Page - 81 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Samantha Wilkinson, Catherine Wilkinson | Night-Life and Young People’s Atmospheric Mobilities 81 body, achieved through the playful nature of dance, can provide a resource for resistance against powerful networks. As such, dancing in the urban nightscape may be productively conceived as an attempt by young people to carve out a space for themselves in the public realm. Young people are subject to manifold micro-politics of mobility and immobility that differ - entiate their experiences of urban spaces from the experiences of adults (McAuliffe 2013). Mo- bilities research then, should not only pay attention to physical movement, but also potential movement, blocked movement and immobilisation (Sheller 2011). This point was made earlier by Urry (2003), who argues for the significance of moorings that are solid, static and immobile. Further, Skelton (2013) contributes here, proclaiming that how, and where, young people can/ cannot move with speed or slowly, with freedom or constraint, are important to consider in order to enhance understandings of the complex relationality of im/mobility and its connection with identity formation. However, as Bissell and Fuller (2009) note, a focus on the dialectic of stasis and movement neglects other registers and modalities that are not necessarily reducible to this. With this in mind, Bissell (2007) thinks through the event of waiting from the perspective of embodied corporeal experience. Events of corporeal stillness, such as waiting, sleeping, and boredom, then, should not be conceptualised as dead periods of stasis; rather, as Bissell (2007) writes, each of these processes have the potential to be active and mobile. This paper now turns to review a small body of literature working at the intersection of atmospheres and mobilities, which has alcohol consumption as a focus. Towards Young People’s Atmospheric Drinking Im/Mobilities Atmospheres foreground the role of more-than-human elements to young people’s alcohol con- sumption practices and experiences. As Bohme (2013, no pagination) puts it, atmosphere is a “floating in-between”, something between ‘things’ and the perceiving subjects. Bohme (2013, no pagination) goes on to state that, “the character of an atmosphere is the way in which it communicates a feeling to us as participating subjects”. People can stage atmospheres in order to lay the ground for the sensuous, emotional feel of spaces (Bille et al. 2015). In order to get to grips with atmosphere, Bille et al. (2015) note that one must actively engage with colours, lighting, sound, odour, and the textures of things – an atmosphere’s approach is thus inherently multisensory. According to Anderson (2009), atmospheres are ‘affective’ qualities that emanate from bod- ies, but also exceed the assembling of bodies. Whatmore (2006, 604) contends that ‘affect’ refers to: “the force of intensive relationality – intensities that are felt but not personal; visceral but not confined to an individuated body”. Meanwhile, emotions are considered to “belong to an individual agent” (Horton and Kraftl, 2006, 79); that is, emotions are personally ex - perienced. However, whilst emotions and affects are sometimes set apart in the existing litera- ture, we follow Anderson (2009) in contending that atmospheres do not fit neatly into any dis- tinctions between affect and emotion; this is because they are both impersonal, as they belong to collective situations, and yet can be felt as intensely personal. An atmosphere perspective thus has potential to tease out the spatial, emotional, embodied, and affective experiences bound up with young people’s alcohol consumption practices. The concept of ‘atmosphere’ is developed by Shaw (2014) in an ‘assemblage urban’ ap- proach, as a means of reconceptualising how the night-time city is understood. Shaw (2014)