Mobile places and emplaced mobilities: problematizing the place-mobility nexus

Abstract

Places are key to our understanding of human mobilities and the other way around. Places and mobilities exist in a co-constitutive relationship, making it difficult to disentangle one from the other. Research across disciplines needs to pay more sustained attention to how places are mobile and to how mobilities are emplaced. It is crucial to undertake both endeavours simultaneously. Privileging the former, as happens in globalization studies, leads to de-essentialized conceptualizations of place, questioning the traditional taken-for-granted bond between peoples and territories, but it also creates a disconnect between high-level theory and lived experiences. Favouring the latter, on the contrary, as happens in more micro-scale and phenomenological approaches, leads to embodied understandings of human movement, but often overlooks the influential local-to-global power relations and structures that are implicated in local(ized) practices and processes. Based on a critical reading of existing scholarship and drawing on ethnographic and emic understandings of mobility-related issues in various contexts around the globe, this article develops conceptual as well as methodological insights about the multiple ways in which places are mobile and mobilities are emplaced. This includes anthropological reflections on displacement and immobilization. I end by offering suggestions for future transdisciplinary research on the place-mobility nexus.

Keywords:

• Mobility
• place
• emplacement
• embodiment
• displacement
• immobilization
• theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).