Paper short abstract:

This paper will interrogate the factors catalyzing, as well as the ensuing implications of, an attenuation of mobility among professionals whose education and/or careers have hitherto required frequent and ongoing long-distance travel.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when people whose lives have been significantly fashioned around the frequent and ongoing long-distance travel required by their educations and careers face a change of circumstances in which this mobility is either no longer necessary, possible and/or desirable? Drawing on two studies of peripatetic professionals, this paper will review factors, such as life course transitions, which can prompt this shift in mobility patterns. It will also probe some of the social and personal implications of assuming more sedentary lifestyles for people whose work-based mobility has hitherto played a significant factor in configuring their daily routines, identities and/or professional as well as personal networks -i.e., who have spent a considerable period of their adult lives 'dwelling in travel/mobility'(Clifford 1991; Urry 2000)? What impact does this shift have on their activities, involvements, relationships, as well as conceptions of home and belonging? Where does someone who has previously lived in a succession of locales or who has spent a substantial portion of their annual round away from their official residence, settle when the impetus for this kind of mobility has abated? And what do their choices about where to land and with whom to establish or maintain contacts reveal about the continuities, disjunctures and inequalities that are entailed in different patterns of spatial mobility?