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- Convenors:
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Raghavi Viswanath
(SOAS)
Vageesh Vishnoi (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi)
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- Discussant:
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Fariya Yesmin
(SOAS, University of London)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This roundtable re-imagines mobility not simply as physical movement, but as an embodied and affective process of defining the body, legal identity, and the State, reflecting on the conceptual registers developed by mobile peoples including sex workers, digital nomads, tourists, and pastoralists.
Long Abstract
The onset of the pandemic generated a powerful, universal newfound currency for mobility. Around the world, many yearned to exercise their freedom of movement, even those who had long settled into sedentary lives. In this context, this roundtable asks: what does mobility mean in today’s times?
While the practice of mobility has been normalised as the physical movement across space, its conceptual understanding reveals a more complex relationship between the body, agency, and the State.
At least three aspects of mobility warrant deeper inquiry. First, with the turn of the millennium, the migratory identity of the nomad has come to be conflated with liberal ideas of ‘choice’. This romantic prefiguration of the nomad by the State hides the more insidious processes of capitalist accumulation and governing through displacement that compel movement. Second, mobility exposes the absurdity of man-made borders — a colonial tekhné that encloses and orders people to fabricate a shared sense of belonging to the nation-State. The border, as both myth and mechanism, allows the State to engage in spacemaking that delineates the ‘Self’ from the ‘Other.’ Third, mobility also invites attention away from the point of origin/destination and instead pushes to study the process of journeying or becoming; an embodied, affective, and reflexive process that resists static and Statist understandings of body, place, and identity.
This roundtable seeks to open a continuing conversation on these shifting meanings of mobility by bringing together perspectives from across disciplines. From the everyday realities of sex workers and digital nomads to those of pastoralists, diasporas, and tourists, this roundtable aims to explore new conceptual registers of movement and call for a radical reimagining of mobility in today’s world.
Accepted contributions
Session 1Contribution short abstract
This paper explores Bangladesh’s Bihari camps as micro-ecologies of "disruptive immobility." By linking Islamic sabr with digital labor, I argue that stateless groups unsettle state authority and re-territorialize space through disciplined endurance and economic agency.
Contribution long abstract
This paper examines the Bihari community in Bangladesh as a critical site for rethinking mobility as an embodied, legal, and temporal condition shaped by constraint. Following the 1971 Liberation War, this Urdu-speaking minority was confined to dense urban camps marked by infrastructural fragility and prolonged statelessness. I conceptualize these camps as micro-ecologies where restricted movement actively reshapes relationships between the body, the State, and space. The paper advances the concept of “disruptive immobility” to describe how prolonged spatial confinement unsettles dominant assumptions equating agency with movement. First, it shows how economic adaptations—particularly the shift from low-wage garment labor to digital gig work—enable new forms of re-territorialization within enforced immobility. Second, it analyzes the transformation of the Stranded Pakistanis General Repatriation Committee into a citizenship-claiming institution, interpreted through the Islamic concept of ṣabr (endurance). Here, ṣabr is framed not as passive waiting, but as a disciplined, collective ethical practice oriented toward temporal continuity and political recognition. Third, it highlights how younger generations, through digital participation and social integration, rework Partition-era identities and expand horizons of belonging.By bringing Western critical theory into dialogue with Islamic ontology, the paper proposes a framework for understanding mobility through endurance, suspension, and temporal reconfiguration. The Bihari experience demonstrates how marginalized communities unsettle legal categories and state authority not through movement alone, but through sustained practices of inhabiting constraint in precarious conditions.
Contribution short abstract
Gaza marks an ultimate collapse of mobility regimes. Through the case of Intissar Al-Sa’affin, I argue the digital becomes a prosthetic mobility infrastructure: videocalls enable modalities of fragmented presence-absence, reshaping embodied grief and the possibility of “being there” amid death.
Contribution long abstract
Mobility is not simply a regime of circulation of bodies across space: it is shaped by relations of power, infrastructures, and permissions that decide who and if one can move, when, and at what cost. This proposal engages with the roundtable’s third axis by shifting our understanding of mobility away from origin and destination, toward a process of embodied remaining, in a context where it being made impossible.
Drawing on ethnographic fragments from Palestinian diasporic and displaced experiences, I argue that the genocide in Gaza constitutes a configuration of total enclosure and ultimate disruption of mobility resources, regimes, and infrastructures. Under siege, the impossibility of “physically being there” becomes most tangible in the event of death: the funeral, the farewell, the last encounter. In this context, the systematic restriction of mobility produces forms of distance that exceed geographical separation and become affective, temporal, and sensory; where the inability to move is also the inability to access death rituals, praxis of kinship and care, and forms of collective mourning.
In this long state of genocide-driven collapse, the digital emerges as an interface through which modes/modalities of embodied presence are reconfigured. Through the case of Intissar Al-Sa’affin, a Gazan mother who received news of her son’s killing via her phone and attended his farewell through a videocall, I explore how grief becomes mediated by screens, and how care is enacted through a “grammar of holding”. I propose the concept of fragmented presence-absence that implements through partial, mediated, affective forms of being-with.
Contribution short abstract
This paper employs a "regimes of mobility" framework to examine cross-border im/mobilities at the Sino-Kazakh border.
Contribution long abstract
In 2013, Glick Schiller and Salazar urged us to move beyond the dichotomy between mobility and stasis and to acknowledge that mobilities are unevenly distributed. Building on their concept of "regimes of mobility", I propose the Sino-Kazakh border as a powerful lens to see the mobility inequalities produced by different forms of governance.
Based on 20 months of ethnographic field research conducted in Kazakhstan, this paper explores regimes of mobility pertaining to the Sino-Kazakh border. Focusing on Khorgos, a major global economic hub, I show how people’s mobilities are scaled, layered, and intersectional. While individuals on one side of the border move across it on a near-daily basis with relatively few restrictions, their co-ethnics on the other side cross the border in far less visible and significantly more constrained ways. By examining these spatially and temporally layered mobilities, the paper renders visible processes of political polarization as well as the constraints imposed by global capitalism.
This paper makes two main contributions. First, it applies a “regimes of mobility” framework to revisit the concept of the borderline. Second, empirically, it demonstrates how highly mobile female cross-border traders from Kazakhstan intersect with mobilities of people on the other side of the border.
Contribution short abstract
My contribution focuses on the relational, embodied notions of becoming to cross biometric, colonially inherited borders between Sierra Leone and Guinea. Border crossers performed the ‘commoner’ without documents who was limited to the borderlands or the ‘two-SIM citizens’ belonging to both states.
Contribution long abstract
Beyond having the right papers, relations and embodied belonging facilitate mobility in West Africa. At the increasingly biometric and colonially inherited borders between Sierra Leone and Guinea, I argue, local notions and embodied performances of belonging may enact freedom of movement.
To many travelers, the new biometric travel documents from Sierra Leone and Guinea were hardly accessible or fundable. They crossed these borders without documents by performing the role of ‘the commoner’, as people who live on both sides of the border who only travel within its narrow confines. To do so, they had to perform knowing the border guards, show no fear and travel in slippers to demonstrate their localized movements. These relational and embodied practices de facto sutured the travelers to the borderlands.
In contrast, other travelers instead identified as ‘two-SIM citizens’ who belonged to both countries. This form of lived dual citizenship from below allowed them to travel far beyond the border. However, to be a two-SIM citizen they needed to know the national languages, perform belonging to the national ethnic groups, engage in place-making in both contexts and often go a long way to procure the digital ID cards from both countries to prevent police racketeering.
These local notions of belonging demonstrate the importance of local and transnational identities beyond statist identification and their relational and embodied performance for cross-border mobility.
The data draws on direct observation at different border crossing points and interviews with border crossers, border officers and traditional authorities in 2024-2025.
Contribution short abstract
Based on ethnographic work, this paper examines Kutaisi International Airport as a peripheral infrastructure shaping migrant aeromobility in post-Soviet Georgia. It analyzes how everyday travel practices, labor migration, and European border regimes produce unequal, embodied experiences of mobility.
Contribution long abstract
Kutaisi International Airport in western Georgia has emerged as a key mobility hub linking Georgia to Europe. Located on the periphery of the historic city of Kutaisi and approximately 250 kilometers from the capital, Tbilisi, the airport serves as a hub for low-cost air travel, particularly for Georgian migrants engaged in precarious and circular labor across Europe. Budget connections to countries such as Poland, Italy, Greece, and Germany facilitate transnational mobility for less privileged Georgians, for whom air travel has become both accessible and necessary.
This paper examines the everyday mobility practices through which travelers reach Kutaisi Airport from different parts of Georgia and continue onward their labor migration to European cities. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2021 and 2025, I trace the assemblages of infrastructures, routes, and actors that enable this form of aeromobility, including long-distance buses, trains, private travel companies, and European law enforcement agencies. I focus on specific transport services connecting Tbilisi and Batumi to Kutaisi, as well as on informal networks involving family members and regional ties that mobile Georgians use for their mobility.
The paper asks how modern aeromobility is produced, mediated, and experienced in contemporary Georgia. It analyzes how distance from infrastructure, time constraints, visa regimes, and European border control practices shape unequal travel experiences, particularly at the border with the privileged Schengen area. By foregrounding Kutaisi Airport as a peripheral site, the paper raises broader debates of embodied mobility and infrastructure in post-Soviet Georgia.