Page - 7 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

Atmospheres and Mobility An Introduction Rainer Kazig, Damien Masson, Rachel Thomas Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 3 2017, 7-20 Editorial Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0 Atmospheres, Mobility: An Implicit Connexion to be Made Explicit For at least the last fifteen years, research carried out in social science and focusing on movement of individuals and their physical, political, social and cultural dimensions, etc. have strong ly contributed to renewing transport studies and to stabilizing the field of mobility. This field, which crosses disciplinary approaches, contributed to the widening of some restrictive perspec- tives to mobility that would primarily or solely consider displacement (as getting moved from A to B) on the one hand, or, on the other hand, a change of social status within society that would be determined by an environment (developed, social or professional). Mobility characterizes all that exists around displacement and physical movement, may that be infrastructure, relation- ship, power, spatiality, and so on. More broadly, mobility refers to what makes displacement possible and, reversely, to what displacement makes possible. In that sense, mobility encompas- ses culture, meaning, representations, bodies and their sensory issues. Meanwhile, the growing interest towards senses, affect and atmospheres in the humanities and social science also contri- butes to extending the investigations and thematic openings inherent to mobility studies. Atmospheres refer to the physical qualities of sensory phenomena surrounding human bodies, as well as to the potential to seize them, while being immersed into them. As they also characterize the “pervading tone or mood of a place, situation” (Oxford Living Dictionaries English 2018), atmospheres carry out affect and meaning, and therefore describe not only a material, social or sensory situation, but also our relationship and representations to it. French and German Social Science and Humanities broadly approached atmospheres following two major distinct paths: phenomenological and aesthetical (Augoyard 1995, Griffero 2014, Böhme 2016, Schmitz 2016), ecological and praxeological (Amphoux 1998, Thibaud 2004). British geo- graphers proposed the notion of “affective atmospheres” (McCormack 2008, Anderson 2009) which refer more directly to the tone of a situation that might, on the one hand, emerge from the presence of bodies, but, on the other hand, can also be linked to an idea (e.g. a neoliberal atmosphere) that might not necessarily be connected to specific sensory settings, or human presence at all. We consider atmospheres as a comprehensive approach to situated practices as they arti- culate the problem of individual-specific ways of doing, perceiving and feeling with that of the sensory qualities of the environments in which they live, act, interact, play… and move. Therefore, mobility opens its scope and focus to issues of movement, motion and motricity, and