Movement is a political site. Movements are diverse. Humans, more-than-humans, goods, financial flows, and ideas travel unequally across the planet. Movements can be violent. Movements can also bring about social change, collective action, and cooperative survival.
At the same time world conflicts, environmental disasters, political instability, poverty, sexual orientation, and inequality continue to dispossess communities and prevent them from finding sanctuary. Anthropologists are interested in how movement defines us and the world around us.
Mobility is capitalized through tourism, digital nomadism, mobile homemaking, remittances, pilgrimage, extractivist infrastructures, legal permits, elite forms of mobility, or the privatization of asylum seeker and refugees’ centers to name just a few ways in which the power of (im)mobility is exerted. Voluntary or forced migration is also (re)making our multiple identities, belongings, diasporas, and homelands.
Anthropologists pay attention to the accounts people on the move share with us about food, music, art, religion, pain, expectations, or hope. Due to the nature of movement, our ethnographic approach is patchworked to accommodate the ethical situations we research aided by archives, generational narratives, digital accounts, and artistic methods among others to coproduce and share anthropological knowledge.
Researchers working on mobilities
Research projects within mobilities
Unpacking the Logistics Town - How are local communities reshaped in a time of global logistics?