Accepted Panels

Anthropology has always been in movement, just like the world and the people it engages with. Such a dialectical nature of the discipline has meant that its conceptual apparatus to talk about movements of humans and other entities has continuously changed: pastoralism, nomadism, migration, diaspora, exile, refugees, circulations, mobilities, flows, etc. The centrality of each one of these concepts were often defined by historical moments of different societies and anthropology itself: colonialism, conflicts, postcolonial imaginaries, regional crises, globalization. More often than not these conceptual metamorphosis brought better understandings of the social world, but not rarely they also ended up creating hermeneutical imbroglios. The popularization of abstract categories like transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, hybridism, Third Space, scapes, global citizens, and expatriates, to cite but a few, only complicated an already fragmented field. More recently, “mobilities” has emerged as a new paradigm to cover a great array of experiences, responding to some challenges and creating others. In the light of these transformations, the Commission on Migration of the IUAES decided to address these conceptual complexities as a gesture of openness to a wider range of members, as it seeks to create a forum to address possible new horizons - and perhaps a new name - for the commission. For that end, we invite colleagues to reflect on the hermeneutical implications of this conceptual scattering and, more concretely, to think about possibilities of dialogues and connections between them. Our ultimate aim is to ruminate on the possibility of terms capable of representing what many of us have been doing inside the IUAES without falling into excessively large approaches.