Crises reinforce uncertainties across society. Different mobilities and social cleavages are exacerbated by crises brought by pandemics, ecological concerns, wars and conflicts. Analysing crises from the perspective of mobility and immobility is anthropologically relevant in several ways. It invites us to rethink our relationship to space, time, and social interactions, and allows us to consider how different types of mobility are unequally distributed and socially valued.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed social inequalities exposing how not everyone has the same access to spatial or virtual mobilities, which are often linked to economic and social capital (Pardo and Prato 2021). It exposed that the immobility of some people conditions the mobility of others and vice versa, and that the different types of mobility are not perceived and valued in the same way.
Moreover, it has also shown from the first lockdowns, the high value of mountain and rural open spaces and the search for a healthier environment considered to be found outside of cities.
Not only the pandemics, but also the uncertainty of the future given by conflicts and ecological concerns brings back a mobility that seeks refuge in rural and mountainous areas. The marginal rural space becomes the center of the urbanites quest, though only for those who can choose it and dispose, among others, a mobility capital.
In this panel, we invite participants:
- to reflect on these different aspects of mobility and immobility during times of crisis, on how crises reveal social inequalities and allow developments of new ways of social interaction;
- to consider the old hierarchies between the peripheral rural and the central urban space, the imaginaries linked to each one, and how they are reactivated in times of crisis;
- to consider how crises and mobility/immobility may induce new perspectives on social anthropological theories.
