1/27 Criticising the solitary mobile subject: researching relational mobilities and reflecting on mobile methods Katharina Manderscheid, Universität Luzern, katharina.manderscheid@unilu.ch Zitation: Manderscheid, K., 2013. Criticising the Solitary Mobile Subject: Researching Relational Mobilities and Reflecting on Mobile Methods. Mobilities, (October (Online First)), S. 1–32. Abstract One of the key arguments of the mobilities paradigm is that people's mobility practices are embedded in their spatial, cultural, political, economical, social and personal context. Yet, empirical mobility research tends to research these two sides of the social separately – either mobility practices and their subjective sense and experience or their discursive, spatial or structural foundation. Taking this desideratum as point of departure, I will make a proposal for researching the links between structures and practices of mobilities consisting of the application of multiple correspondence analysis. This proposal attempts, furthermore, to operationalise mobilities as relational practices, which reinforces that social networks rather than solitary subjects are the origin of mobility decisions. This methodological approach is demonstrated by a comparative data analysis of movement patterns in England and Switzerland. In the final part of the paper, I will reflect upon methods and quantification more generally - against the background of an understanding of mobilities research as being also critical and political. Introduction One of the key arguments of the mobilities paradigm (cf. Sheller and Urry, 2006) is that people's mobility practices are embedded in their spatial, cultural, political, economical, social and personal context. As Anthony D'Andrea et al. (2011: 158) put it very recently in this journal, "(…) as subjects and objects move across spatial, social and cultural settings, they are not doing so independently of the political and economic structures that shape subjectivity, locality and mobility, but are actually embodying, recoding and updating larger material and symbolic regimes." Furthermore, people's movements are about social relationships, forming and maintaining social networks of various kinds with places and people who are not necessarily proximate, such as family members and relatives, friends and partners, employers and work colleagues, institutions and services etc. (Larsen et al., 2006, Urry, 2007). These assumptions of the social and spatial relationality of mobility practices signalise a significant difference to traditional transport studies: transportation behaviour research as well as residential migration studies tend to model mobility practices as derived from set demands – such as work, housing, leisure, shopping. Moreover, these transport models conceptualise the origin of transportation and