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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the existential implications of immobility and uncertainty experienced by Palestinians in a variety of situation, and the ways in which they navigate precarious and disorienting conditions in order to gain agency and make sense of the world.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines immobility in the context of how Palestinians ‘stuck’ in different communities of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, make sense of everyday life in constantly shifting and precarious situations. The experience of everyday life of Palestinians is characterized by immobility and uncertainty in terms of ambiguities of citizenship and rights, the absence of a coherent state, and siege. Imposed geographic divisions and restrictions on the movement of people, products and information, have resulted in social fragmentation and isolation between communities, and different levels of ‘being stuck’. This paper examines the ways in which Palestinians existing in various spaces of immobility, negotiate to maintain social cohesion amid the disorientation of everyday life. In recent years grassroots civil society movements working across communities, which are independent of any political leadership, have been important in overcoming fragmentation as well as reclaiming a collective identity away from discourses of division, and allowed Palestinians in different communities to gain agency and navigate uncertainty. Finally, this paper will address the current situation in which Palestinians are living in various levels of ‘stuckness’ and uncertainty, and the paradoxes of immobility in the face of forced migration and displacement.

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The research paper is based in the city of Barcelona and explores the concepts of sedentarism and immobility within the context of migrant workers in tourism. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the aim is to comprehend the conditions of informal labour practices.

Paper long abstract:

Tourism labor regimes have recently faced a renew critical analysis, as in times of polycrisis tourism companies have resorted to outsourcing, flexibilization, and the precariousness of working conditions to enhance profits, often at the expense of workers' rights. The informal economy, present across multiple productive sectors, has also made inroads into the tourism sector. The informalization of the workforce, a pivotal aspect of the tourism sector's functionality, especially in well-established tourist destinations and markets, has been accompanied by a elusive invisibilization.

The prevalence of informal work in tourism settings has further intensified, notably in sectors such as short-term rentals, property brokering, housekeeping, tourist guiding, riders' platforms, and urban mobility services. Concurrently, there has been a surge in informal street vendors peddling tourist-oriented goods and informal tourism brokers actively seeking business for restaurants, hotels, and tours by approaching visitors directly on the streets. Notably, a significant proportion of these roles is undertaken by temporary migrant workers who view tourism as an accessible entry point with minimal professionalization requirements.

This research, situated in the city of Barcelona, employs participant observation and semi-structured interviews with informal workers to unravel the intricacies of informal tourism economies. The study aims to comprehend the underlying dynamics contributing to such precarious conditions, and the structural factors necessitating such informal labor practices. Additionally, the discussion delves into the concepts of sedentarism and immobility, exploring how such debate might help the comprehension of the informal labor landscape within the context of tourism in Barcelona.

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This research focuses on the (im)mobility enfolded within the emergent tourism industry in the northern Albanian mountains, examining how the concept of home shifts through migration and commodification and how tourism creates and unsettles the possibility of future life among these communities.

Paper long abstract:

“Democracy came and people left, because what is there to do here?” This question was posed to me in 2017 by a resident of Curraj i Epërm, a village in the northern Albanian mountains. Curraj, like many other villages in the region and, indeed, the country as a whole, experienced a massive period of out-migration following the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, largely spurred by a bleak outlook on the feasibility of a future life in the country.

However, over the past decade, the influx of tourism into Albania has provided one answer for many regarding what there is to do, a trend that has drastically increased with the explosion of tourism Albania, especially the so-called northern “Albanian Alps,” has witnessed in the last two years. Consequently, many have begun converting their homes into bujtina, or guesthouses, predominantly funded by money earned abroad.

While this increased tourism has sparked a seeming revitalization for many communities in the northern mountains, its development has been ostensibly uneven, as evinced by the case of Curraj, whose community-funded road was washed away last summer, thereby excluding the village from the country’s record-breaking tourist season.

This research focuses on the unique interplay of mobility and immobility enfolded within the emergent tourism industry in the northern Albanian mountains by centering the concept of home and how it shifts through migration and commodification. Furthermore, it examines the uneven development of tourism and how it creates and unsettles the possibility of future life among these communities.

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This paper explores emic experiences of (im)mobility on the European railway network. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork in the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion and the Eastern Pyrenees, we explore how these experiences influence imaginaries of European mobility and perceptions of the continent itself.

Paper long abstract:

With an increased need for sustainable modes of transport in Europe, public and political attention is returning to its extensive international railway network. It holds promises both to those aiming to slow down travel as well as those seeking high-speed and emission-free forms of transport. But despite their potential, the European railways face significant challenges. The network remains divided into multiple national systems, which function to varying degrees internally but often face political and structural obstacles when connecting to neighbouring countries. Incompatible ticketing systems and timetables, differing security practices and infrastructure standards are just some of the difficulties travellers may face, all of which result in varying experiences of immobility, for example: waiting in stations, interrupted journeys or being stuck on trains in-between destinations.

This dysfunctional travel environment serves as a starting point for exploring the meaning-making processes that emerge when traversing bicultural regions and experiencing their diverse structural, political and social aspects. The paper seeks to unravel the complexities of “imaginaries of (im)mobility” (Salazar, 2011: 577) that emerge in transnational rail journeys. Following an ethnographic approach, the authors will compare their experiences of (im)mobility with the emic experiences of travellers and railway operators they meet on the way while travelling through the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion and the Eastern Pyrenees. In doing so, this paper explores how (im)mobility is experienced on cross-border rail travel in Europe, how it influences the imagination of future European mobility and how this converges with perceptions of the continent itself.

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This paper examines Indigenous urbanisation through a detailed attention to movement and non-movement. To do so, I focus on the imagination and practice of weaving beaded jewellery and highlight the tension between stillness, idealised by my interlocutors, and the reality of their stuckedness.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on twenty months of fieldwork conducted with Emberá Dobidá women in the city of Medellín, Colombia, this paper aims to examine the detailed components of their recent urbanisation. More especially, I trace how ‘weaving beads’ (tejer chaquira) in the city affects the ways in which Emberá Dobidá women imagine and live their urban experience. I suggest that specific movements, produced in the weaving practice, generate specific transformations. I show how new aspirations have led women to desire ‘to sit at home’ (quedarse sentenda en la casa) and to rely on weaving to find a certain stillness. Emerging from a particular form of weaving, stillness is active, ideally transformative and transitory, and potentially allows women to build a future outside the house. Yet, I also examine how women’s aspirations are broken by the reality of the weaving industry in Medellín, which effectively makes them stuck. Repetitive, painful, unhalted movements generate disappointing urban experiences by preventing desired transformations and producing instead a static immobility.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes a sedentary analytics of im/mobility beyond a sedentarist epistemology. Drawing on Gambian and (diasporic) West African ethnography, it shows that immobility, in relation to mobility, must be placed with a wider, longer preoccupation with emplaced life.

Paper long abstract:

Whereas immobility has been initially an underdog in mobility studies, several scholars and especially anthropologists have variously studied how people and other entities stay put or become stuck, fixed, still, etc. in relation to a mobility regime. What is still arguably underdeveloped is a wider reconceptualization of sedentarity or emplacement in which then mobility and immobility take shape. This is by no means a return to a “sedentaritist metaphysics” (Malkki 1992); rather it is an attempt to heed what we may call a sedentary physics – how sedentarity is constructed, how it works and how it provides an analytical concept for studying the relation between mobility and immobility. This paper draws on fieldwork in the Gambia and in the West African diaspora, as well as on comparative ethnography of West Africa. I first consider, among others, at (oral) histories of frontier settlement. In rural Gambia, not only does an increasing sedentarization of agricultural settlements go hand in hand with a greater intensity and scales of human movement. Both migration and staying put stem from the moral and social injunction to ensure sedentarity, in space and time. Secondly, I broaden my view and consider West African forms of hospitality that, even among highly mobile pastoralist groups, sustain im/mobility through a socio-cultural logic of emplacement. This socio-cultural physics of the sedentary foundations of im/mobility complicates representations of West Africa as a mobile region, and provides an alternative epistemology of im/mobility.

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The paper examines how asylum seekers in Japan, whose applications have been denied, cope with severely restricted mobility by depicting their tactics against the state’s attempts to prohibit their domestic mobility for self-sufficiency and to encourage their global mobility for self-repatriation.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines how asylum seekers in Japan, whose applications for refugee recognition have been denied or are pending, cope with restricted mobility. It portrays the acute challenges faced by those asylum seekers who are “provisionally released” from the migrant detention centers and are prohibited from moving across the prefectural boundaries outside of their residence. With the ever-present threat of detention and deportation, indefinitely temporary legal status, and severely restricted spatial and socioeconomic mobilities, many of these asylum seekers are stuck in the “continuum of carcerality” and “confinement in motion” (Balaguera, 2018). Based on my ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017, 2021-22, and 2023 in Japan, the paper portrays how those provisionally released asylum seekers manage to comply, subvert, and index the loss of control over their own mobility through deception, relationship-building, and advocacy. Their various tactics to survive the ambiguous conditions that prohibit their domestic mobility for self-sufficiency and encourage their international mobility for self-repatriation suggest that anthropologists must pay closer attention to the irregular migrants’ both desire and fear of mobility and their struggles to gain and maintain the control over their movements.

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Amidst the promotion of migration as sole possibility to secure stable futures among supermarket employees in Bosnia, this paper analyses how some employees negotiated their wish to stay put by attempting to create variegated securities at the workplace, and thus a more stable future.

Paper long abstract:

Following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the mobility of its citizens, who had been accustomed to mostly unrestricted movement, became increasingly constrained until the introduction of the Western Balkan Regulation in Germany in 2015. This regulation ensured convenient access to the German labour market, sparking a new wave of labour migration. Many individuals left in pursuit of economic but especially political stability (Majstorović 2021). Since 1991, the former Yugoslav countries have lost one-third of their population (Rajković 2023), while migration was heralded as the sole opportunity to secure a stable future in one of the wealthiest European countries.

Contrary to this prevailing narrative, my observations in a Bosnian supermarket in 2019 depicted a different reality. Nearly all my interlocutors shared concerns about an uncertain future in Bosnia, but despite the omnipresence of the option to leave, many of my interlocutors found it challenging to justify their decision, describing it as particularly painful and difficult. And while some decided to leave, others chose to stay.

This paper centers on the motivations and perceptions on mobility of those who stayed. Aligning with Schewel’s (2019) concept of 'acquiescent immobility,' that challenges the ‘mobility bias’, the paper explores the discursive techniques employees created and actions they took to justify their decision to stay put. Employees often engaged in gossip and mockery directed at those arriving from the diaspora or attempted to establish diverse securities in the workplace to ensure a stable environment and a potential future in Bosnia.

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Paper short abstract:

I explore the im/mobility nexus of migrants crossing the Balkan to reach a core EU country. I foreground everyday experiences of im/mobility and the interruptive effects of mobility management, exploring migrants’ mobility tactics generated in the interface of border constructions at various scales.

Paper long abstract:

How do refugees and other migrants in the Balkan enact mobility and make decisions to move despite or in close interaction with border management and control practices that in this region are framed to produce immobility? This paper explores how refugees and other migrants’ im/mobility in the Balkan region is shaped by migration policies and practices at different scales, including the EU’s externalization policies, the Balkan nation states’ internal and external policies, and migrants’ desire to continue to a core EU country.

Drawing on fieldwork with refugees and other migrants, NGO volunteers and locals, I explore how migrants’ journeys are interrupted, and how they transgress the sometimes-incongruent border management. My investigation foregrounds the insights emerging from everyday experiences of the border, im/mobility, containment (Tazzioli and Garelli 2018) and the interruptive effects of border and mobility management. I argue that the Balkan region has labyrinthian characteristics in that journeys are interrupted, transformed and continued at different speeds. Literature on borders recognizes the relevance of migrant agency in responding to that border control (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013), seeking to displace the dichotomy between border control and migrant agency (Vaughan-Williams and Pisani 2020). Mobility tactics, I will show, are generated in the interface with how border constructions – constituting the Balkan territory as both one of transit and one of containment – affect their movements. Attending to the ways in which migrants continue their disrupted journeys is key to understanding the dynamics between mobility and immobility and its reverberation over time and space.

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This paper explores the experiences, strategies and reasons of the ngäbe indigenous families of Panama that actively choose to permanently stay in a community where historically the vast majority of families have members that annually move temporarily to work in Costa Rica.

Paper long abstract:

Every year thousands of ngäbe indigenous families from Panama move from their territory, the Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé, to agricultural areas of Costa Rica to work in the coffee harvest. In communities such as Ratón, the articulation between mobility and immobility is one of the main life strategies of most domestic units and temporarily moving to the neighboring country to earn money is part of the local sociocultural and economic structures and something that is repeated and expected. Nonetheless, confronted with this way of living in (im)mobility, there are progressively more people who seek to remain continually in the community and value immobility as a way of life. Facing the “sacrifice” of constantly moving, being able to stay is now considered a success and even a source of social prestige.

Due to the sedentary logic that permeates our conceptions and is still present in the academic world, staying put is considered as the default situation. However, staying can also be an active, conscious and in many cases even costly decision. In the same way as living in (im)mobility demands the creativity and resourcefulness of the domestic units, the experiences observed in Ratón clearly show that living in the community permanently also requires strategies and inventive capacity. The aim of my communication is to present the different experiences and strategies of immobility of the ngäbe families that stay in their community, as well as analyze the impact of social welfare, education, transport infrastructures and local agricultural production in their decision to stay.