On time: temporal and normative orderings of mobilities

This special issue is about the ways in which mobilities, as they are made and lived, tamper with a multiplicity of entwined normative and temporal orderings. Questions concerning the entwinement of temporal and normative orderings are not only a challenge for social theory. Mobilities, notably, make the intricate multiplicity of normative and temporal orderings a palpable, everyday issue: Distant spheres have to be linked, gaps to be bridged, connections forged, groups coordinated, timelines met, processes aligned etc. Serving flexibility, safety, synchronization and efficiency, contemporary mobilities involve diverse timings and commitments. This special issue, then, examines how multiple normative and temporal orderings unfold in practice, how they overlap and interfere, support and challenge one another. The multiple orderings that characterize today’s mobilities are typically coordinated by means of infrastructure – sequences, breaks and buffers, brackets, borders and walls – in ways that we describe as co-existence, conflict, containment, and collation.