Navigating hurdles and pacing (im)mobilities in times of corona

Convenors

Noel B. Salazar (KU Leuven)

Marta Kempny (Ulster University)

Chrysi Kyratsou (Queen’s University Belfast)

Discussant: Fabiola Mancinelli (Universitat de Barcelona)

Short Abstract

This panel discusses people’s experience and agentive navigation of (im)mobility regimes in times of corona. Considering the pace of (im)mobilities, it explores transformations of pre-existing differential mobility regimes through the distinguishing lens of essential and non-essential travel.

Long Abstract

The ‘frictions’ underpinning globalization, as a result of various and usually opposing forces intersecting with each other, are resulting in contested transformations (Tsing 2005). Regarding people’s mobilities, their increase in terms of volume, diversity, and geographical scope, has always been entangled with efforts to control them, via monitoring, intercepting, and immobilizing. ‘Pace’ merges the temporal and spatial dimensions of movement and its overall experience as shaped within contested frames (Amit and Salazar 2020).

Various (im)mobilities in times of corona are viewed by actors and commentators alike as a violent rupture to established norms. However, what has actually been reinforced are pre-existing asymmetries and conceptions, masked under the differential modes of ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ travel, the first one relating to the socio-economic sphere, and maintained through the situation of crisis over the latter, which relates to existential reasons (Salazar 2021).

This panel welcomes papers addressing the following questions:

1. How have the policies in place to curb the spread of the pandemic altered people’s mobilities as experienced and as imagined?
2. How have differential regimes of mobility been reinforced, through the distinguishing lens of essential vs non-essential travel?
3. What tactics and strategies have people employed to manage, actually and virtually, the new circumstances of (im)mobility?
4. How have experiences of the temporalities of people’s (im)mobilities altered?
5. How do key moments, transitions, and hope for future trajectories resonate with the modalities of crisis?

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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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.

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Propose paper

https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easa2022/paper-form/11516

Before submitting online, please send an e-mail to the panel organizers with the following data: title, short abstract (<300 characters), long abstract (<250 words), author(s), affiliation and full contact details

Deadline:

23:59 GMT/WEST on 21 March 2022

Paper submission rules

https://www.easaonline.org/conferences/easa2022/cfp

General information on the conference

https://www.easaonline.org/conferences/easa2022/