Connectivities, Ecologies, Engagements: recrafting mobilities in the 2020s

From a once fringe approach within the social sciences to a now core field of inquiry in both research and policy, mobilities have become a central part of how many people conceive of the contemporary world. Yet, many of the challenges and changes that the world has faced over the past decade also necessitate rethinking the role of mobilities, and mobility studies, in the 2020s. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Fielding Challenges, Challenging the Field: The Methodologies of Mobility ANTHROMOB workshop held at COMPAS, Oxford in 2013, this international workshop seeks to foster and develop new collaborative approaches for studying mobilities from an anthropological perspective. As human and non-human phenomena become at once more mobile and more sedentary, anthropologists, along with counterparts in fields such as media and environmental studies, sociology, and human geography, have taken to researching life in motion and lives in situ. This widening transdisciplinarity has called for the development of research methods that can approach the spectrum of new digital and non-digital forms of mobile life, as well as new interdependencies, materialities and ecologies. Taking inspiration from these shifts, this workshop will examine the connectivities and ecologies an (im)mobility approach affords. In particular, we seek to develop new inclusive ways of thinking about the human/non-human and digital/non-digital that help us engage with other disciplines, fields and stakeholders. Working with colleagues from across EASA networks this approach necessitates exploring how the methodologies circulating within overlapping areas of the human sciences have created new ways for anthropology to engage with the world.