Short Abstract:

Facilitating critical reflections on contemporary mobilities and the ethnographic practice of writing, this panel brings together ethnographers and scholars from related disciplines who assess mobile communities and border regimes.

Long Abstract:

This panel assesses the epistemological politics of ethnographic (un)writing about mobilities. Writing is an essential part of everyday life as well as an integral element of the ethnographic research practice (Wulff, 2021). Ways of creating, storing and disseminating information are structured by practices of writing. On the one hand, sign boards, handwritten notes, leaflets, text messages and social media posts shape the spatial organisation of places and the social construction of local identities in ethnographic field sites (Barton & Papen, 2010). On the other hand, ethnographers write field notes, reports and papers about mobile communities, corporal movement and the circulation of objects, data and capital across the globe. Written documents shape how mobile subjects experience borders, moments of stasis and movement (Riles 2006). In this panel, we invite scholars to explore the dynamic tensions between written traces of movement and ethnographic writing. How can written accounts of mobility complement field notes? How can mobile regimes be unwritten? In what ways are colonialism and contemporary mobilities intertwined?

The panel encourages ethnographic researchers to explore the potential of ethnographic storytelling for unwriting contemporary migration and border regimes. Ethnographic storytelling can challenge asymmetrical power relations in academia and establish transnational ethnographic collaborations, while transgressing conventional rules for single-person authorship. Participants will be given an opportunity to discuss experimental forms of gathering and presenting ethnographic data. The panel welcomes critical reflections on ethnographic (un)writing for anthropological mobility research into refugees, climate mobilities, health regimes and mobile labour.

This Panel has so far received 1 paper proposal(s).
Propose paper