AAG 2005 Call for Papers
TRANSLOCAL SUBJECTIVITIES: MOBILITY, CONNECTION AND EMOTION
Denver, Colorado, 5-9 April 2005
(http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/call_for_papers/call_for_papers1.html)
David Conradson, School of Geography, University of Southampton,
Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom, [log in to unmask]
Deirdre McKay, Department of Human Geography, Research School of Pacific
and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200,
Australia, [log in to unmask]
Recent work on transnationalism has highlighted the significance of both
the emotional labour performed by transnational subjects and the affective
experiences of migration. Eschewing narratives of disembodied actors
skating across a frictionless world, scholars have begun to trace out the
emplaced corporealities of transnational mobility. We are now more aware
of the emotional complexities of transnational lives, of their relational
implications with respect to matters such as opportunity, shame,
reciprocity, and obligation.
In this session we want to look more closely at this nexus of
transnational mobility, social connection and emotion. Our starting point
is that the emotional dimensions of transnational mobility – the
experiences of departures, arrivals, settlement and new forms of
transnational belonging – are both relatively under explored and worthy of
closer attention. This is not simply a matter of ‘adding emotions’ to
existing accounts, but of beginning to consider how the feelings that
mobility affords - freedom, connection and disconnection, new
opportunities for self-expression, loneliness, family stress and so forth –
are often heavily implicated in both the experiential texture of
transnational mobility and the forms of migration people undertake. We
are interested in the ways these mobile subjectivities can be linked to
emotion, and in how the emotional dimensions of transnational mobility
shape both experiences of place and places themselves (cf. Thrift 2004).
Possible topics for consideration might include, but not be limited to:
• new emotional geographies of global cities
• embodied experiences of mobility and affect for transnational
migrants
• transformations created by departures and returns
• experiences of freedom and self-actualization through movement
• transnational friendship, family or professional networks as sites
of subjectivation
• transnational love and romance, transnational parenting
• negotiations of the sometimes significant material gains afforded
by transnational mobility against the emotional and familial costs
• transnational labour markets and migrants performing emotional
labour – experiences of mobility for caregivers, companions for the
elderly, special needs teachers etc.
Please send expressions of interest to either of the organizers by 30
September 2004.
Abstract instructions:
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/call_for_papers/abstract_Instructions.htm
Details for organized paper sessions:
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/call_for_papers/organized_sessions.htm
Thrift, N. 2004 Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of
affect. Geografiska Annaler 86, B (1): 57 - 78
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