Mobility, Infrastructure, and the Humanities

From its earliest days, mobility studies has been intensely concerned with “the infrastructure of social life,” (Urry 2017, 13). Mobility might be seen as a kind of infrastructure for the social while it is undergirded by infrastructures of systems that enable and disable mobilities. Notably, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, mobility infrastructure came to be recognized as indispensable for human life itself, while brutely materializing its geographical inequality and acutely strengthening racial, sexual, and class discrimination and their intersections. But which infrastructures enable the movement of people, things, ideas, and information; that makes possible not only the socialities of everyday life but the circulation of power and wealth, especially as they have undergirded the formations and afterlives of empire and settler-colonialism (Cowen 2020)? For example, logistics, roads, railways, ports, sea routes, transportation networks, pipelines, and the like have been taken into consideration by many researchers in the mobility studies field. So too have internet servers, mail and postage systems, under-sea cables, charging points, bike docking stations, as well as churches, cafes and corner-shops, bodies and practices as ‘arrival’ infrastructures for mobile subjects (Jung and Buhr 2021; Meues et al. 2019). What, then, might count as a mobility infrastructure?

Many narratives of infrastructure, and indeed mobility, suggest their invisibility . Where it is only in their breakdown that we are forced to see the usually sunk or hidden qualities of infrastructures beneath our feet. Studies of infrastructure often involve staying with, following, and especially maneuvers of looking beneath and (un)concealment (Hetherington 2019). Sometimes these seek to reveal the political and power relations infrastructures perform and reproduce, and the (often mobile) lives and livelihoods that service and labour the infrastructures we depend upon. Might we foreground mobility infrastructures, then, if (in)visible and unthought, ‘deep’ or ‘under’, in the way they are unearthed by the (im)mobile practices of research that elicit, know, reveal, uncloak, surface, dig, spotlight, or perhaps write, draw, envision, revision, among other modalities of looking, sensing, writing and creative expression?

The 2022 GMHC is to be a platform to discuss mobility infrastructures in its technologies, geographies, histories, cultures, as well as its social being, ethics, justice, and affects from the mobility humanities perspective. Indeed, as the humanities are challenged not only by COVID, but structural changes in academia and its funding in many contexts, the conference might reflect upon what new infrastructures and (im)mobilities are possible and necessary in the Humanities? Given the emphasis on (virtual) labs, digital platforms, networks and emerging practices to share and collaborate and engage publics in new spaces (Eccles 2021), what might mobility infrastructures offer for a Humanities under threat?

This conference presents an opportunity for scholars to share their ideas and inquiries at the intersection of mobilities studies and humanities, transcending the sometimes conventional divide between the social sciences and humanities and the arts. The conference theme, “Mobility, Infrastructure, and the Humanities,” enables scholars to engage with the mobility humanities from different academic disciplines. With the advent of a ‘high-mobility’ (Viry and Kauffmann 2015) society, infrastructures come to have more far-reaching power, but are perhaps even more taken for granted. Wary of the dangers that they are assumed as universal and taken as ungrounded or uncritically, we encourage studies that contemplate geographic variation, difference and specificity of context across different global regions, national contexts, locations and places.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

1. Philosophies of Mobility Infrastructures
    

2. Infrastructural Reading of Literary and Cultural Texts
    

3. Infrastructures of Knowledge Circulation and the Mobility of Things
    

4. Visibilities and Invisibilities of Mobility Infrastructures
    

5. Bodies, Practices and Social Infrastructures
    

6. Creative Responses and Approaches to Mobility Infrastructure/Creative           Practices as Mobility Infrastructure
    

7. ‘Coming Community’ and Mobility Infrastructure Ethics
    

8. Mobility Infrastructure Justice
    

9. ((Post)Colonial) Histories of infrastructures
    

10. Emotions and Affects of Mobility Infrastructure

11. Cultural infrastructures from antiquity to the future

12. Failing or fracturing mobility infrastructures

13. Other Related Issues

We welcome submissions of individual papers and panels for this conference.

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

En savoir plus x

Movement

Movement is the crossing of space by people, objects, capital, ideas and other information. It is either oriented, and therefore occurs between an origin and one or more destinations, or it is more akin to the idea of simply wandering, with no real origin or destination.

En savoir plus x

How to submit your paper/panel proposal:

For panels supposed to be composed of more than four presenters, a 200-word outline of the theme of the whole panel, together with 200-word abstracts of each paper and the details of each presenter and (if any) the co-authors, should be submitted via email to the Organizing Committee of 2022 GMHC by 30th April 2022: GMHC2022@gmail.com

For individual papers, a 200-word abstract of the paper, together with the details of the presenter and (if any) the co-authors, should be submitted to the Organizing Committee of 2022 GMHC by 30th April 2022: GMHC2022@gmail.com

All panel and paper submissions must be in English. Submissions in languages other than English will not be considered.

Key dates:

All submissions must be sent by email by 30th April 2022 and will receive an acknowledgement. Any submission received after the deadline will not normally be considered for presentation.

All panel and individual paper proposals will be reviewed by two members of the Organizing Committee of 2022 GMHC. We will contact you at the end of May 2022 to inform you as to whether your panel/paper has been accepted.

Please note that, by being accepted to this conference, your abstract will be automatically considered to be included in the GMHC’s conference proceeding in due course. Please email the Organizing Committee of 2022 GMHC (GMHC2022@gmail.com) with the subject heading “2022 GMHC Inquiry” if you have any questions and concerns.

Registration fee

Online registration runs from June 2022. Information on registration will be made available on the conference website which will go live on April 2022.

An early-bird discount by registering before 1st August 2022. The early-bird fee is US$ 150. After that date, the registration fee is US$ 200.

A student discount: The early-bird fee (registration before 1st August 2022) is US$ 100. After that date, the registration fee is US$ 150.

Registration fee will cover the costs for the conference materials, coffee/tea breaks, and a farewell dinner reception.

Please email the Organizing Committee of 2022 GMHC (GMHC2022@gmail.com) with the subject heading “2022 GMHC Inquiry” if you have any questions and concerns.

2022 GMHC Organizing Committee https://www.mobilityhumanities.net/