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.