Drifting mobilities: the experience and governance of (im)mobile socialities

Border crossings have divergent temporal characteristics. This panel uses drifting as a heuristic device to critically interrogate how the temporal dimensions of border crossings – sea, land and air – present fresh opportunities to retheorise how we account for border crossings. In contrast to land crossings, aerial and maritime border-crossings share liminal qualities: one spends considerable time in-between national borders where one has departed one country but yet to arrive in another. However, while air travel comprises distinct linear temporalities between start and endpoints, recent years have made it clear that maritime border crossings can result in open-ended journeys for asylum seekers and refugees: vessels drifting at sea. Yet, air travel can also involve a sense of 'drifting'. Whether migrants are stuck in detention centres or at gated borders, drifting suggests different governing logics and experiences. Drifting connotes the opposite of being settled, yet at the same time is not-quite moving and is often contrary to sinking: a politics and existential experience of unbounded abandonment (evident through the willed failure in assisting distressed asylum seekers at sea). What is the temporal significance of drifting as a mobile experience? How does drifting, as a distinct phenomenon within maritime migration, feature as an object of border governance? And finally, how do these mobilities compare with the temporal qualities of terrestrial and aerial border crossings? The panel invites papers that are theoretically grounded, empirically informed, or speculative.

Paper Abstracts:

If you think the above panel abstract might resonate with any work you are conducting that is connected to questions of migration please get in touch with sverre.molland@anu.edu.au and/or j.coates@sheffield.ac.uk

Please be ready to send us a paper abstract of 250 words by November 28th.