AAG 2005 Call for Papers
TRANSLOCAL SUBJECTIVITIES: MOBILITY, CONNECTION AND EMOTION
Denver, Colorado, 5-9 April 2005
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).
In exploring the connections between transnational mobility and emotion,
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 abstracts (no more than 250 words) and/or expressions of
interest to either of the organizers by 13th October 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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