Toward 'a Wise, and Sacred Movement': Mobility Justice as Movement Work

Keywords: mobility justice, abolitionism, environmental justice, feminist, intersectional
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Mobility justice has emerged as a new paradigm for researchers and practitioners in the past 15 years. Mobility justice challenges those working in transportation and researching spaces to think more broadly about historical, place-based, and identity-based factors that limit people's mobility. These may include histories of highway construction through and disinvestment in communities of color, restrictive migration policies, over-policing of Black and brown people, infrastructure disrepair, high levels of environmental toxicity, as well as other systemic issues. For each challenge, mobility justice offers a path forward rooted in feminist intersectional research/praxis. This presentation will outline these challenges and next steps, based on the preliminary results of an in-progress study on the origins and spread of the mobility justice framework in mobilities and intersectional justice-oriented spaces. Special attention will be paid to the role of overlapping expertise and collaboration in the future uses of mobility justice as a framework for furthering researcher/practitioner partnerships on justice-oriented projects. This project arises from the first author's direct involvement in convening early conversations about mobility justice among academic researchers and BIPOC transportation professionals, who collaboratively wrote the foundational "Principles of Mobility Justice."