In what follows, we propose three entry points for studying entangled mobilities: in particular localities, through co-dependent mobilities and in individual biographies. We will first discuss these entry points separately; later, in the conclusion, we will elaborate on how they might converge. Of course, some migration scholars have considered how different forms of mobility shape, engender or limit other forms of mobility, and thus how different mobilities are entangled with and co-dependent from each other. We will base our argument on this existing research, but by looking through the lens of entangled mobilities, we will also propose concrete and systematic approaches to how we can study mobilities from such a relational perspective.
Studying entangled mobilities in specific localities
One way to study entangled mobilities is to focus on specific localities. Using specific places as entry points can be a useful approach to exploring how different mobilities co-constitute these localities—and, vice versa, how particular localities affect these movements. The underlying assumption is that localities are not the result of stasis or boundedness so much as being economically, politically and culturally produced by intersecting forms of multiple mobilities on local, regional and transnational scales (Tarrius, 1993; Urry, 2007). Such an approach understands places and localities ‘as in a constant state of becoming’ (Milbourne & Kitchen, 2014, 327; see also Massey, 2005). Building on mobility studies, we thus distance ourselves from a statist conceptualisation of the social world and argue ‘against the ontology of distinct “places” and “people”’ to emphasise the ‘complex relationality of places and persons’ (Hannam et al., 2006, 13). In this understanding, ‘places and landscapes are continually practised and performed through the movement and enfolding of a myriad of people and things’ (Cresswell & Merriman, 2010, 7).
We ask what kinds of mobilities unfold, and in which ways, at a particular locality. Are they entangled and co-dependent? If yes, how? And how do they shape this place? How does the positioning of the locality in a national, transnational and global order inform the mobilities that traverse it, and how does this shape the local reception of these mobilities? To answer these questions, we need to first identify and explore the kinds of mobilities moving into, through or out of a particular locality—not only in the present but also in the past. Second, we must look at how mobile actors are differently positioned, which mobility regimes and historical legacies are effective and how these produce particular forms of inclusion and exclusion, bordering and boundary work—and thus forms of inequalities. In short, this entry point provides an agenda for combining a mobility lens with a focus on particular localities, and we argue that this allows for a dynamic and processual conceptualisation of localities as ‘mobility nodes’ (Hannam et al., 2006).
This approach connects well with recent developments within migration studies, in which a ‘growing interest in locality as a relevant scale for understanding migration’ (Bernardie-Tahir & Schmoll, 2014, 45; see also Çaǧlar & Glick Schiller, 2018) has been observed. In this respect, we build on migration studies’ interest in persons’ displacement and emplacement in given localities—but with the aim of overcoming the simplistic and problematic categorisation of groups of people according to their nationality and origin.
How does this approach address the aforementioned epistemological problems of migration studies? Instead of taking nation-state containers or a national or ethnic group as a starting point of the analysis, we suggest concentrating on smaller localities and investigating how—and which—people become (or do not become) migranticised or racialised and what role class, gender and other categories of difference play. This brings to mind studies about islands (Baldacchino, 2018; Bernardie-Tahir & Schmoll, 2014), villages (Milbourne & Kitchen, 2014), middle-sized cities (Çaǧlar & Glick Schiller, 2018), airports (Adey, 2003) and regions (Blanchard, 2017) but also even smaller localities, such as refugee camps, harbours, markets and local squares. We could also think of tourist sites and borderlands, or ‘-scapes’ (Brambilla, 2015), as spaces where mobilities crystallise and where they are halted or sped up by different mobility regimes that affect people in unequal ways.
A study conducted by Charmillot and Dahinden (2021) may illustrate this point. They applied a mobility lens to investigate the ways in which membership is organised in a peripheral(ised) Swiss valley. Instead of studying only a particular ethnic or national group, they included a variety of people arriving, living in or passing through the valley—and thus different types of transnational, national and local (im)mobilities and how these are locally entangled with each other and shape local processes of community formation. Their study identifies a local scheme of ordering (non-)membership that is the outcome of a dynamic and nested form of boundary work in which the most important categories and markers are socio-economic—rather than nation- and ethnicity-based. Or take Rajaram’s (2018) article on a district in Budapest where processes of post-socialist gentrification led to the internal displacement of poorer residents (such as Roma and homeless people) and where in 2015 hundreds of refugees got stuck in a train station while en route to Austria and Germany. Rajaram points to histories of ‘othering’ that target both ‘internal others’ (such as impoverished people) and an ‘externalised population’ (such as newly arrived refugees who are readily racialised in the public political debate). By focusing on a concrete place, the author is able to identify such historical continuities in terms of state actions of exclusion that target different groups of people and which are always also related to the governance of marginalised people’s mobility by means of displacement or containment.
Studying entangled mobilities in specific localities thus moves away from focusing on a particular group of mobile persons (such as refugees, particular nationalities, ethnic groups, etc.). The mobilities under scrutiny are not necessarily mutually interdependent, but they become emplaced in and constitutive of a specific locality—and are therefore locally entangled. Such a focus unveils the different regimes of mobility that are effective in specific localities and that concern people unevenly but also the multiscalar connections of places across time and space and how these manifest in relation to people’s mobilities.
In a sense, therefore, what we are proposing here is an approach that does not ‘follow’ human movements, as Marcus (1995) and others (Elliot et al., 2017) suggest, but examines them in a particular place. Following Çaǧlar and Glick Schiller (2018, 10), our perspective is ‘multisighted rather than multisited’; it considers different scales and positions of the site under study within larger political, economic and social structures, as well as in the context of its interconnections with other places and times. Almost like earlier anthropological studies, we therefore start from a concrete place; but in contrast to these studies, we conceive of that place as fluid and dynamic rather than as a static entity.
Studying intersections and co-dependencies of different mobile persons
A second entry point for exploring how the movements of different people intersect, become entangled with and affect each other is to concentrate on the co-dependency patterns of different mobile persons. The focus here is on individual persons and how their mobility is shaped by others—or how, in turn, they shape the mobility of others. The questions to be answered are (among others) as follows: how and why do individuals’ mobilities become entangled with and affect each other? In which ways are these entanglements of mobilities results of, or connected to, economic and political circumstances, colonial and other historical legacies, and mobility regimes—and, hence, to what extent do these entanglements reveal inequalities?
By focusing on co-dependent mobility patterns between individuals (beyond those commonly called migrants), this approach again allows us to overcome a priori nation-state-influenced categories and to include historical contingencies in our empirical and theoretical work. We see (at least) two ways in which such entangled mobilities evolve among people: through direct social ties between people or through the structural contexts of inequalities—which are shaped by coloniality, the expansion of capitalism or other historical connections.
Focusing on direct social ties between individuals allows us to connect to migration research, this time the research interested in social-network analysis. Social-network researchers have long been concerned with how the movement of some people can spur the migration or mobility of others. Studies on so-called chain migration (MacDonald & MacDonald, 1964) or ‘migration systems’ (Fawcett, 1989) have explored how ‘pioneering’ migrants engender successive human mobility by family members or friends (Boyd, 1989; Boyd & Nowak, 2013). Similarly, transnational studies scholars reveal how a person’s relocation to another place can be followed by frequent visits to their country of origin, and thus how migration can lead to new kinds of mobility (Carling, 2008; Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007). The literature on marriage migration (Beck-Gernsheim, 2011; Scheel & Gutekunst, 2019) reveals another example of how individuals’ mobilities depend on and shape each other, and how they are embedded in mobility regimes. Such entanglements also concern forms of mobilities that are not commonly subsumed under ‘migration studies’; for instance, Schaer, Jacot and Dahinden (2021) show that in the case of mobile early-career academics, other family members sometimes become mobile themselves to support their children or spouses with childcare or other practical and emotional needs—a phenomenon they refer to as ‘satellite mobility’. Similarly, Bal and colleagues (2017) demonstrate how highly skilled professionals from India returned to their country of origin from abroad and convinced their parents (from other regions in India) to move into gated estates to live near their children and grandchildren.
In other words, interpersonal relationships (not only family, marriage and friendship but also work- or neighbourhood-related connections) can engender different forms of mobility and trigger aspirations to move. In short, an entangled mobilities lens means systematically broadening an investigation into mobilities by looking at how the movements researchers observe are generated by—and generate themselves—other forms of movements. These co-dependency patterns are differently affected by and embedded in regimes of mobility, depending on people’s nationality, legal status, class, sexuality and gender (Groes & Fernandez, 2018).
Entangled mobilities between people can also emerge when there is no direct social tie between individuals per se. In this case, historical connections between places and global inequalities cause the entanglement of people, or groups of people. These global inequalities are, for instance, a result of the internationally gendered division of labour, economic and political circumstances, colonial legacies and mobility regimes. It is here that the relationship between the privileged movements of some and the unprivileged, often racialised or migranticised, movements of others becomes most visible.
Entangled mobilities without immediate social ties are directly triggered by structural factors, which mostly create an interdependence between privileged and underprivileged mobilities. This becomes conspicuous when we think of, for instance, how tourism intersects with labour migration, such as when people move to tourist hotspots to find employment in the service industry (Salazar, 2020). Whereas tourists mostly originate from wealthy countries (or are elites from the so-called Global South) and are not confronted with visa restrictions, migrant labourers working in tourist resorts might be exposed to illegalisation and exploitation. For example, we can think of asylum seekers from former African colonies who are trying to access the labour market of a European country. They might end up in Italy, selling goods in the informal market on beaches to wealthy Northern European tourists. It is particularly obvious how, in this case, diverse mobilities intersect and depend on each other: whereas migrant workers, because they are exposed to a racialised migration regime that marginalises them, are pushed to provide cheap labour—and thus render tourism accessible for a broader range of people—they themselves become economically dependent on the mobility of the wealthier visitors. By scrutinising these intersections, we shed light on inequalities based on class, nationality and global disparities.
Scheel (2017), for instance, explores how aspiring male migrants from a North African country seek to marry European tourists as a strategy for moving to Europe. Thus, they make use of the facilitated mobility of European citizens to overcome visa restrictions imposed on themselves. Scheel convincingly demonstrates how these mobilities are a result of intersecting gender and postcolonial mobility regimes, and how the entanglement of these contested mobilities affects policymaking and implementation, such as when consulate staff question the legitimacy and authenticity of these relationships and develop new restrictions targeting unwanted movement from Africa to Europe. Finally, the literature on care migration provides many examples of how a gendered international division of labour produces entangled mobilities (Ehrenreich, 2003; Parreñas, 2001). In her work on Albanian migrant women, Danaj (2016, 175), for instance, speaks of ‘entangled care chains’: complex mobility configurations in which internal migrants (Albanian women who left rural areas and headed towards the capital, Tirana) become domestic workers for returned female Albanian migrants, who previously worked abroad as domestic workers for women in Italy or Greece but who are now themselves engaged in productive work in the Tirana labour markets. This example points to the ways in which local, national and transnational labour markets are gendered—which, in turn, produces these entangled care chains.
Studying individuals’ mobility trajectories
A third option for studying entangled mobilities is to look at individuals’ life stories. Such a lens reveals the very different kinds of mobility and complex trajectories people engage in over time. On the one hand, considering mobility biographies allows us to identify the different kinds of mobilities people experience and appropriate. On the other, this sheds light on how individuals are labelled with, and navigate, different ‘mobility categories’. A single biography may include multiple forms of mobility (such as cross-border movements, commuting to work and travel but also enforced mobilities). Movements may cover smaller or larger distances, may be short-term moves or long-term displacement and may evolve in different directions. The aim of this third entry point is, therefore, to shed light on the developments within individual biographies and thus to apply a processual and diachronic perspective. We ask the following questions: what different forms of mobility do people exhibit during their lives and how are these entangled with each other? What mobilities are relevant in a biography for triggering other forms of mobility and how are these different movements categorised? How are they linked to the positioning of individual actors – and hence to history, political economy and mobility regimes?
This entry point also allows us to address the problems of ahistorical and nation-state-centred epistemologies. Instead of normatively categorising people—as ‘migrants’, for instance—we propose looking at the effects of such categorisations and how they produce privileges and disadvantages. This perspective further underlines the fruitfulness of combining migration and mobility studies, because different forms of movement are relevant to individual biographies. Taking biographies as a starting point forces us to go beyond clear-cut categorisations of individuals—who are assigned different labels over time—to pay attention to the changing nature of (im)mobility patterns within life courses and the fluidity of legal status (Wyss, forthcoming; Schuster, 2005). Adopting a long-term perspective on people’s changing patterns of mobility also better captures the non-exceptionality of migration (cf. Hui, 2016) and the ways in which different forms of movement are interrelated (e.g. international and internal migration: Camenisch & Müller, 2017; Cingolani, 2017; King & Skeldon, 2010).
Studying entangled mobilities by focusing on individuals’ mobile trajectories suggests an approach that ‘follows’ people’s movement (Marcus, 1995), either through narrative-biographic interviews and life-history approaches (Blanchard, 2017; Cingolani, 2017; Rosenthal, 2011) or via multisited research (as in what Schapendonk and Steel (2014) call ‘trajectory ethnography’).
While there are plenty of examples in the literature of how different forms of mobility are entangled in people’s biographies, there is rarely a specific focus on how these mobilities are interconnected, interdependent and embedded in structural societal and transnational contexts. There are exceptions, however; for example, Kalir’s (2013) article on the life story of a Chinese worker in Israel, whose cross-border movement was preceded by many other moves within China and whose trajectory challenges the ‘idea that crossing international borders constitutes the most significant type of human mobility’ (313). Kalir thus urges us to ‘study human mobility holistically, privilege the perspective of moving subjects, explore the impact of movement on the lived realities of involved actors and “bring in the state” as people experience it’ (325). Moret’s (2016, 2018) research is another interesting illustration; she focuses on the pre- and post-migration mobilities of persons born in Somalia, and points to the entanglement of different forms of mobilities within people’s biographical trajectories. Although the participants in her study had settled in the UK or Switzerland, they engaged in new forms of mobility when they moved back and forth between different locations. Such mobility is considered a resource, enabling people to accumulate both financial and social capital. Moret’s participants obtained European citizenship, which permitted them to be mobile within Europe and to capitalise on their ethnic social networks spread across Europe (and beyond). Such an approach thus starts with mobile individuals’ life stories; only then does it ask whether—and if so how—cross-border movements matter and how they are embedded in wider structural and historical connections.