From Lifestyle Migration to Mobility
One of the most common criticisms of Mimi Sheller and John Urry’s (2006) conception of a “mobility paradigm” was that it subsumed too many different types of mobility, in the process risking an obfuscation of important distinctions between motivations for, circumstances, forms and outcomes of moving about the world. But there are also some important advantages of an expansive rendering of mobility. First and foremost, rather than treating different forms of mobility a priori as separate silos of inquiry, this kind of expansiveness allows us to interrogate the relationships, overlaps and intersections as well as distinctions between different modes of moving about the world. In this treatment, mobility becomes a framework for opening up the range of questions about mobility that we can probe rather than presupposing the answers through prior classification. But initial discussions (for e.g., Cohen et al. 2015) introducing the idea of “lifestyle mobility” seem to involve an attempt to straddle both expansive and restrictive interpretations of mobility, and not always comfortably so. In this paper, I want to argue that launching discussions of lifestyle mobility by bracketing it off from other forms of movement such as permanent, temporary or seasonal migration undermines some of the very promise of this term. A shift in terminology from lifestyle “migration” to lifestyle “mobility” can and should provide an opportunity for a more open-ended or expansive consideration of the relationship between lifestyle, voluntarism, work, tours, sojourns, and settlement, life projects, serendipity and happenstance. In other words, the notion of “lifestyle mobility” can be more useful if it eschews restrictive definition in favour of an expansive and hence usefully ambiguous idea that is good to think with.