Unruly Landscapes: Mobility, Transience and Transformation (18-19 June 2020) (original) (raw)

For geographers (both “physical” and “human”), all landscapes—while notionally associated with stability and permanence in the popular imagination—are unruly. By adjusting the temporal viewfinder through which a tectonic plate, mountain range, coastline, or urban settlement is viewed and speeding up the “playback,” we see that all human and non-human life is perched on a heaving, groaning, folding crust of rock. Water and vegetation, too, are never still but in constant, reshaping motion, sometimes as the result of human intervention, sometimes of their own accord. Movement—and mobility—are thus essential considerations in any conceptualization of the landscape and both the source and effect of its unruliness.

The 21st century seems to be on the move, perhaps even more so than the last. With cheap travel, and more than two billion cars projected worldwide for 2030. And yet, all this mobility is happening incredibly unevenly, at different paces and intensities, with varying impacts and consequences to the extent that life on the move might be actually quite difficult to sustain environmentally, socially and ethically. As a result 'mobility' has become a keyword of the social sciences; delineating a new domain of concepts, approaches, methodologies and techniques which seek to understand the character and quality of these trends. This Handbook explores and critically evaluates the debates, approaches, controversies and methodologies, inherent to this rapidly expanding discipline. It brings together leading specialists from range of backgrounds and geographical regions to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this field, conveying cutting edge research in an accessib...

*This course fulfills the Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights requirements for a secondary field " History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history " ~ Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) The current global moment carries the mark of border-crossings and transgressions where not only people are on the move, but also ideas and images about them. The refugee, the migrant, and the terrorist – while itinerant figures of different orders – they all inspire particular narratives about what constitutes " human nature " and inhumane practices. This seminar course for both undergraduate and graduate students explores the multiple meanings of mobility and stasis by examining the (dis)placement and circulation of people and things along with the (folk)tales that accompany "being on the road." New roads through rainforests can bring improved economic conditions to rural areas; they can also bring disease and environmental destruction. So-called " uncontacted " tribes still inhabit in parts of the Amazon rainforest and Bedouin tribes continue to trouble Middle Eastern states. These nomadic populations present a challenge to state politicians, in theory because they represent a nomadic legacy and the possibility of insurrection, along with the belief that they cannot coexist with the modern, fixed, nation-state. If history is always written from the seated point of view, what does a mobile history or global outlook look like? How do our perspectives on movement inform notions (or realizations) of peace, war, progress, and development? And what does it mean to tell a tale in motion? From the side of the road and on the highway, who and what can move or stay-as well as who can tell the tale-has defined those people and things gain and maintain social value.

Hybrid Mobilities. Transgressive Spatialities develops a relational approach to spatialities, such as space-times, connected to social networks. In these spatialities, identities are multiple, not fixed, and are constructed in their interactions with otherness and elsewhere (Massey 1993). By focusing on the production of spatialities in mobile situations, the book proposes rethinking territories, and more generally, societies in terms of their spatio-temporal dynamics. Hybrid Mobilities. Transgressive Spatialities aims to go beyond the usual dualities and segmentations of concepts such as mobility/immobility, distance/proximity, individual/collective, permanence/impermanence, presence/absence—dualities that fail to account for the complexity of the situations being analyzed. It also contributes to an interpretation of the coexisting temporalities inherent in contemporary urban processes, by looking at temporalities of mobility and those of immobility and anchorage, as well as by studying rhythms of individual trajectories and those of public policies that may be significantly different. In this sense, the book aims to highlight the cross-cutting dynamics of the construction of relationships to places, and the production of spatio-temporal arrangements made of assemblages that have so far only been studied marginally (Adey 2006; Müller 2015; Recchi & Flipo 2019)