Dr. Shaolu Yu, assistant professor of urban studies, has been awarded Urban Geography’s inaugural Early Career Researcher Prize for her paper “Mobilocality” published in Volume 39, Issue 4 of the academic journal. Her teaching and research focuses are race/ethnicity, space and place, mobility, and GIS applications.
“Mobilocality” was part of Yu’s doctoral dissertation completed in 2015 at the University of Connecticut. It is based on the empirical findings of mobile practices among Chinese (im)migrants in Flushing, Queens, New York City. Yu considers mobilocality as a conceptual framework where spatialities of mobility, place, scale, and distance interplay with each other in formulating ethnic landscape in a mobile and transnational era.
“Mobilocality embodies the paradox of mobility and immobility, transnationalism and locality, time and space,” says Yu. “It is critical to understand what hinders the translation of physical mobility into social and cultural mobility, and of the intention to move to the ability to move.”
Yu says the early career research prize is an incredible honor, which encourages her to move forward with more exciting projects and articles to come in the field of urban geography.