Paper short abstract:

Lawyers are integrative part of regulatory systems of mobility. This proposal seeks to disentangle the expertise of lawyer’s labour within the daily practice of helping migrants while dealing with unequal regimes of mobility of the European Union.

Paper long abstract:

Working within and outside of official structures, lawyers are essential actors in mobility regimes. Lawyers are experts in humanitarian, hosting and asylum systems, and their legal assistance is vital for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in irregular situations who face detention, deportation, expulsion, and/or exclusion. Often, lawyers work as volunteers, activists or workers for a local or international NGOs, but they also represent state bodies or supranational organizations.

In this article we follow the strategies and tactics of lawyers as experts on the mobility game of disputing mobility regulations, to shed light on the process of ruling essential and non-essential mobilities during the new circumstances of pandemic mobilities. The discussion bases on ethnographic fieldwork on irregular migration to the Canary Islands during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic. In the Canaries, mobility rules were arbitrarily and illegally applied as an excuse to immobilized to few thousand African migrants in transit to the EU in the archipelago, in contravention of the Schengen rules. We show how a single court win by activist lawyers changed some rules that immobilized people on islands that were just one stage in their mobility trajectories.

While lawyers have an important role in litigation with the state, we argue, that they are also counsellors in vital decisions for essential mobilities of precarious migrants, and legal mediators/brokers/translators between plural legal systems, facilitating the communication between the people on the move and the ruling apparatus (e.g., police officers, civil servants, migration and border agents, etc.).

Paper short abstract:

Through different travel stories, this paper sheds light on travel restrictions, travel uncertainty and travelers’ strategies to cope with the coronavirus situation. It highlights human agency and strategies to manage this situation, refusing to be confined or immobilized.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 outbreak has severely compromised travel and tourism activities worldwide (Gössling et al., 2021; Milano and Koens, 2021; Terry, 2020, 2021). In the beginning of the pandemic, national borders were closed, and traveling was prohibited, except for some repatriation trips. Travel was then progressively resumed with several measures to prevent the spread of the virus (e.g., use of face masks, HEPA filter equipment, PCR tests, vaccine certificates), including travel restrictions which differ from one place to another or from one mode of transport to another.

Collecting different travel stories from South America and Europe from multi-sited (auto)ethnographic work (February – November 2021), this paper sheds light on travel restrictions, uncertainty when traveling, and travelers’ strategies to cope with the coronavirus situation. Through different examples, it argues that people who are willing to travel, will find a way to keep traveling despite restrictions, doubts, and difficulties in reaching their destination. They navigate through the corona waves (e.g., the Delta wave, the Omicron wave), at times altering their modes of transport, sometimes even crossing control borders illegally or using counterfeit documents to proceed with their journey.

The paper highlights the human agency in managing travel restrictions in order to accomplish desire to travel, often motivated by personal reasons (e.g., tourism, visiting friends or family, international conference participation). It shows how limiting ‘non-essential’ travels as a set of anti-covid measures promoted by national governments can be overcome by the people’s desire and strategies for not being confined or immobilized.

Paper short abstract:

Lockdown was a time of immobility and confinement, with individual movements restricted. Existing limitations on asylum-seeking and refugee women's mobility worsened yet they found empowerment through new forms of mobility using digital technologies.

Paper long abstract:

The lockdown greatly restricted individual movement of refugee and asylum-seeking women living in Belfast. The mobility of this population was already greatly restricted due to lack of rights, finances, and access afforded due to their precarious legal status. The pandemic exacerbated these inequities, leaving women without access to basic needs such as food banks, support organisations, and donations of necessities like baby supplies and clothing. Not only were women unable to leave their homes, but many also lacked the ability to connect with others digitally due to a lack of internet, Wi-Fi, devices or any way to securing these. A local organisation created by and for these women worked to address these needs, adapting their services to the rapidly changing situation the pandemic created. Not only did they secure devices and internet services for their members, but they also developed new ways of connecting women.

At the same time as lockdown limited women's mobility, it also created new opportunities for online mobility that some women found empowering. I contrast the immobility of lockdown with the mobility women discovered online by creating online meetings using Zoom to share in activities such as cooking, yoga, and gardening. These activities involved movement within one's home being shared through the use of technology, broadening opportunities and participation for many.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on changing experiences and debates around ferry mobility on the Isle of Coll (Scotland) during the pandemic. It looks at how islanders strategically negotiated restrictions on mobilities and perceived the ferry as both a ‘lifeline’ and an infection risk.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on how people on the Isle of Coll (Scotland) experienced and debated ferry mobility during the pandemic. In the absence of Covid-19 cases on Coll, the ferry connection to the mainland was the focus of heated debates and of pandemic policymaking for the islands. However, even when the strictest measures were in place, island life relied on extensive mobilities, making the ferry a necessary ‘lifeline’ and an infection risk. In this paper, I focus on the ‘essential’ mobilities of islanders travelling to the mainland to obtain services they could not access on Coll. On the one hand, I show that the pandemic highlighted the dependency of island life on mobilities in the context of depopulation and service withdrawal in the region, emphasising islanders’ limited control over the mobilities that sustain their everyday lives. Islanders were forced to continue being mobile, and experiences of mainland journeys shifted from routine to being framed by worries and fear of infection. On the other hand, I argue that some islanders used ‘essential’ reasons for journeys strategically to see mainland family and escape feeling stuck. In doing so, they regained a sense of control over their mobility and experienced journeys as adventure and excitement, turning ‘essential’ into existential mobilities. In a community without police presence to enforce pandemic policies, this way of negotiating restrictions created a locally specific regime of mobility, combining policy-makers’ category of essential travel with islanders’ existential reasons for journeys into what islanders considered ‘essential for island life’.

Paper short abstract:

When COVID restrictions disrupted their travels, including plans for b’nai mitzvah ceremonies abroad, the migrant families of Luxembourg’s Liberal Talmud Torah drew on various strategies. This paper explores the implications of that process for families’ experiences of temporality and mobility.

Paper long abstract:

The families of Luxembourg’s Liberal Talmud Torah are highly mobile ex-pats, used to moving regularly and rapidly, whether between home, the workplace, and their children’s school and activities, traveling often for leisure, or moving long distances for higher education and work. Many have the sense that, though they live in Luxembourg, they do not (nor desire to) live in the ‘real’ Luxembourg, but rather circulate through exclusive spaces for foreigners and move in and out of Luxembourg easily, rapidly, and at will. In early 2020, many of these families were in the process of planning their children’s b’nai mitzvah ceremonies at synagogues and in Jewish communities around the world when COVID regulations abruptly disrupted their regular pace and ability to move. In particular, COVID travel restrictions made many of their plans for their children’s b’nai mitzvah ceremonies impossible. At a loss, experiencing themselves as newly immobile, and facing the possibility that their children’s movement into a new life stage could be delayed, these families sought a range of solutions. Some organized a local ceremony, while others opted to delay the ceremony indefinitely – but both options came with their own issues and implications for placed-ness, time, and meaning. Based on 31 months of ethnographic fieldwork (including during the COVID-19 pandemic), this paper explores how privileged migrants’ mobility regimes were altered by COVID restrictions in ways that disrupted expected movements and temporalities and the strategies families deployed in response.