Mobility equity and transportation in pursuit of social work's Grand Challenges

Abstract

Summary

Transportation and mobility enable or constrain access to other essential resources across societies; rarely, though, do we center transportation and mobility in social work research, practice, or pedagogy. First, we conducted a summative content analysis of the concept papers that define the Grand Challenges of U.S. social work to determine the frequency of transportation and mobility words. Then, we conducted a latent pattern content analysis of those words in context and compared that to the tenets of the new mobilities paradigm, an approach that centers mobility and immobility, to interpret the contexts.

Findings

This study identified five key narrative uses of concepts related to transportation and mobility: (1) transportation as an instrumental resource for access or barrier to access (“access,” n = 13); (2) transportation/mobility as an outcome (“outcome,” n = 10); (3) mobility as a risk factor for negative outcomes (“risk,” n = 1); (4) transportation/mobility as intervention (“intervention,” n = 6); and (5) transportation as an interdisciplinary-built environment concern (“built,” n = 6). The most frequent narrative use was transportation as a critical resource for access, but the Grand Challenges largely ignored it and there is little explicit connection between transportation and mobility. The tenets of the new mobilities paradigm were mostly absent from Grand Challenges.

Applications

We link the relative absence of transportation and mobility terms in the Grand Challenges of social work concept papers with recent work that centers transportation and mobility to argue for a potentially impactful approach to meeting the Grand Challenges, fostering productive interdisciplinary collaborations, and effecting positive social change.