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Time01


Imagination, migration & (im)mobility 
Convenors:
Thomas Chambers (Oxford Brookes University)
Ross Wignall (Oxford Brookes University)
Formats:
Panels
Stream:
Time
Location:
Examination Schools Room 7
Start time:
19 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
Session slots:
3

Short Abstract:

The panel brings together contributors focusing on imagination, migration & (im)mobility. We consider how vernacular understandings of mobility and immobility are conceived and experienced within the temporal and material contexts of migration.

Long Abstract:

The panel brings together contributors focusing on imagination, migration & (im)mobility. We consider how vernacular understandings of mobility and immobility are conceived and experienced within the temporal and material contexts of migration. We explore forms of change and continuity which may enable 'new subjectivities' and social transformation or act to entrench degrees of marginalisation and enclavement. We see migration imaginaries as shaped through various factors including affective forms of sociality, temporal experiences, prior histories of migration, religiosities, and personal/social transformation.

Our 'object', then, is migration and the imaginaries, materialities and temporalities therein. We situate the relationship between the imagination and migration as an ongoing process of 'envisioning and becoming', rather than a relationship between imagined possibilities and achieved outcomes. Imaginaries are shaped, changed and even transformed by migration itself. Imagining departure, going elsewhere, returning and imagining again form a constant process in which the self is crafted and re-crafted and more collective visions are forged and re-forged.

Against this background, the panel offers a series of fine grained ethnographic contributions covering, amongst others, the experiences of YMCA volunteers travelling from the UK to The Gambia, the ways in which male North Indian migrants' experiences of the Gulf are shaped by the sociality of home or the rhythm and temporality of prior domestic migration, older peoples' remembered experiences of mobility and migration in the context of 'becoming old' in the Ugandan city of Jinja, and the influences of transnational migration on young men's educational aspirations and trajectories in northern Senegal.

Accepted papers:

Session 1