‘‘I’m an imaginary figure”: Unravelling the mobility and marginalisation of Scottish Gypsy Travellers Sergei Shubin a, * , Kate Swanson b a Department of Geography and Environment, University of Aberdeen, Elphinstone Road, Aberdeen AB24 3UF, UK b Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182-4493, USA article info Article history: Received 4 September 2009 Received in revised form 5 June 2010 Keywords: Mobility Exclusion Gypsy Travellers Power Discourse Scotland abstract Gypsy Travellers have a long history of marginalisation in Scotland, but their mobility remains an issue of particular contention. Drawing upon a series of interviews with Gypsy Travellers in the North-East of Scotland, this paper uncovers how power and politics permeate discourses on movement to legitimise the spatial ordering of this traditionally nomadic group. The paper begins by exploring the more hidden and subtle aspects of mobility, such as the emotional and imaginative ties to travel. It then shifts to doc- ument how Gypsy Travellers’ geographies have been compromised by discriminatory policies and prac- tices, which demonstrate a misunderstanding of the heterogeneity of their mobility. Consequently, increasingly punitive policies have pushed many Gypsy Travellers to abandon their travelling ways to move into ‘‘fixed” housing, while others have been forced into states of perpetual motion. The overall goal of the paper is to unravel the discursive constructions of movement in the context of institutionalised power and to document the spatial ordering of Gypsy Travellers’ lives, whose marginality has been legit- imised by laws, ideologically sustained and reproduced in policy documents. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Mobility has become a central theme in social studies in recent years (Crang, 2002; Featherstone et al., 2004; Papastergiadis, 2000; Pascoe, 2001; Thrift, 2004; Urry, 2000; Verstraete and Cresswell, 2002); yet, as some have noted, it is ‘a resource to which not every- one has an equal relationship’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 49). This reality holds particular resonance for Scottish Gypsy Travellers, 1 whose mobile ways of life have long been regulated by discriminatory pol- icies and practices. As others have demonstrated, nomadic ways of life are caught within power relationships, which make the mobility of some people dependent on the immobility of others (Massey, 1993; Urry, 2003). This paper follows recent research on mobility and marginalisation to unravel how discourses and policies lead to the exclusion of Gypsy Travellers in Scotland (Drakakis-Smith, 2007; Hetherington, 1994; Kofman, 2002). The ‘‘mobility turn” in social sciences transcends disciplinary boundaries; it encourages a rethinking of the politics of travel and metaphors for movement (Hannam et al., 2006). Following Cresswell (1999), herein we adopt a broad definition of mobility as ‘‘socialized movement... as a human geographical activity im- bued with meaning and power” (p. 176). We focus on the impor- tance of different modes of thinking and on ideologies of fixity and flow to explain the marginalisation of itinerant groups. While unravelling ideas about movement, this paper also challenges essentialised assumptions concerning mobility. As Cresswell (2006) insists, the regulation of mobility in areas of law, planning and social policies attaches ideological meanings to movement, but often takes these meanings for granted and overlooks how mo- bile ways of life are interpreted within institutional frameworks. As recent studies have demonstrated, including publications in this journal (Adey, 2008; Cloke et al., 2003; Holloway, 2007), institu- tional policies configuring spatial order are often not particularly appreciative of the centrality of mobility in creating unequal power relations (Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007). This inability to fully acknowledge the crucial role of mobility in structuring society is especially evident in discourses regulating nomadism. In particular, different analyses of sedentarist policies have highlighted metaphors of mobility mainly to illustrate rela- tions of domination and resistance between the state and itinerant people (Cowan and Lomax, 2003; Morris, 2001; Turner, 2000). 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.06.006 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: s.shubin@abdn.ac.uk (S. Shubin), kswanson@mail.sdsu.edu (K. Swanson). 1 In this paper, we use the term ‘Scottish Gypsy Travellers’ to refer to traditionally nomadic or semi-nomadic groups in Scotland. Terminology used to describe this group is often controversial, with some preferring ‘Travellers’, ‘Gypsies’, ‘Roma’ or ‘Gypsy Travellers’. We use the term ‘Gypsy Travellers’ because many of our key informants expressed a preference for this term. The term is also used and endorsed by the Scottish Gypsy Traveller Association (SGTA) and is widely used by people who are not members of the community but who work with them. We should note that this paper is chiefly concerned with Scottish Gypsy Travellers and not ‘New Age’ Travellers. Geoforum 41 (2010) 919–929 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum