Short Abstract

Research on movement tends towards polarized views of mobility and immobility, reifying these as separate spheres of experience. This panel seeks to go beyond their framings as opposing poles to consider complex configurations of (im)mobilities as interconnected, overlapping, and multifaceted.

Long Abstract

Anthropological research on mobilities across diverse scales, geographies, and temporalities has frequently emphasized the ways in which movement is unevenly distributed, both reflecting and reproducing societal inequalities along intersecting axes such as gender, race, class, nationality, and status. Exploring these inequalities, research on movement tends towards polarized views of mobility and immobility, reifying these as separate spheres of experience that produce distinct subjects and communities. In such frameworks, mobility can be associated either with privilege (tourism; white collar or flexible professions; access to efficient transport; able-bodiedness and leisure time exercise) or oppression (displacement, dispossession, and labor migration; long commutes from urban peripheries and the hypermobility required of gig economy work). Simultaneously, immobility is often alternately read as a marker of constraint (due to exclusionary border regimes, enclosures and incarceration; lack of access to transport and personal limitations) or agency (remote work options; having the time and security to rest, be still, or embrace slowness; commissioning others to move on one’s behalf). Keeping such structural inequalities at the fore, this panel seeks to go beyond a conceptual framing of mobility and immobility as opposing poles to consider complex configurations of (im)mobilities as interconnected, overlapping, and multifaceted. It invites submissions which explore the dynamic relationship between mobility and immobility through ethnographic research across and between diverse scales and tempos of movement, including migration and enclosure as well as everyday (im)mobilities.

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