Abstract

This chapter focuses on how race and mobile media intersect to influence mediated mobilities. The terms “mobility,” “media,” and “race” are relational and contingent. These terms have been imbued with flexible meanings in different historical and cultural contexts. Therefore, they are historically and culturally variable. As this chapter argues, the meanings of these terms are also mutually constitutive in some practices, moments, and sites. Mobility, media, and race encapsulate the capacity for change as well as stasis. With no possibility of claims to universality regarding these terms, this chapter focuses on race and mediated mobilities involving the phonewatch, the automobile, and the mob in the white-settler societies of the U.S. and Canada. By doing so, this chapter encourages further exploration of race and mediated mobilities, including in other cultural contexts that have their own specific racial histories and in relation to other mobile media uses.