Two publications from the LDS projects were published over the last few months. The first is a book chapter for the book “Mobility Across the Life Course. A Dialogue between Qualitative and Quantitative Research Approaches“, edited by Joachim Scheiner and Henrike Rau. The chapter is titled Towards a mobility biography approach to long-distance travel and ‘mobility links’ and sketches the theoretical framework for the project.

The second publication is an entry for the International Encyclopedia of Transportation, titled “Long-distance travel“. The entry is co-authored by Giulio Mattioli and Muhammad Adeel, and summarizes the theoretical, methodological and policy challenges related to this important travel segment.

Further to the conference session organised at RGS in 2019, we are organising a special issue of the journal Travel Behaviour and Society titled “Long-distance travel: between social inequality and environmental constraints”.

For this special issue we invite interdisciplinary contributions on the drivers, trends and socio-spatial patterns of long-distance travel behaviour, framing them within the following, overarching question: how can long-distance travel demand be reconciled with environmental limits, while ensuring equitable access to long-distance travel opportunities, and a fair use of public resources?

Deadline for full paper submission: July 1st, 2020

All inquiries regarding this call for papers should be directed to the managing Guest Editor, Dr Giulio Mattioli (giulio.mattioli@tu-dortmund.de). Prospective submitters are encouraged to get in touch to make sure that their paper is within the scope of the special issue.

For more details see https://www.journals.elsevier.com/travel-behaviour-and-society/call-for-papers/long-distance-travel-social-inequality-and-environmental

Giulio Mattioli was interviewed by DW.com as part of an interesting article on the struggle of climate-conscious migrants who feel compelled to fly to visit friends and family in their country of origin. The article mention findings from this project’s first conference paper, where we have found an association between first generation migration background and greenhouse-gas emissions from flying.

The first academic output of the LDS project is now available online. It is a conference paper that was presented at the 51st Universities Transport Study Group Annual Conference in Leeds (UK). It explores the relationship between migration background, geographical dispersion of social networks and air travel and related emissions.

We found that a first generation migration background (being born abroad) tend to fly more frequently than the rest of the population, mostly because they have friends and family abroad. This means that migrants have higher levels of emissions from air travel, although this is compensated by lower emissions from car use.

Read the full paper here.