Contouring the mobile risk society

ABSTRACT

The contours of the “mobile risk society” are becoming increasingly visible. Contemporary discourses on climate change have gained in intensity and represent a significant semantic shift. The modern idea of the controllability and domestication of natural processes and the anthropogenic impacts of modern lifestyles, consumption and production patterns are being deconstructed and their side effects can be experienced on a daily basis. Multiple warnings seem to lack the impact necessary to stop the dystopian consequences of human activities in the Anthropocene. The “climate crisis” is pushing societies to their limits and revealing the limits of the problemsolving capacities of national and transnational institutions. Against this background, social science research on mobility is challenged in the same way as all other sciences. Without being able to provide comprehensive answers, it has certainly contributed to analyzing, understanding and sometimes solving some of the most pressing and risky problems in a turbulent world. The article takes these observations as a starting point to reflect on some aspects of the risky nature of mobilities and the consequences for the sustainability of lifestyles based on cultures of multiple mobilities. It elaborates on the conceptual differences between linear and reflexive modernization and on what it means to find ways of acting under conditions of ambivalence, uncertainty and insecurity. It also focuses on aspects of sustainable mobility policies and the future of communities and social integration. The article concludes with some conceptual considerations and an outlook on the future of mobilities in the age of climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile risk society
• theory of reflexive modernization
• mobilities research
• climate change
• mobility transition

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The article is based on a keynote given on 08/07/2021 at the conference Im/Mobile Lives in Turbulent Times: Methods and Practices of Mobilities Research in Newcastle, UK.

2. See i.e. Rasborg (2021: 85ff.) where he elaborates on the concept of “reflexive modernity” in particular.

3. Translation from German original by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hans Böckler Stiftung [mobil.LAB]; Institute for Sustainable Mobility Baden-Württemberg [BWIM]; Ministry of Education, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany [Living Lab Climate program: MobiQ].