Exploring highly mobile life-worlds

 Original Call for Papers - Sief Congress 2013

Short Abstract

The panel seeks to contribute to an empirically founded multi-dimensional understanding of highly mobile ways of life. It focuses on relevant conceptual and theoretical aspects, historical and contemporary experiences and methodological challenges that arise from studying highly mobile milieus.

Long Abstract

Perceived as new phenomena of the late modern period, 'hyper-mobility' and 'highly-mobile people' have attracted much media attention and become popular topics for globalization and mobility studies. However, throughout history, social groups and professional milieus, such as artists, circus families, or traveller minorities, have practiced highly mobile ways of life. Analyzing privileged and non-privileged mobilities allows for a critical discussion of social differentiation and power relations while drawing attention to (im)mobility patterns, mobility regimes and mechanisms of control.

The panel seeks to contribute to an empirically founded multi-dimensional understanding of translocal ways of life. It will focus on network and community formation, work and labor issues, life course and everyday life-world, family and conceptions of "home" under mobile circumstances. It emphasizes interdisciplinary and comparative approaches and aims at an analytical differentiation, addressing the following questions:

• How can we empirically explore mobile life-worlds in Europe?
• In which ways can we unravel dynamics in the entangled history of highly-mobile groups and shed light on the central areas of close encounter with majority populations and nation states?
• Can highly mobile groups serve as an epistemic tool to counter/read the theoretical figure of the post-modern nomad and go beyond mobile/sedentary binarisms?

Structure of the Subsections

Slot I: Conceptualizing Mobility - Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (10:30-12:00)

• Intro (Anna Lipphardt / Matthias Möller, Universität Freiburg)
• On the road again. Small scale mobility, translocal ways of life and everyday life strategies in early 19th century Württemberg (Sabine Kienitz, Universität Hamburg)
• Transnational mobility and new forms of disconnect: Czech and Slovak Roma migrations to Great Britain and Canada (Jan Grill, University of Manchester)

Slot II: Mobility, Work Practises and Labour Conditions (14:45-16:15)

• High mobility and precariousness in Canada: exploring the relationship among those with no fixed place of work (Deatra Walsh, York University, Canada)
• Constructing normality: Deconstructing the "problematic" mobile workers in the Arctic petroleum industry (Gertrude Eilmsteiner-Saxinger, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
• Transnational Finnish artists and their relationship with Berlin (Laura Hirvi, University of Helsinki)

Slot III: Home and Belonging under Mobile Circumstances (16:45-18:15)

• Home, continuity in highly mobile life-worlds (Bernardo Figueiredo, University of Southern Denmark)
• Chasing Houses - a road movie. Architectural migration in the US (Justin Rathke)
• Final discussion