Call for Special Issue: “Infrastructuring Mobilities: Backbones and Entanglements of Leisure, Tourism and Migration”
Mobility Humanities Special Issue (for publication July 2027)
CALL FOR PAPERS
“INFRASTRUCTURING MOBILITIES:
BACKBONES AND ENTANGLEMENTS OF LEISURE, TOURISM AND MIGRATION”
Guest Editors:
Thiago Allis, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Franz Buhr, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Jessica Frazão, University of São Paulo, Brazil
In the broad context of contemporary mobilities, recent developments in mobility infrastructures are reshaping how people travel and experience tourism-oriented routines. From face recognition at passport control to AI-assisted holiday planning, these infrastructures—whether material or digital—underpin diverse forms of (im)mobility. Thinking through infrastructures allows us to understand not only how people, information, waste, drugs, suitcases, and images circulate, but also how they ‘land’ in specific destinations, transforming spaces and local social dynamics. Not only airports or coffee shops, but entire urban neighbourhoods and ‘neo-rural’ attractions have emerged or changed in order to accommodate, facilitate, or restrict different kinds of mobility (for instance, digital nomads and asylum seekers, or the so-called ‘mass’ tourists and visitors seeking “off-the-beaten-track” experiences). To the familiar repertoire of mobility infrastructures—hotels, airports, tourist information centres, and souvenir shops—one can now add new amenities such as coliving spaces, coworking hubs, and app-generated personalised tours.
In this special issue, we approach infrastructures as “systematically interlinked technologies, institutions and actors that facilitate and condition mobility” (Xiang & Lindquist 2014, 122). This definition expands the notion of infrastructure to include both human and non-human agents implicated in shaping mobility. At the same time, we
recognise that infrastructures can themselves be mobile, ephemeral, and bottom-up (Meeus, Arnaut & van Heur 2019), as well as enduring and capable of sustaining mobility not only as dislocation but also as a defining feature of contemporary lifestyles (Jung & Buhr 2023).
Mobility has always depended on apparatuses that channel flows, set directions, and regulate their pace—accelerating some movements while slowing down or blocking others. Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller and John Urry (Urry, 2003; Hannam et al., 2006) originally conceptualised – followed by others (Freire-Medeiros & Vianna Pinho, 2024) – the discussion of the mobility–moorings dialectic, shedding light on the relatively stable systems that enable, shape, or constrain movement. The strength of analytically examining infrastructures, rather than simply assuming phenomena as ‘more’ or ‘less’ mobile, enables a contextualised analysis of mobility and its embeddedness in multi-scalar regimes of power (Glick Schiller & Salazar 2012), generating uneven and often deeply unequal patterns of movement—such as migration policies’ implicit distinction between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ tourists or migrants.
Infrastructures are the architecture for circulation (Larkin 2013) and, as such, they may be more or less visible, mundane, taken for granted, as well as spectacular, highly politicised, and in constant dispute. Like other forms of architecture, mobility infrastructures are built or composed by people, requiring little or huge amounts of money, aiming to tackle perceived issues, and targeting specific social groups and their needs. They may be lucrative, public, (un)official, answer to the demands of social civil movements, as well as mirror existing forms of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, etc. Think of walls and barbed wire splitting countries and fast-track corridors for VIP passengers at airports; or of refugee camps and luxury hotels; of soup kitchens for homeless migrants and coworking cafés for digital nomads; women-only tourism packages and sex tourism, for example. Think also about the bodies that are allowed to move freely across the globe and those who are constantly stopped and checked, if not denied transit.
Exploring the infrastructuring role of these emerging materialities in popular leisure destinations helps to unpack how ‘hip’ places transform themselves, adapt to new consumption habits, and tourists’ aesthetic preferences – often to the detriment of longer-term residents’ claims. Or, on the contrary, how certain infrastructures shut down (think of street-level travel agencies), go bankrupt, or move somewhere else. The physicality of infrastructures adds new matter to neighbourhoods (e.g., boutique hotels, amusement parks, gourmet markets, surf schools, minimalist coworking cafés, Instagrammable brunch eateries, etc.). These leisure amenities facilitate short-term travel, networking, group excursions, physical exercise, etc. They accommodate the needs of various kinds of mobile lifestyles, whose movements “resonate with and cut across people and things, spaces and subjects” (Merriman 2016, 85). Infrastructures, nevertheless, are integral to the reproduction of certain kinds of mobility privilege and mobility precarity. Aerial life (Adey, 2010), for instance, is not free of relations of power: it produces and reproduces social differentiation, unevenness, and inequalities (Murray,
Sawchuk, Jirón, 2016), constituting regimes of mobility that affect and shape individual movement across the globe (Glick Shiller, Salazar, 2012).
The way cities increasingly cater to leisure-seeking global middle classes may be more or less exclusive and accentuate existing local fractures. Similarly, examining virtual mobility infrastructures prompts critical questions about the influence of algorithmic knowledge—shaping everything from the very destination choice to the tailor-made visit itineraries proposed by smartphone apps, also including the emergence of fully virtual tourism experiences. Not to mention the paraphernalia that shape work-on-the-move routines of the corporate travel, increasingly mingled with leisure activities, fostering the so-called “bleisure” programs (Lichy & McLeay, 2018).
With this call for papers, we aim to bring together research that places the infrastructural production of leisure mobilities at its centre. We define leisure mobilities broadly, including tourism, leisure-led migration, lifestyle migration, digital nomadism, and other related forms of movement, especially those located closer to the voluntary side of the voluntary-involuntary spectrum driving migration. Anchored in the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry 2006), this special issue will shed light on the practices, actors, policies and technologies that enable or deter multiple and not always obvious tourism-like experiences of mobility.
With this background in mind, this call for papers aims to foster creative interdisciplinary debates on mobility and infrastructures. In doing so, it echoes the efforts of Mobility Humanities to “pluralise” (Adey et al., 2024) infrastructures in the domain of mobility studies, with special attention to auspicious theoretical developments and the dissemination of methodological practices on leisure, tourism, and migration research agendas.
Topics and Themes
We welcome contributions critically addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
● Making visible the often-invisibilised infrastructures and the affordances of mobility, travel, tourism, and migration;
● New tourism experiences enabled by emerging mobility infrastructures (AI, travel apps, thematic apps guiding visitors to niche markets, etc.);
● Social dynamics and experiences produced through new mobility infrastructures (e.g., the use of dating apps, technologies designed to meet other tourists sharing similar interests, or connecting ‘like-minded’ people staying temporarily at a given place, etc.);
● Urban change (such as touristification, gentrification, foodification, gaytrification) as a process of infrastructuring and its impact on local livelihoods and destinations’ ‘vibes’;
● Mobility infrastructures as potential mediation tools between visitors and residents;
● Mobility infrastructures as technologies of control/othering/bordering, possibly reinforcing structural inequalities in travel, access to leisure, and the right to the city;
● Uses of infrastructure as a lens to analyse contemporary cultural products (films, novels, series, etc.) discussing leisure-led mobilities in various contexts;
● Gendered, racialised and/or intersectional (im)mobilities in postcolonial contexts and its entanglements with leisure, tourism and migration;
● Frictions of leisure, diversity and mobile justice and its dependence on infrastructures;
● Agency of things, more-than-human mobilities, and material culture as a reference for the study of leisure-oriented mobilities.
We also encourage submissions that explore other related topics from critical, comparative, or interdisciplinary perspectives.
Submission of Abstracts and Manuscripts
– Deadline for abstract submission (300 words) – January 31st 2026 (email to the guest editors)
– Response to the authors (abstracts) – up to March 1st 2026
– Deadline for full paper submission (7000-8000 words) – July 31th 2026
– Response to authors (paper review period) – up to December 20th 2026
– Publication – July 2027
Author Guidelines
1. Authors must follow specific guidelines for Mobility Humanities and ensure that contributions cover the journal’s publication criteria.
2. The Call for Papers is open to a global audience and manuscripts must be written in English.
3. After the guest editors inform the abstracts that they are accepted, Full Papers should be submitted via the submission portal with the notification of the special issue.
4. Once papers are accepted, they will be published online and printed.
Submission Guidelines https://journal-mobilityhumanities.com/guidelines/manuscript-submission
Submission Portal https://mc03.manuscriptcentral.com/mobilityhumanities
Queries
For questions regarding the special issue, please contact guest editors Dr. Thiago Allis (thiagoallis@usp.br), Dr. Franz Buhr (fbuhr@edu.ulisboa.pt) and Dr. Jessica Frazão (jessica.frazao@gmail.com).
The Guest Editors
Dr. Thiago Allis is Associate Professor at the School of Art, Sciences and Humanities, at the University of São Paulo (Brazi), and leader of the Research Group on Tourism and Mobilities (MobTur). His research relies on qualitative mobile methods and focuses on the multiple dimensions of mobilities (corporeal, objects, images, communicative) combined with tourism, including urban tourism, academic mobilities, and aeromobilities.
Dr. Franz Buhr is a researcher at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT) – University of Lisbon (Portugal), where he writes about the intersections between migration and urban change. He has worked on migrants’ everyday mobilities in Lisbon, on migrant entrepreneurship and transnational gentrification, and is currently working on the relationship between digital nomadism and city transformation in Portugal.
Dr. Jessica Frazão is a member of the Research Group on Tourism and Mobilities (MobTur). She studies Aeromobilites and Air Transport Economics, having conducted qualitative and quantitative research on gender and income inequalities at University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), the Academy of Mobility Humanities at Konkuk University (South Korea) and the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (Brazil). She has worked for several airlines in South America and currently works as a consultant in the Aviation Industry.
References
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Freire-Medeiros, B., & Vianna Pinho, I. (2024). Ancoradouros para pesquisas móveis: navegando o sistema de automobilidades a partir do Porto de Santos. Revista Brasileira De Sociologia, 12, e-rbs.1031. https://doi.org/10.20336/rbs.1031
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