Short Abstract

This panel approaches African mobility through the imaginaries, aspirations, and social vocabularies that render movement conceivable. Treating these situated concepts as theoretical resources, it refracts mobility across histories and social positions, challenging established migration categories.

Long Abstract

What happens when African mobility is approached not primarily through the categories used to govern and explain it, but through the imaginaries, aspirations, and social vocabularies through which movement becomes conceivable? We understand imagination as a practice of envisioning possibilities, imaginaries as socially circulating horizons of what is possible, and aspirations as situated orientations toward desired futures. Across generations, genders, classes, and social locations, people speak of dignity, adventure, struggle, escape, waiting, success, obligation, chercher la vie, or return (Kleinman 2019; Bachelet 2019; Hannoum 2019; Benhadda 2025).African mobility, in this sense, is not confined to the continent but extends through movements, connections, and imagined futures linking African and diasporic spaces. Mobility may emerge through collective departures, circulating rumours, digital images, historical memories, and shared perceptions that life elsewhere has become necessary or imaginable. Such experiences complicate distinctions between voluntary and forced migration, economic necessity and political flight, and individual and collective movement.Taking “African Prisms” as an invitation to rethink how knowledge about mobility is produced, this panel asks what becomes visible when people’s own conceptualisations of movement are treated as resources for theory rather than empirical material explained through established categories. Rather than proposing a singular “African” theory of migration, we approach the prism as plural, refracted through different histories, languages, generations, genders, social positions, and political conditions.We invite contributions exploring how people narrate, imagine, desire, contest, organise, or refuse mobility, and what these situated concepts and vocabularies can contribute to theorising mobility elsewhere.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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