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In the last few decades or so, there have been a number of ‘turns’ in social and cultural theory – the spatial, linguistic, punitive and so forth. The application of the word ‘turn’ indicates the achievement of some epistemological breakthrough that has transformed a disciplinary field, altering its integuments and providing a blueprint for new developments. One of the more significant of the recent turns is the ‘mobility turn’, which, since its recognition a little over a decade ago, has attracted considerable attention in sociology, cultural studies and critical geography (McCann, 2011; Urry, 2007). Its underlying assumption is that movement and mobile are important facets of social and quotidian life that ‘sendentariast’ social theory had hitherto either downplayed or overlooked (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 208). Although this paradigm shift in thinking has been an epistemologically ubiquitous one, other than in a very limited sense, it has not thus far included education (though some exceptions include the work on student mobility, e.g. Brooks & Waters, 2010; Collins, Sidhu, Lewis, & Yeoh, 2014). Hence, this special issue of Critical Studies in Education which comprises papers from educational scholars who are endeavouring to redress the hiatus, and explore the ways in which mobility approaches offer new and potentially fecund strands of theorising, that attempt to shed new conceptual light on some of education’s most incorrigible problems. Mobility theory (though theories, given the plurality of its approaches, are more accurate) is predicated on the idea that social formations, rather than being static and immutable, are in states of constant movement and mutability, are dynamic rather than stationary. According to Tim Cresswell (2006), mobility constitutes three interrelated elements. First, there is mobility as a thing in the world, as being measurable and analysable. Second, there are representations that capture and produce meanings about mobility, that are frequently ideological, as in those representations found in law, literature and film. In this, he posits that ‘the brute fact of getting from A to B becomes synonymous with freedom, with transgression, with creativity, with life itself’ (Cresswell, 2006, p. 3). The third aspect of mobility is as ‘practiced, as it is experienced, embodied. Mobility is a way of being in the world’ (Cresswell, 2006, p. 3). Crucially, for this collection of essays, it represents a way of being in the world requiring various forms of induction, training and education, and to which, in a world where mobility has taken on myriad and often, unevenly distributed manifestations, there is differential access. The interrelationships between representation and materiality are crucial, in that ‘human mobility implicates both physical bodies moving through material landscapes and categorical figures moving through representational spaces’ (Delaney cited by Cresswell, 2006, p. 4). There is recognition under the aegis of mobility, space and time are indivisible, form a critical nexus, and treating social and cultural phenomena as either solely spatially or temporally determined is to overlook the fact that these phenomena are in a constant CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION, 2017 VOL. 58, NO. 2, 125–130 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2017.1317756