Abstract

The following paper aims to explore the plausibility of considering movement and place part of the conventionality of social life and interactions from an ethnomethodological point of view and asks whether there is a conventionality to the very distinction between actions being ‘mobile’ and/or ‘inert’—if we can speak of this as, at least in part, conventional, then we can further ask, whether this conventionality plays a part in the social construction of space and the socio-spatial order more generally. After arriving at this question by looking at Giddens and Garfinkel, the paper differentiates four types of movement: drifting, circling, mobility, and circulating. The latter is then used to show how a key aspect of social order is not simply experience of being ‘enclosed’ by a boundary or division of space, but that instead, most of the time, spatial order is simply taken for granted and movement is experienced and neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. Circulation, then, helps us to account for our ability to move within a place without necessarily having to leave it. Circulation describes the process of accomplishing the interiority of a place and the paper will claim that this is achieved by glossing over particular borders and boundaries as we traverse space