In our 10th and final talk of the series, REBALANCE spoke with Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology, and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She is considered to be a key theorist in critical mobilities research. Clearly a perfect candidate as our final speaker, Sheller spoke about the new mobilities paradigm, justice and specifically mobility justice, expanded upon her ideas of the mobility manifesto and shared ideas for the future. In 2006 Mimi Sheller and John Urry published a paper entitled, The new mobilities paradigm. The paper sought to unify a discourse on mobility which the authors noticed across a wide range of social science disciplines including; geography, transport studies, anthropology, sociology, tourism and cultural studies. They write: Issues of movement, of too little movement or too much, or of the wrong sort or at the wrong time, are central to many lives and many organizations. From SARS to train crashed, from airport expansion controversies to SMS (short message service) texting on the move, from congestion charging to global terrorism, from obesity cause by ‘fast food’ to oil wars in the Middle East, issues of ‘mobility’ are center stage. And partly as an effect a ‘mobility turn’ is spreading into and transforming the social sciences, transcending the dichotomy between transport research and social research, putting social relations into travel and connecting different forms of transport with complex patterns of social experience…it seems that a new paradigm is being formed with the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Therefore, for Sheller and Urry, the new mobilities paradigm is not stating that mobility is necessarily new, but rather that across a vast number of disciplines within the social sciences, there is an awareness of a turn or shift in recent years. Sheller explained that around the same time of their publishing of the paper the business world was also reclaiming or asserting a shift in the way in which we understand the interconnection between transportation and mobility. She explained that, for example, automobile companies such as Renault and Ford started claiming that they were a mobility company: mobility as a service, mobility as more than the automobile...