Mobility justice after climate coloniality: mobile commoning as a relational ethics of care

ABSTRACT

This conceptual article argues for linking the concept of mobility justice to an analysis of climate coloniality and then seeks to build on recent feminist, Indigenous and Black studies of climate ethics. More just, equitable, and sustainable futures call for more than decarbonization or low carbon transitions. Situating the climate crisis within deeper political ecologies of colonialism, extractivism, and racial capitalism, the argument centers relational co-becoming, anti-extractivism, and mobile commoning as crucial to climate ethics that are inclusive of Indigenous and Afro-descendent cosmologies, as well as respectful of non-human mobilities and webs of life. Finally, it turns toward feminist, decolonial, Black, and Indigenous relational ontologies of transmotion and mobile commoning as a needed step beyond the existing global mobility regimes and toward the intentional decolonizing of extractive mobilities that have led to the contemporary climate crisis. The conclusion joins others in advocating for an ethics of care and for social science approaches that can coalesce the growing conversations on these issues across North America, Latin America, Australia, Oceania, Africa and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate coloniality
• extractive mobilities
• mobility justice
• mobile commoning
• relational ontologies‌
• transmotion

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the organizers of the Mobility Justice Symposium, 13–14 June 2022, which was a collaboration between the Geographical Society of NSW (GSNSW), AusMob network, and the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space at the University of Wollongong. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their extensive input that enabled me to connect my argument to a far wider range of work in Australian geography.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Mimi Sheller

Mimi Sheller, Ph.D., is the Inaugural Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts. She was previously founding co-director of the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University in England, and then became Professor of Sociology, Head of the Sociology Department, and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Sheller is an interdisciplinary scholar with interests in Caribbean Studies, Mobilities Research, and Social Theory. She has published more than 130 articles and book chapters, and is the author or co-editor of fifteen books.