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*** Apologies for cross-postings ***

/Call for a new boundary-crossing network/
*Anthropology and Mobility*
Convenor: Noel B. Salazar

Mobility, as a concept-metaphor, captures the common impression that 
people’s life-worlds are in constant flux, with not only persons 
(including anthropologists), but also cultures, objects, capital, 
businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas 
circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. Among anthropologists, 
it is fashionable these days to study tourism, migration, diaspora, and 
exile; cosmopolitanism and transnationalism; global markets and 
commodity chains; and global information and communication technologies, 
media, and popular culture. The literature is replete with metaphorical 
conceptualizations attempting to describe perceived altered spatial and 
temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and 
scapes; time–space compression, distantiation, or punctuation; the 
network society and its space of flows; the death of distance and the 
acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. The interest in mobility 
goes hand in hand with theoretical approaches that reject a sedentarist 
metaphysics in favour of a nomadic one and empirical studies on diverse 
mobilities, questioning taken-for-granted correspondences between 
peoples, places, and cultures.

While anthropologists traditionally tended to ignore or regard 
border-crossing movements as deviations from normative place-bound 
communities, cultural homogeneity, and social integration, the 
discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism of the 1990s shifted the 
pendulum in the opposite direction, mobility often being promoted as 
normality, and (too much) place attachment a digression or resistance 
against globalizing forces. At the same time, critically engaged 
anthropologists were among the first to point out that not all 
mobilities are valued equally positively and that the very processes and 
regimes that produce trans-border movements also result in geographical 
and social immobility.

This new scholarly network aims to facilitate theoretical and 
methodological exchanges on anthropology and mobility. What is the 
analytical purchase of (im)mobility as a conceptual framework to study 
and understand the current human condition? What are the most adequate 
methods to research objects of study “on the move”? The network will not 
only foster intellectually stimulating debates among anthropologists 
working on mobility along various thematic and conceptual lines, but 
will also create exciting opportunities for collaborative research and 
publications.

We kindly invite everyone interested to attend our first network 
meeting, which will be held during the 11th EASA Biennial Conference in 
Maynooth, Ireland (24-27th August). The meeting will take place on 
Wednesday, 25 August, from 20.00 until 21.30. The exact location will be 
announced at the conference through flyers (http://www.easaonline.org/).

Those who want to express their interest in joining the network may contact:
Noel B. Salazar, Ph.D.
Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe)
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45, bus 3615, BE-3000 Leuven
[log in to unmask]

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Noel B. Salazar, PhD
CuMoRe - Cultural Mobilities Research
New book: Envisioning Eden 
<http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=SalazarEnvisioning>
Marie Curie Fellow (EC, FP7-PEOPLE-IRG)
Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Visiting Research Associate, CTCC, Leeds Metropolitan University (UK)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMMRC-Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45 (Blok B, 04.05), bus 3615, BE-3000 Leuven, Belgium
Tel: +32 (0)475 53.73.13, Fax +32 (0)16 32.59.02
More info here... <http://kuleuven.academia.edu/NoelBSalazar>
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