Moles provides a compact conceptual grammar for research in which movement is not background but an active methodological condition. Mobile methods, in her account, follow people, objects or ideas in ways that foreground mobility, immobility, flow and networked connection. Her most useful distinction separates mobility as a social practice from mobility as a research method. In the first case, movement is part of how people make and know their worlds; in the second, mobility is deliberately introduced into the research encounter to alter what can be observed, discussed and remembered. This distinction prevents a common collapse in which any study involving movement is automatically labelled “mobile”. Methodologically, the framework legitimises accompaniment, following and co-presence as techniques for studying everyday worlds that unfold across multiple sites and temporalities. The wider intellectual bridge is to the mobilities paradigm associated with sociology, anthropology and geography, where circulation and stoppage are treated as constitutive of social organisation rather than secondary effects of fixed spatial structures.
URBANISM MEETS ART