Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In the West Bank, Palestinian and Israeli mobilities are often framed as binary. In this paper I challenge this binary by examining how Palestinians use social media to collectively navigate checkpoints, closures, and risk, reframing mobility as a tactical, everyday practice.

Paper long abstract

In the occupied Palestinian West Bank, everyday mobility is made dangerous, difficult, and perilous by occupation policies, geographies, and violence that disrupt and distort the spatial landscape for Palestinians. Indeed, the region is often characterised as one of immobilisation and staticity for Palestinians, binarily opposed to the dynamic mobility of their Israeli settler counterparts. Ethnographic research, however, evidences not only the inaccuracy of this binary but the importance of disrupting it, in order to evidence and emphasise uniquely Palestinian and creative forms of mobility in the face of restriction.

Disrupting binaries that frame Palestinians solely as subjectified victims of occupation, I reflect on how Palestinians strategize their mobility using the tools they have available. In the absence of physical maps and mapping software, social media emerges as a unique virtual space in which Palestinians trade information and live-map the numerous ways in which Israeli occupation and settlement restricts their mobility. In so doing I build on Vigh’s (2009) work on navigation, connecting it with the growing scholarship on migrant uses of smartphones and social media to trade information about safe movement, and apply it to an everyday and non-migratory context. Anthropologists of mobility have been somewhat reluctant to engage with the concept of navigation, yet as a key aspect of mobility (and indeed immobility), in contexts of conflict and violence it emerges as a key metric by which mobility is achieved.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper will examine how Irish borderland farmers are mobile through the routine and necessary movement of animals and commodities, yet are simultaneously rendered immobile through delays, regulatory checks, paperwork, and changes to agricultural subsidies.

Paper long abstract

On June 23rd, 2016, the United Kingdom voted, by a thin majority, to exit the European Union, leading to an event known as Brexit (Wilson 2020, 23). For areas such as Northern Ireland and its borderlands with the Republic of Ireland, this was a life-threatening matter as a long and complex road to peace had been achieved after decades of ethnoreligious conflict. Brexit threatened to reduce agricultural subsidies and the movements of goods, people, and livestock between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Since the end of “the Troubles” and the ratification of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998, the governments of the UK, the Republic of Ireland, and the EU have removed barriers, walls, checkpoints, surveillance towers, and promoted cross-border cooperation at the Irish border, the only land border shared between the UK and the EU following Brexit. After several rounds of negotiations, the Irish border has remained open to the movement of people, but new regulations have been introduced for the movement of livestock, food products, and goods. In this paper, I will focus on how Irish borderland farmers are mobile through the routine and necessary movement of animals and commodities, yet are simultaneously rendered immobile through delays, regulatory checks, paperwork, and changes to agricultural subsidies. By centering (im)mobilities through cross-border farming strategies, this paper reframes the Irish border as an agricultural landscape shaped less by securitization than by the uneven governance of everyday movement.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Starting from ethnographic category of being ‘seco’, this paper examines the simultaneous co-existence and entanglements of mobilities and immobilities in the suspended hopes and modes of persistence in the case of precarious migrants from Venezuela in the city of Cali, Colombia.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the simultaneous co-existence and entanglements of mobilities and immobilities in the suspended hopes and modes of persistence in the case of precarious migrants from Venezuela in the city of Cali, Colombia. Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Cali, it examines the particular story of Ibrahim, which illustrates a broader pattern of precarious work trajectories and experiences of movement and stasis for many precarious migrants in Colombia. As Venezuela’s social, economic, and political crisis diminished the possibilities of socio-economic and existential viability, many migrants were forced to project their social hopes and imagined survival strategies elsewhere. Focusing on the cases of precarious migrants in the city of Cali, the article examines how their social, physical and existential mobilities intertwine with co-existing immobilities. This entails ethnographically exploring their experiences of movement and stuckedness (both temporally and spatially) in relation to processes of rapid downward social mobility prior to migration, work experiences and stuckedness in their migration destinations situated within multi-layered diasporic social space. The article shows how the possibility, promise of salir adelante and process of regularisation and obtaining the Special Permanence Permit (PEP) with its work permit in Colombia generate hopes for socio-economic (and other types of) mobility in contrast to other migratory destinations. This article examines what happens to migrants' hopes and bodies when obtaining legal status and taking on multiple jobs does not translate into better conditions and opportunities and instead produces suspension, contradictions, ambiguities, weariness and hopefulness for imagined elsewhere.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic embroidery workshops with undocumented migrant women in New York City, this paper explores how more-than-human relations sustain translocal care and solidarity amid forced (im)mobility, environmental dispossession, and restrictive border regimes.

Paper long abstract

Increased global flows and interconnectedness are intertwined with forced (im)mobility, growing border restrictions, and unequal access to freedom of movement (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Tošić and Palmberger, 2016). People in contexts of undocumented migration living in the United States navigate daily life as “impossible subjects”, simultaneously “welcome and unwelcome” as they face a political economic system that both relies on them as cheap disposable labor and criminalises and deports them (Ngai, 2014, p.2).

This presentation emerges from my doctoral research project working with people from rural towns in Mexico now living in contexts of undocumented migration in New York City. The research focuses on how more-than-human entanglements are lived, transformed and negotiated translocally, in response to environmental dispossession and forced (im)mobility.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork using participatory and arts-based methods, the proposed paper discusses findings and conversations that emerged from a series of embroidery workshops co-designed with a group of 25 women in Corona, Queens, and the South Bronx. These workshops sought to engage, through circles of embroidery and care, with participants’ relationships to nonhuman nature carried across borders and through rural-to-urban migration.

In short, through care-centered ethnography and the creative method of embroidery, this paper explores the role of human/nonhuman relations in sustaining translocal ties and solidarity in contexts of (im)mobility. I argue that translocal entanglements with more-than-human nature reveal ongoing flows of care and affect that exceed restrictive border regimes in contexts of forced (im)mobility.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Wellbeing is often understood as either a fixed state or a moving process. Drawing upon 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with young migrant ceramic makers in China, this paper introduces ‘grounded drifting’ to move beyond such binaries and rethink the (im)mobilities of wellbeing.

Paper long abstract

Wellbeing is often understood either as a fixed, achievable state, or as a fluid, moving process. These framings, however, rest upon polarized assumptions that reify mobility and immobility as separate spheres of experience. Moving beyond such binaries, this paper attends to how mobility and immobility become co-constitutive in the process of living well. It draws upon 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital, where I lived and worked as an anthropologist-creator with a circle of young migrant ceramic makers, or ‘Jing drifters.’ Against an increasingly anxious world, I explore how they live well otherwise by making, moving, and living together.

Public and academic imaginaries frequently cast drifters as transient, rootless, or precarious. Without denying such precarity, I argue that drifting can also become a way of grounding. ‘Grounded drifting’ names a form of staying without fully settling: a vertical anchoring folded into horizontal movement. I trace how grounded drifting unfolds through intertwined ordinary and existential (im)mobilities in Jingdezhen: from everyday practices such as making, riding, vending, travelling, and migrating, to existential movements shaped by life-course transitions, feelings of being lost, and ongoing questions of direction and becoming. Here, grounding is formed through relations: a circle of creators who share time and space across work and life, sustaining one another amid uncertainty. Drifting is thus not the opposite of dwelling but a way of dwelling together, in motion. By attending to (im)mobilities across forms and scales, this paper seeks to enrich wider discussions on (im)mobilities of wellbeing.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how, in the river islands of Western Assam, riverine displacement enforces repeated mobility, while land and citizenship regimes defer arrival through bureaucratic waiting. It argues that mobility and immobility are co-produced through suspended legality as a mode of governance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines mobility and immobility as co-produced conditions in the shifting river islands (chars) of Western Assam, where the movements of the Brahmaputra intersect with colonial land-making, postcolonial bureaucracy, and contemporary politics of citizenship. Combining ethnographic fieldwork among char dwellers with archival research in colonial maps, survey reports, and police records, the paper traces the colonial genealogies of wasteland discourse, settlement schemes, and surveillance to show how contemporary regimes of land and illegality actively produce immobility and defer arrival through the governance of mobility.

Annual floods and river erosion compel recurrent spatial mobility, forcing people to relocate homes, livelihoods, and social worlds. Yet these movements rarely culminate in arrival as legal settlement or recognition. Instead, mobility is accompanied by forms of immobility produced through land administration, revenue regimes, and citizenship verification, which demand documentary stability from landscapes and lives shaped by flux. While files, maps, surveys, and registers promise recognition and entitlement, they draw people into endless bureaucratic circulation. As the river repeatedly unsettles land, boundaries, and identity, people circulate between chars, offices, tribunals, and witnesses, without these movements solidifying into legal recognition or arrival. Mobility thus generates immobility, while waiting emerges as a central modality of governance, producing temporal immobility amid spatial motion. I conceptualize this condition as suspended legality: a mode of governance in which people are held in prolonged temporal and political immobility despite repeated attempts at arrival. In doing so, the paper reframes displacement as an enduring configuration of (im)mobilities rather than a discrete event.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Recurring to ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tijuana and taking a gender-sensitive lens, I demonstrate how the monthslong waiting experience of Central American and Mexican women at the US-Mexico border is permeated by overlapping or alternating configurations of im/mobility on various scales.

Paper long abstract

Since 2018—and further reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic—migration policy at the US-Mexico border has aimed to radically restrict the mobility of asylum seekers. Due to various intertwined waiting mechanisms, migration along the Central America-Mexico-US corridor appears to be characterized by immobility more than ever before. Contrary to the common perception of waiting as merely a passive state, however, recent anthropological and migration research shows that waiting is not an experience of absolute stillness, but of differentiated speeds and rhythms related to a wide range of practices of and in waiting. Recurring to my ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024 in the north Mexican border city of Tijuana, I aim to expand these recent works. Taking a gender-sensitive perspective, I demonstrate how the monthslong waiting experience of Central American and Mexican women at the US-Mexico border is permeated by multiple, often overlapping or alternating configurations of im/mobility on various scales: First, in the context of forced migration and the ongoing externalization and securitization of borders of the global North, it is not only prolonged waiting that is part of the functioning of migration regimes, but also unexpected accelerations of processes. Second, migrant women are often forced to be mobile during periods of waiting due to persecution, (fear of) violence, bureaucratic processes, or regulations of migrant shelters. And third, mobility at the place of waiting can also be an expression of the migrant women’s agency and strategy for coping with chronic waiting in everyday life.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines refugees’ im/mobile becomings in an Italian mountain province, showing how everyday and onward mobilities are integral to grounding themselves locally. It troubles polarized views of mobility and stasis by centering unequal experiences and aspirations of rural staying.

Paper long abstract

This paper originates from a broader research project on the staying experiences of refugees who continue to live in rural and small-town locations after the end of official reception periods. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a mountainous province of northern Italy, I zoom in on West African interlocutors’ efforts to re-ground and emplace themselves in small towns while simultaneously aspiring to remain mobile. I analyze their everyday and seasonal mobility practices as integral to their efforts at regaining agency and a sense of normalcy following experiences of containment and forced relocation within the reception system.

Ethnographic examples include seasonal and circular mobility practices, vertical mobilities to higher-altitude sites of labor and leisure, and the prevalence of “mobility talk” in interactions among friends and with me as the researcher. I show how age, gender, and positioning within transnational social fields, and broader regimes of migration governance shape these im/mobility practices and their underlying imaginaries. At the same time, I analyze these dynamics in the context of other im/mobilities characterizing this mountain region, including global tourist flows, forms of privileged mobility, and trends of young people leaving, remaining in, and returning to this depopulating area.

Building on scholarship from anthropology, rural studies, migration and mobility studies, the paper troubles rigid dichotomies between mobility and stasis, agency and constraint by centering precarious migrants’ im/mobile becomings in rural and mountain spaces.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how migrants engaged in circular mobilities across Europe enact placemaking practices. Focusing on a ‘transit’ squat on the French–Italian Alpine border that became an intermittent home, it shows how mobility and immobility co-produce contested yet enduring forms of emplacement.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the entangled dynamics of mobility and immobility in a short-lived squat situated in a small Italian village close to the Alpine border with France. Founded by a group of anarchist activists as a 'space of transit' for illegalised migrants, the squat was conceived mainly as a temporary stopover for irregular cross-border movement. However, some residents, primarily Moroccan men, gradually transformed it into a space of intermittent, yet long-term dwelling. Through ethnographic engagement with their experiences, I trace how mobility, displacement, and homemaking converged in the daily life of a marginal place. Drawing on recent debates on (im)mobilities and the politics of placemaking (Winters et al., 2024), the paper challenges dichotomous understandings of mobility as uprootedness and displacement, and immobility as stasis.

Migrants’ circular, open-ended trajectories in and around the border squat reveal instead how emplacement and displacement were co-constituted, with placemaking practices of solidarity and conviviality turning a space defined by illegality and temporariness into one of affective attachment and sociality - even as structural precarity, racialisation, and the threat of eviction persisted.

By situating the squat within broader European ‘regimes of mobility’ (Glick-Schiller & Salazar, 2013), the paper connects intimate, embodied practices of placemaking to the multi-scalar configurations of governance that regulate movement and fixity. In doing so, it illustrates how ‘errant homes’ like the squat reconfigure ‘spaces of transit’ into contested, yet enduring forms of home amid ongoing displacement.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper proposes "staying with politics" to challenge mobility/immobility binaries. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, I examine how authoritarianism reconfigures privileges, generating emotions that attach people to resistance in Turkey across different migratory trajectories.

Paper long abstract

Why do left-wing activists with relative but differentiated privilege—education, cultural capital, ethnic and religious positionality, transnational networks—choose to risk everything for uncertain political gains under authoritarianism? Left-wing progressives in Turkey have been studied through outward migration and diaspora politics under authoritarianism (Bulut 2024; Akyüz et al. 2024). However, this framework often reinforces the staying-versus-leaving binary, producing the implicit assumption that where people reside is the only determinant of political attachment. Drawing on scholarship examining the interconnectedness of mobility and immobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Ticktin and Youatt 2022), I propose "staying with politics" as an analytical framework. Throughout my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, I observed different modalities of staying among activists contributing to Istanbul's resistance infrastructure—organizing festivals, documentaries, protests, political education, publishing. These activists inhabit vastly different migratory trajectories: some live abroad but return seasonally; others chose Turkey for activism; some contemplate departure yet remain actively engaged. What binds them is not whether they stay or leave, but their attachments to producing politics in Turkey, shaped by relative privilege that allows migratory possibilities. To theorize what sustains their commitment to resistance in Turkey, I argue that rather than only asking where people stay, we need to attend to how people "stay" and what staying entails.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on a study of Swiss and German migrants, this paper shows how long-term immobility is enabled by mobility. It argues that the ability to stay is mediated by return options, everyday mobility, and the capacity to convert movement into stability.

Paper long abstract

Although anthropological debates on mobilities increasingly reject binary oppositions, mobility and immobility are still often treated as coexisting or alternating states. Based on ethnographic research with Swiss and German migrants in their neighbouring countries, this paper puts forward the argument that long-term immobility is actively produced through mobility, rather than occurring in its absence.

The paper examines a group commonly associated with privileged hypermobility. Rather than constant movement, participants orient their lives towards stability by remaining in the same region, settling long-term and minimising disruptive relocations. Nevertheless, mobility remains central to these projects, not as circulation, but as capacity, option and horizon. Regular visits to the country of origin, maintaining the possibility of returning in situations involving care, crisis or failure, and making fine-grained adjustments to everyday mobility make long-term staying both feasible and desirable.

Theoretically, the paper frames immobility as an achievement produced through selective and anticipatory mobilities across multiple scales. It argues that the capacity to remain emerges not from the absence of mobility, but from its continued availability as a latent possibility. This potential mobility underpins participants' desire to stay, motivating investments in local relationships, place-based knowledge and everyday belonging.

By foregrounding immobility as a relational outcome rather than a residual category, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on (im)mobilities by demonstrating how privilege operates not only through movement, but also through the capacity to convert mobility into stability over time.