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- Convenors:
-
Anna Lisa Ramella
(Leuphana University Lüneburg)
Fabiola Mancinelli (Universitat de Barcelona)
Silvia Wojczewski (Medical University of Vienna)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/012
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Climate crisis and global pandemic have turned mobility into a threat to our planet - while projects wishing to move beyond earth sprout from the ground. This panel wishes to engage mobilities' constitutive role in these social transformations with Eric Olin Wright's notion of real utopias.
Long Abstract:
This panel wishes to engage ethnographic research on mobility with Eric Olin Wright's notion of real utopias. Real utopias embody the tension between dreams and practical realities: they surface when practices are reformed in feasible ways thanks to the reinforcement of the role of civil society. The current global situation is calling to question the idea of geographical movement as something inherently positive. The intersection between the climate crisis and the global pandemic has turned mobility into an ecological and health threat to our planet. At the same time, projects wishing to explore moving beyond earth sprout from the ground and gain momentum through connected media. Whether as problem or tool, mobilities themselves remain constitutive of these social transformations.
This panel invites papers to explore how the individuals' freedom of and potential for movement intersects with the making of real utopias for collective, equitable and sustainable alternative mobility futures - or on the contrary, jeopardizes such advances. How do people bridge their wish/necessity to move with the emerging moral imperative of immobilization? How do movements which propagate hypermobilization fit into global debates on climate awareness? How do these mobilities and immobilities feed into the concept of utopia(s)?
We welcome new contributions drawing on a broad spectrum of examples, such as mobilities and activism, labour im/mobilities, academic lifestyles, futuristic mobilities and (space) tourism, and more largely invite researchers who find it intriguing to think their ethnographically grounded research along the lines of mobilities and utopias.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Through two environmental infrastructures in the Americas, we interrogate how such projects, set in motion by green entrepreneurs, fabricate the temporality and spatiality of utopia, inviting the elite to participate through increased mobility, contracting the supposed ethos of climate awareness.
Paper long abstract:
Taking two case studies across the Americas - SpaceX based in Los Angeles’ South Bay and a new scenic route through Chile’s Patagonia, the Ruta de los Parques de la Patagonia, this paper interrogates how environmental infrastructures, set in motion by green entrepreneurs, produce new, out-of-touch hypermobilities, contradicting the very ethos of climate consciousness. We inquire into the divergent spatial and temporal logics of utopias as they are imagined and inaugurated by these green entrepreneurs toward either a recreated past or a technofuture. In the Chilean case, US conservation philanthropists Kristine Tompkins and the late Douglas Tompkins have developed and marketed the scenic Ruta, aiming to “rewild” the region and so return it to an ecological past. Headquartered in a predominantly low-income Black and Latinx region of Los Angeles, Elon Musk’s projects at SpaceX promise utopian visions for humanity by shifting mobilities toward outer space frontiers and a more efficient, interesting, and less depressing future, as Musk would phrase it. We analyze the visual rhetoric of these infrastructures - their directionality, aesthetics, and intended audiences - in order to explore the entrepreneurial appeals for buy-in and participation to install these utopias. Through comparing these infrastructures as well as the recent geographic histories each exists upon, we uncover the ambiguity of green entrepreneurial utopian senses of time and space, interrogating the “nowhere” places and skewed temporalities embedded in these visions as well as the elitist hypermobilities they produce.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the connection between remote work and new forms of im/mobilities embodies both the utopia and dystopia of the worker in the 4th industrial revolution, exploring the new responsibilities and social consequences underpinning life in the mobile virtual workplace.
Paper long abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic has fast-tracked a global-scale adoption of remote work practices, relocating work from offices to homes and other settings. Entrepreneurial literature has hailed such unprecedented global trial as "Remotopia", celebrating its increased productivity and cost-saving benefits for employers (Cognizant, 2022). Undoubtedly, the advancement in digitisation can afford more location-independence and flexible work-life arrangements. In the last decade, digital nomads have made the intersection between remote work and leisure travel the core tenets of their lifestyle manifesto. This paper argues that the connection between remote work and an untethered lifestyle embodies both the utopia and dystopia of the worker in the 4th industrial revolution, exploring the new responsibilities and social consequences underpinning life in the virtual workplace. The research draws on online ethnographic interviews and analysis of secondary sources aiming to chart how new forms of im/mobilities feed and contrast with visions of imagined utopias.
Paper short abstract:
Between utopian rural mobilities and disillusions, the creation of an ecovillage engenders some contradictions. While rural exodus appears for founders as a necessary solution to preserve the environment by developping its "authentical" self, it also generates ecological issues as tourism.
Paper long abstract:
Ecological crisis, globalisation, fast lifestyles, loss of social relationships and identity indetermination forces citizens of our current western society into an uncomfortable and stressful way of life (Le Breton, 2015 ; Rosa, 2020). Some of them decide to move toward rural locations in order to create new futures far away from pollution of cities. It is the case of the ecovillage of Le Ruisseau (alias), in Occitanie (France). Living close to nature is perceived as a good way to develop an « authentic self » which is necessary to resolve ecological dysfunctions. Urban exodus appears as a necessary solution to preserve the environment. The creators of this ecovillage tried to set up what is Godelier (2007) named a superreal imaginary which means to be able to produce different levels of realities. They made real what was at dream state (in the sense of Glowczewski, 2021). By proposing workshops and retreats in this designed place, the inhabitants create another type of mobility : the tourism of authenticity and self-quest (Selwynn, 1996 ; Cravatte, 2009). Unfortunately, the enchantment of authenticity, made by an aesthetic device, does not work on everybody. In this paper, I will discuss the many contradictions between the utopian rural mobility and the disillusion that it can provide. Moreover, I will describe the paradox between the response to the environmental crisis and its ecological implications.
Paper short abstract:
Luxembourg’s transition to fare-free public transport was charged with utopian ideals, from mobility justice and sustainability to unchecked movement and individual freedom. Yet amid restrictions imposed during the COVID pandemic, people developed their own real-utopian visions of free mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Luxembourg’s transition to fare-free public transportation (FFPT) on March 1, 2020 was charged with myriad utopian visions. The policy (devised by the government with little input from civil society) was feted with a “Mobility Day” festival, with hyperbolic advertising comparing #FreeMobility to the “First Step on the Moon.” While the idiom of “free mobility” first and foremost references fare abolition – a move linked to ideals of mobility justice and sustainability – it also connotes freedom to move wherever and whenever one chooses. This idea of unchecked movement is tinged with (neo)liberal logics of individual freedoms, consistent with broader efforts to rebrand public transportation as an individual rather than collective experience.
The freedoms promised by #FreeMobility seemed to vanish two weeks later with the arrival of COVID and the implementation of movement restrictions. Yet paradoxically, many people who had previously been hypermobile in their everyday lives expressed feelings of freedom from the pressures of commuting for work and began to reconsider which types of im/mobilities are essential or harmful to their personal flourishing, their relationships, and the planet. Thus, mobile people developed their own real-utopian visions of free mobility that go beyond those proposed by legislators and urban planners.
Drawing from ethnographic research in Luxembourg between 2018 and 2022 – including interviews with transit users before and after the transition to FFPT, participant observation in transit spaces and at mobility events, and tracking official discourses and public debates – this paper explores competing configurations of utopian ideals of free mobility.
Paper short abstract:
Utopias are an inherent part of travel and imaginaries of "elsewhere/the Other". In this paper I analyze how ideas of utopian self and society feed into the travel experiences of young Afrodescendent women from Germany. Does the concept of utopia help coping with inequalities within communities?
Paper long abstract:
Utopia and the search for a better or different life elsewhere is an inherent part of travel and feeds into travel imaginaries. As such, travel plays also an inherent role in the making of diasporic identities. In this paper I analyze how ideas of utopian self and society feed into the travel experiences of young Afrodescendent women from Germany. To be able to understand the imaginaries of the future of the young women, this study uses a life-story approach and an ethnographic approach of travelling with participants.
It follows the travels of Aminata C. and her family to Ghana to visit family and explores the tensions which exist in a transnational family with inherent social and economic inequalities. A central motivation of Aminata C. is to give back to the community in that case extended kin and like that alleviate the differences which exist between their global positions. She is faced with a dilemma: Global Inequality is dealt with on a personal level yet it is impossible to make up for it on an individual level.
Another example is given following the travels of an Afro-Feminist artist couple Oxana C and Layla Z. Mobility for them is an ideal in life and a means to achieve a personal idea of utopia by bringing together feminist and Black activist communities.
An underlying question of this paper is: Does the concept of utopia help coping with inequalities within communities or on the contrary does it make coping more complicated?