A dialogue on the relations between migration, globalization, power, hegemony, desire, materiality and “modernity”, in the form of a two-part seminar focused on the complementary dimensions of mobility and immobility. The first part will discuss the global imaginaries and forms of subjectivity sustaining the desire to move. The second part will focus the border(ing) processes that are deployed to control migration and their effects on the daily lives of the people in motion.

Programme
 
Mobilities / Immobilities: March 21, 2104, 9.30-13.30. ICS-UL Lisbon
Presentations by: Valerio Simoni (CRIA-IUL), José Mapril (CRIA-UNL), Francesco Vacchiano (ICS-UL)
Discussants: Liliana Suárez Navaz (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid); Cristiana Bastos (ICS-UL Lisbon)
 
Immobilities / Mobilities: May 16, 2014, 14.30-18.30. ICS-UL Lisbon
Presentations by: Simone Frangella (ICS-UL), Francesco Vacchiano (ICS-UL), Gabriele Del Grande (Fortress Europe), Alexandra D’Onofrio (University of Manchester) (with excerpts from the movie “La vita che non CIE”)
Discussants: Marzia Grassi (ICS-UL Lisbon); Cristiana Bastos (ICS-UL Lisbon)
 
 
Presentation
In a world in motion the relationship between mobility and immobility has become increasingly relevant for the analysis of contemporary forms of power and status. As early as in 1998, Zygmunt Bauman argued that “mobility assumes the highest level among the values which confer a status, and freedom of movement […] becomes rapidly the main factor of social stratification of our time” (Bauman 1998). Whether it concerns the displacement of goods and capitals or the circulation of information and people (Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007), the capacity to move, its timing, and the conditions in which movement takes place, represent a marker of social difference which highlights the many inequalities under which mobility as “socially produced motion” (Cresswell 2006) is constituted (Ohnmacht, Maksim, and Bergman 2008; Salazar and Smart 2011).
If this process is part of a global dynamic, its consequences are particularly noticeable in the Global South, where the desire to migrate is forcefully emerging as a powerful and often frustrated aspiration. In countless places around the world, social scientists have been facing this relatively new and generalized “desire of elsewhere” through which people channel their hopes of success and their search for opportunities. Local structural conditions are unquestionably a key dimension to take into account if we wish to understand the widespread wish to leave. However, in many places, these same conditions, and the ways they inform people’s everyday lives, are increasingly measured against standards of a paradigmatic “global form of life”, one that is moulded upon a series of hegemonic models shaping the benchmarks of well-being and happiness on a wide-reaching scale. Some authors have reflected about the impact of these models and their role in forging contemporary “expectations of modernity” across de globe (Ferguson 1999; Ferguson 2002; Piot 1999; Piot 2010; Jackson 2008; Jackson 2013; Comaroff and Comaroff 2003; Fouquet 2007; Chu 2010). They observe how the relationship between contemporary forms of power and global imaginaries is producing, especially among the younger generations, a powerful aspiration for change, which manifests itself in the desire of freedom from traditional obligations and the claim for membership and participation in a wider world. Self-improvement, material achievement (for example through consumption) and the longing for success seem to represent key structuring axes of a modern subjectivity that rests on a sense of unbounded possibilities (Jackson 2011).
In counterpoint to these processes, in which mobility represents a means of achievement and a value in itself, transnational migrants meet increasing obstacles to their movement, and have to deal with a broad range of border devices and other instruments of management and control. In this sense, the complementary nature of mobility and immobility seems representative of a new form of social ordering “through movement”: the proliferation of devices that facilitate the circulation of some while hindering that of others informs the differential status of the people in motion, hampering or enabling different forms of citizenship. This way, the categories associated to human mobility (tourists, refugees, expats, migrants, visiting scholars, clandestini, etc.) define new hierarchies of subjects and, as a consequence, act as powerful tools of classification and stratification. Whereas the possibility to move is constituted as one of the most influential means of social promotion in the contemporary world, forced immobility (or conditioned mobility) turns out to be a new form of discrimination and exclusion, one of globalization’s shadows.
 
Taking these reflections as conceptual backdrop, we propose a dialogue centred on the relations between migration, globalization, power, hegemony, desire, materiality and “modernity”, in the form of a two-part seminar focused on the complementary dimensions of mobility and immobility. In the first part we aim to address, from an anthropological perspective, the global imaginaries and forms of subjectivity sustaining the desire to leave. In the second part we aim to focus on the border(ing) processes that are deployed to control migration and on their effects on the daily lives of the people in motion.
 
 
References
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chu, Julia. 2010. Cosmologies of Credit. Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2003. “Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and ID-Ology: Citizenship and Difference in South Africa.” Social Identities 9 (4): 445–473.
Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. Taylor & Francis.
Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ferguson, James G. 2002. “Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the ‘New World Society.’” Cultural Anthropology 17 (4) (November): 551–569.
Fouquet, Thomas. 2007. “Imaginaires Migratoires et Expériences Multiples de L’altérité : Une Dialectique Actuelle Du Proche et Du Lointain.” Autrepart n° 41 (1) (March): 83–98.
Jackson, Michael. 2008. “The Shock of the New: On Migrant Imaginaries and Critical Transitions.” Ethnos 73 (1) (March): 57–72.
———. 2011. Life Within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want. Duke University Press.
———. 2013. The Wherewithal of Life. Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-Being. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ohnmacht, Timo, Hanja Maksim, and Manfred Max Bergman. 2008. Mobilities and Inequality. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Piot, Charles. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2010. Nostalgia for the Future West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Salazar, Noel, B., and Alan Smart. 2011. “Anthropological Takes on (Im)Mobility”. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18 (6): i-ix.
Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207 – 226.
Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge and Malden: Polity.
              
For further information please contact: Francesco Vacchiano and/or Valerio Simoni.