–127. Farnham: Alder-
shot.
Spinney, J. 2011. “A Chance to Catch a Breath: Using Mobile Video Methodology in Cycling
Research.” Mobilities 6 (2): 161–182.
The Automotor and Horseless Vehicle Journal. 1896. Emancipation Day 1 (2): 66–70.
Thrift, N. 1993. “For a New Regional Geography 3.” Progress in Human Geography 17 (1): 92–100.
Thrift, N. 1994. “Inhuman Geographies: Landscapes of Speed, Light and Power.” In Writing the Rural,
edited by P. Cloke, M. Doel, D. Matless, M. Phillips, and N. Thrift, 191–248. London: PCP.
Thrift, N. 1996. Spatial Formations. London: Sage.
Thrift, N. 2000a. “Non-representational Theory.” In The Dictionary of Human Geography (Fourth Edi-
tion), edited by R. J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt, and M. Watts, 556. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thrift, N. 2000b. “Afterwords.” Environment & Planning D: Society & Space 18: 213–255.
 Rethinking Mobile Methods 187

Thrift, N. 2000c. “Introduction: Dead or Alive?” In Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns, edited by I.

Cook, D. Crouch, S. Naylor, and J. R. Ryan, 1–6. Harlow: Prentice Hall.
Thrift, N. 2004a. “Movement-space: Changing Domain of Thinking Resulting from the Development
of New Kinds of Spatial Awareness.” Economy & Society 33 (4): 582–604.
Thrift, N. 2004b. “Summoning Life.” In Envisioning Human Geographies, edited by P. Cloke,
P. Crang, and M. Goodwin, 81–103. London: Arnold.
Thrift, N. 2004c. “Driving in the City.” Theory, Culture, and Society 21 (4–5): 41–59.
Thrift, N. 2008. Non-representational Theory. London: Routledge.
Thrift, N., and J.-D. Dewsbury. 2000. “Dead Geographies – and how to Make Them Live.” Environ-
ment & Planning D: Society & Space 18: 411–432.
Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Vannini, P., ed. 2009. The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities. Farnham: Ashgate.
Vannini, P. 2012. Ferry Tales. London: Routledge.
Vergunst, J. 2011. “Technology and Technique in a Useful Ethnography of Movement.” Mobilities 6
(2): 203–219.
Downloaded by [University of Delaware] at 01:08 07 October 2014

Verstraete, G. 2010. Tracking Europe. London: Duke University Press.

Vincent, L. 1905, Apr. “The Poetry of Motoring: An Impression.” The Car (Illustrated): A Journal of
Travel by Land, Sea and Air 153 (26): 308.
Watts, L. 2008. “The Art and Craft of Train Travel.” Social and Cultural Geography 9 (6): 711–726.
Wylie, J. 2005. “A Single Day’s Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast
Path.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30: 234–247.