CFP: Critical Anthropological Engagements with Mobility (AAA Annual Meeting 2013)

This is a call for papers for a session at the 2013 AAA Annual Meeting.



*** Apologies for cross-posting ***

CALL FOR PAPERS

*Critical Anthropological Engagements with Mobility*

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting

Chicago Hilton, Chicago, November 20-24, 2013

*Organizers*

Noel B. Salazar (University of Leuven): noel.salazar@soc.kuleuven.be
<mailto:noel.salazar@soc.kuleuven.be>

Kiran Jayaram (Columbia University): kcj2103@columbia.edu
<mailto:kcj2103@columbia.edu>

*Panel Description*

Each paper in this panel will critically analyze one of the keywords in
mobility-related research, including: /(im)mobility/, /motility/,
/capital, imaginaries,/ /infrastructure/ and/regimes/.

*Abstract*

Boundary-crossing human mobility has been prevalent throughout history,
though recent discourses of globalization have conjured up novel
metaphors of "flow" through images of unfettered movement.Purposeful
mobilities, usually of the temporary kind, are widely accepted as a
desirable and even normative path towards success: career achievement
through educational exchange and work experience "elsewhere," and
well-being or quality of life achievement through tourism and lifestyle
migration.Across the globe, such forms of geographical movement are made
meaningful by being variously linked to the accumulation of economic
(resources), social (status) or cultural (cosmopolitanism)
capital.Partly influenced by neoliberal and free market imaginaries,
translocal mobilities have become one of the newest stratifying factors,
leading to a global hierarchy of movements, for as more people cross
physical borders and social boundaries, authorities resort to various
infrastructures and regimes of mobility to maintain control over these
movements.

In the past decade, social scientists investigating boundary-crossing
flows (primarily non-US anthropologists and US non-anthropologists) have
been developing a field of research that focuses on the multiple and
distinct movements of people, things, and ideas, the meanings of these,
and the associated experiences and imaginations of them.Mobility
studies, with its emphasis on agency, capital, regimes, and
stratification, enriches current understandings of globalization,
capitalism, and circulation across the planet, but as of yet, certain
key ideas have not been fully conceptualized.Inspired in part by the
(cultural) /Keywords/ (1976) of Raymond Williams, this panel seeks
original conceptual contributions that critically analyze
mobility-related keywords such as /(im)mobility/, /motility/, /capital,
imaginaries,/ /infrastructure/ and/regimes/.By design, the panel
presentations on each of these will form the foundation of an
intellectual conversation about the interrelationship between these
concepts and their analytical value for anthropological knowledge
production (and the social sciences at large).

Questions addressed include:

* /(Im)mobility/: What is the (analytical and empirical) relationship
between mobility and immobility?
* /Motility/: What social and cultural processes facilitate the
connection between motility and (im)mobility, and how do people
experience this?
* /Imaginaries of mobility/: What are the contours of power, agency,
and subjectivity in imaginaries of translocal mobility and the
intersecting social categories those visions both reify and dissolve?
* /Mobility capital/: How could the notion of mobility capital be
enriched by drawing upon the notion of capital as process (Marx)
rather than capital as a static commodity (Becker, Bourdieu)?Does
all mobility produce mobility capital?Are there qualitative or
quantitative differences in mobility capital?How is it possible to
be mobile and lose value?How do people, both those who move and
those who don't, use mobility capital?
* /Infrastructures of mobility/: What are the various infrastructures
put in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, etc.) for managing
the boundary-crossing flows of people?
* /Regimes of mobility/: Assuming there are various regimes of
mobility, what are the dynamics of them?Do race, gender, and
sexuality figure into these?How are these manifest?Where is the
regime of mobility located?How does it construct space and to what ends?

If you are interested in participating in this innovative panel, contact
both organizers*_by 10 March 2013_*.

Please submit your name, your affiliation, your contact details, a title,
and an abstract limited to 250 words. Clearly indicate which
mobility-related keyword you want to analyze. The earlier you contact us,
the more chance you have that the keyword of your choice will still be
available.



More information about the AAA Annual Meeting in general is available online:

http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/index.cfm