Mobilities and Migration: Between visuality and (in)visibility

Anthropologists have studied human mobilities for a long time and from various perspectives. Mobility can refer, among other things, to people’s transnational movements or to local everyday mobilities. Some of these mobilities are visible, while others are not, and even when a certain mobility is visible, its particular aspects often remain hidden or unknown. Sometimes, this resonates with the (problematic) division between “legal” and clandestine mobilities. and sometimes, it is the opposite: “legal” mobilities may be relatively invisible while clandestine mobilities become highly visible, for example in the media. Many anthropologists use visual and other sensory methods to study mobilities: at times focusing on being on the move - on the transitions - while on other occasions focusing on the immobile situations during mobility. This panel seeks to investigate visible and invisible mobilities, their visible and invisible aspects, and the ways in which we try to “visualize” them – aiming to facilitate their understanding and making them more visible and recognized. We invite methodological and contextual papers that discuss (im)mobilities, visuality and (in)visibility.

If interested in joining the panel please send your 250-word abstract by 19 March to panel convenors: Mari Korpela - mari.korpela@tuni.fi and Piotr Goldstein - goldstein@dezim-institut.de

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.

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