All the world seems to be on the move. Asylum seekers, international students, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, businesspeople, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forces these and many others fill the world’s airports, buses, ships, and trains. These diverse yet intersecting motilities have many consequences for different peoples and places that are in the fast and slow lanes across the globe. There are new places and technologies that enhance the mobility of some peoples and places and heighten the immobility of others, especially as they try to cross borders. Many different bodies are on the move, and it is often through their movements and proximities that bodies are marked as different, in the first place and this movement shows relatively little sign of substantially abating in the longer term.

This is so even after, severe acute respiratory syndrome, multiple suicide bombings of transport networks, other global catastrophes, and the fact that many grand projects in transport do not at first generate the scale of anticipated traffic. Simultaneously the Internet has grown more rapidly than any previous technology, with significant impacts throughout much of the world. New forms of ‘virtual’ and ‘imaginative’ travel are emerging and being combined in unexpected ways with physical travel. Mobile telephony based on many societies jumping directly to such a new technology seems specially to involve new ways of interacting and communicating on the move, of being in a sense present while apparently absent (see papers in Brown et al, 2002; The growth of such information and communication technologies is allowing new forms of coordination of people, meetings, and events to emerge.

Tabassum Rahmani
Dated: 12/07/22