******* Apologies for cross
posting *******
 
MOBILITIES / IMMOBILITIES
A dialogue in two parts on desire of migration and
border devices
 
March 21, 2014 / May 16, 2014
ICS-UL
Lisbon
 
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.
Anyone is welcome to join the discussion, the event is
free of charge, no pre-inscription required.
 
 
Programme
 
MOBILITIES/
Immobilities: March 21, 2014, 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 ([log in to unmask])
and/or Valerio Simoni ([log in to unmask]). 
 
________________
 
Valerio Simoni, PhD.
Research Fellow
Centre for Research in Anthropology
(CRIA-IUL)
Lisbon, Portugal
http://iscte-iul.academia.edu/ValerioSimoni/About

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