Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe

Abstract

Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This article and Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, the special issue of JEMS it introduces, build on, as well as critique, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, this issue challenges conceptual orientations built on binaries of difference that have impeded analyses of the interrelationship between mobility and stasis. These include methodological nationalism, which counterpoises concepts of internal and international movement and native and foreigner, and consequently normalises stasis. Instead, the issue offers a regimes of mobility framework that addresses the relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and transnational connection, experiences and imaginaries of migration, and rootedness and cosmopolitan openness. The introduction highlights how, within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although the authors examine nation-state building processes, their analysis is not confined by national boundaries.

Keywords:

• Regimes of Mobility
• Immobility
• Transnationalism
• Migration
• Methodological Nationalism
• Ethnography

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the articles in this special issue of JEMS were presented at a panel entitled ‘A New Virtue? Imaginaries and Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe’, organised by Noel B. Salazar and Pál Nyíri at the 11^th EASA Biennial Conference in Maynooth, Ireland, in 2010. We would like to thank the audience, and all the session participants for their comments and suggestions. We also want to show our gratitude to Pál Nyíri for his valuable input to this special issue.

Notes

1. There is an interesting parallel during colonial times when pastoralists such as the Maasai in East Africa were revered but also demonised. Colonial migrants were sometimes similarly sought as a key to modernisation and urbanisation and feared as deculturated (Epstein 1967). Today, the glamorisation and criminalisation of those who move may also happen at the same time, so that temporary tourists are sought while those who come to work or settle more permanently are rejected.

2. In making this point, we acknowledge and thank an anonymous JEMS reviewer.

3. Bell's concept of mythscape has been applied to migration studies by anthropologist Garbi Schmidt (2012).