Sheller proposes mobility justice as a single frame for problems usually kept apart: transport equity, policing and incarceration, border walls and deportation, sexual violence, eviction, and climate change. Each, on her account, turns on who is permitted to move, who is held still, and who decides.

The book works across scales, from the body through the street, city and nation to the planet, on the premise that these are not separate arenas but one entangled system, and that movement is what makes and remakes them. Against theories of justice she calls sedentary, which take their object to be stable before it is set in motion, she offers an ontology in which justice is itself unstable and emergent.

History carries weight here: the regulation of movement under slavery and colonial rule helped constitute the free, white, mobile subject of liberal politics. She credits the organizers who coined the term, and ends each chapter with specific principles rather than a general prescription.