Events

UPCOMING EVENTS

AnthroMOB's 7th MoMO (Moving Mobilities Online) talk

On Monday, 6 November 2023 at 5pm (CET), Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia (Max‐Planck‐Institute) and Sara Bonfanti (University of Genoa) will give an online talk “Finding home in Europe: Global Migration Chronicles”. The talk will critically engage with how home is experienced by those who move among changing social and cultural constraints and challenge the narrative that refugees, asylum seekers and migrants are ‘out of place’. Sara and Luis Eduardo will critically reflect on how the idea of building on life story as a method and a result of ethnographic research emerged and how the analysis of the search and struggles for home of nine individuals push the boundaries in which the intersections between home and mobility have been conceptualised.

Please register for the talk here: https://forms.gle/RZBxMw88S6ihw1tRA

PAST EVENTS

connectivities, ecologies, engagements: recrafting mobilities in the 2020s
14-15 September 2023
Sheffield, UK

From a once fringe approach within the social sciences to a now core field of inquiry in both research and policy, mobilities have become a central part of how many people conceive of the contemporary world. Yet, many of the challenges and changes that the world has faced over the past decade also necessitate rethinking the role of mobilities, and mobility studies, in the 2020s. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ‘Fielding Challenges, Challenging the Field: The Methodologies of Mobility’ ANTHROMOB workshop held at COMPAS, Oxford in 2013, this international workshop, organised by Dr Jamie Coates, fostered and developed new collaborative approaches for studying mobilities from an anthropological perspective. As human and non-human phenomena become at once more mobile and more sedentary, anthropologists, along with counterparts in fields such as media and environmental studies, sociology, and human geography, have taken to researching life in motion and lives in situ. This widening transdisciplinarity has called for the development of research methods that can approach the spectrum of new digital and non-digital forms of mobile life, as well as new interdependencies, materialities and ecologies. Taking inspiration from these shifts, this workshop examined the connectivities and ecologies an (im)mobility approach affords. In particular, we seeked to develop new inclusive ways of thinking about the human/non-human and digital/non-digital that help us engage with different disciplines, fields and stakeholders. Working with colleagues from across EASA networks we explored how the methodologies circulating within overlapping areas of the human sciences have created new ways for anthropology to engage with the world. We explored both novel methodological approaches as well as re-framings of "traditional" ways of doing research that reinvigorate the value of aThe workshop featured both presentations as well as creative workshops and exploratory activities.

This event was organised in coordination with the EASA Visual Anthropology Network (VANEASA), who organised an additional event in Manchester next to this ANTHROMOB workshop.

URL: https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/connectivitiesanthromob2023/


AnthroMOB's 6th MoMO (Moving Mobilities Online) talk

27 April 2023 "A visual regime of urban mobility? Interventions in passenger “misconduct” on Tokyo’s public transport network" by Dr Christoph Schimkowsky (University of Tokyo).


EASA2022 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

There were 4 official ANTHROMOB panels at the 2022 EASA conference in Belfast.
At the network meeting the previous convenors of the network, Fabiola Mancinelli, Silvia Wojczewski and Anna Lisa Ramella stepped down and new convenors Flavia Cangià, Maarja Kaaristo and Diana Mata-Codesal were elected.


EASA2020 virtual conference in Lisbon, Portugal

There were 8 official ANTHROMOB panels at the 2020 virtual EASA conference.


Mobility and the Future of Work
6-8 November 2019, University of Barcelona, Spain

The workshop was organized in collaboration with University of Barcelona, CONJUST and GER Grup d’estudis sobre reciprocitat. The international workshop engaged with the intersecting notions of mobilities, work and the future, discussing how mobile work practices challenge received notions of not just work and home, but also ideas of leisure, productive age, and retirement. Keynote speech was given by Dr. Diana Mata-Codesal from the OACU – Observatory of Anthropology of Urban Conflict.


Anthropologies of Media and Mobility: Theorizing movement and circulations across entangled fields
The joint workshop of Anthropology and Mobility Network (ANTHROMOB) and the Anthropology of Media Network together scholars working on the theoretical underpinnings of media and mobility studies in anthropology, with an emphasis on early and mid-career academics. The workshop theorised the relationship between media and mobility focusing on how the linkages between media and mobility can enable more thorough understandings of how various power structures produce, transform and reproduce social, material and discursive orders.


EASA 2016 in Milan, Italy

In 2016, the ANTHROMOB network had its most active year ever in terms of conference panels and paper presentations. All convenors together participated in a rigorous vetting, editing and peer reviewing process of mobility-themed panel proposals during the conference. This resulted in 13 submitted panels and laboratories, 9 of which were finally accepted by the scientific committee to take place in Milan. The Milan panels comprised the following:

P030 Mobilities - ethnographically connected. Beyond the 'gap' between internal and transnational migration

P048 Moving beyond the colonial? North-South mobility, power and post-colonial encounters

P064 Mobility, Precarity, and the Activation of Kinship and Intimacy

P069 Slow travelling: A precious heritage or a sustainable strategy for future mobilities? 

P101 Political Subjectivities in the Face of Displacement: Claiming rights, belonging, and social citizenship  

P102 The Power of Mobile Materialities: human movement, objects and the worlds they create (2 sessions) 

P121 Mobility, power and possibility: The search for liveable lives  

P149 Embedding onward migration within Europe into long-distance migratory trajectories (2 sessions)

Lab 01 On the move: walking as anthropological method


Mobile Work-Life Arrangements: Exploring Conceptual and Methodological Challenges
09.10.2015 - 18.10.2015 in Freiburg, Germany

ANTHROMOB co-organised a 10-day doctoral student late summer school in concert with the research group Cultures of Mobility in Europe (COME), led by Dr. Anna Lipphardt. This engaging, multidisciplinary event brought together junior scholars carrying out research on mobile or multi-local work-life arrangements. The ten days encouraged participants to ponder contexts in which mobile practices are an integral part of the quotidian negotiation between different forms of work/subsistence and other spheres of life, such as family life and social networks, housing, political involvement, religion, or leisure. It gave the opportunity for postgraduate students to learn from junior and senior scholars who work across both the social sciences and the humanities.


Grounding (im)mobility: Embodiment, ephemera, ecologies
Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 10-11 September, 2015

groundingmobility.wordpress.com

The Workshop Co-organisers: Jamie Coates, Waseda University (Japan), Simone Frangella, ICS, University of Lisbon (Portugal), José Mapril, CRIA (Portugal), Roger Norum, University of Leeds (UK), Valerio Simoni, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (Switzerland), Francesco Vacchiano, ICS, University of Lisbon (Portugal), Lauren Wagner, Maastricht University (The Netherlands)

covered subjects of embodiment, belonging, morality, media, borders and infrastructure, mobile participatory methods and visual collaboration. The presenters included a mix of EASA members and non-members, ranging from academics to MA candidates, to practitioners outside academia. Filmmaker and curator Daniela Swarovsky screened her most recently completed second film in the Messages from Paradise trilogy (www.zimweb.nl/mfp2/?l=en), on perceptions about life and migration outcomes between Morocco and the Netherlands. Finally, Samuli Schielke served as 'grand discussant' in the final roundtable session, in which all workshop participants were invited to consider future directions for theoretical and methodological work on mobilities.

The event reached about 45 participants in total, including presenters, volunteers, and attendees. In addition to the 25 presenters, representing 18 different institutions in Europe and the US, the workshop was attended by several researchers from institutions in Lisbon and elsewhere in Portugal. The infrastructural participation of the ICS was key for the success of the workshop, while the workshop contributed to boosting the presence of Anthropology in this dedicated research institute for social sciences.

The final programme, with the full list of presenters and abstracts, can be found here: 1drv.ms/1VBiX66.
As a bonus, the recording of Samuli Schielke's discussant summary is available here: 1drv.ms/1j2EMip


EASA2014 in Tallinn, Estonia

In Tallinn, there were 6 official ANTHROMOB panels.
During the 2014 EASA conference in Tallinn, we also held a network meeting where we nominated and elected a new convenors group. Jamie Coates stepped down as convenor, as he is moving to Japan for a research fellowship, while Roger Norum stayed on as convenor, alongside Valerio Simoni and Lauren Wagner.


Fielding Challenges, Challenging the Field: The methodologies of mobility
27-28 Sept, 2013, University of Oxford
URL: www.compas.ox.ac.uk/mobmeth

In response to the methodological challenges that had been expressed by many of colleagues, the network’s co-convenors Jamie Coates and Roger Norum organised a workshop focusing on how mobility informs and challenges contemporary ethnographic research and writing. The event was hosted by the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, with EASA network funding set aside to cover accommodation and travel costs for those EASA members who would otherwise not have been able to attend. Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) in Leuven also provided support with Alice Elliot and Noel Salazar joining the workshop coordination team. Berghahn Books provided additional funding, support and many books at the event.

In total, the event saw the participation of 85 delegates from all around the world including leading universities in Europe, the USA, Australia and China, with 32 paper presentations and keynote speeches by Noel Salazar and Hans Lucht. The research interests of attendees also spanned mobility within and between all the continents of the globe (yes, even Antarctica), showing a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to the question of mobility. Considering the range of nationalities, research topics and disciplines present at the workshop, it was perhaps, as one participant commented, the “most mobile conference on mobility” held in the region to date.

In addition to fostering widespread interest in EASA’s biennial conference in Tallinn, with several possible network-linked panels proposed, the workshop also generated discussion surrounding several joint publications. The network and workshop co-convenors are currently putting in a proposal for a compiled volume/journal special issue of papers from the event.