Short Abstract

Taking up the conference theme ‘What Moves Us’, the panel examines the diverse forms of movement and their equally diverse negations through which social change takes shape. It asks to what extent global processes of social transformation are currently shaped by three intertwined and often highly local processes: densification, differentiation and stabilisation.

Long Abstract

In the face of diverse and pervasive processes of transformation, any ‘society’ or ‘social formation’ today appears as little more than a snapshot within an ongoing sequence of change. On the one hand, ‘everything’ is being moved or is itself in motion; on the other, we can observe a wide range of processes and structures through which movement is slowed down, halted, prevented or even rendered impossible. These dynamics are often closely intertwined: people are moved into positions in which they can no longer move, can move only to a very limited extent, or are confined to predetermined pathways. At the same time, people themselves move to places and enter into social arrangements that minimise the risk of being displaced.

Taking up the conference theme ‘What Moves Us’, the panel examines the diverse forms of movement and their equally diverse negations through which social change takes shape. It asks to what extent global processes of social transformation are currently shaped by three intertwined and often highly local processes: densification, differentiation and stabilisation.

Processes of densification – for example, population growth, increasing traffic volumes and the expansion of built-up areas, or the reduction of available living space and resources – can severely constrain and structure mobility in spatial, social and cultural terms. Processes of stabilisation, particularly through formalisation, standardisation and institutionalisation – such as the centralised codification of property relations, inheritance and succession rules, identities, or professional qualifications – increasingly shape people’s scope for movement and action, including in contexts that were previously regulated only to a limited extent by state bureaucracies.

Social differentiation – through education and professional qualifications, inherited wealth and social positions, or documented affiliations and identities, for example – is both a starting point and an outcome of these processes of densification and stabilisation. It should therefore be incorporated into analyses of mobility and immobility.

We invite ethnographically rich contributions that explore the theoretical potential of the concepts of densification, stabilisation and differentiation in order to examine what moves us and what, in the process, may render us immobile. In doing so, the panel aims to make an innovative contribution to an anthropological understanding of social change.