Welcome aboard KLM Air Land

The so-called mobilities turn offers an analytical framework for analyzing how societies move and the role of mobility in societal development, within or across national borders. In contrast to much migration research, a mobilities approach pays attention to all kinds of mobility and mobile subjects – from runners and commuters to diplomats and asylum-seekers. Likewise, it focuses on the underpinning infrastructures and moorings that make these mobilities possible, such as, for instance, highways or airports. It thereby expands our analytical attention and curiosity. 

In a new blog post, DIIS senior researcher Nauja Kleist introduces the mobilities turn in the social sciences, with focus on regimes, politics and trajectories of mobility. Taking departure in a Ghanaian ‘KLM Air Land’ minibus, she reflects upon local and global inequalities underpinning access to safe and legal migration and the actual experience of mobility – whether you take the KLM Air Land minibus or an intercontinental KLM flight.  She argues that a focus on mobilities may turn our attention to the normal, everyday and unspectacular modes of moving as well as their human dramas. It may thereby extend the range of experiences and subjects included in our analyses. 

The blog is posted at the AMMODI website: a research network on African Migration, Mobility, and Displacement, under the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (AEGIS).