Mobility has become the trope of our times. Contemporary western modernity is premised on fast-paced mobilities and social acceleration. Such an idea of modernity is based on the promise that a singular pathway to progress, represented by speed, is the best and only possibility for our present and future.
Within such a paradigm, while the mobility of the likes of global tourists and digital nomads is privileged, the mobility of pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, craftsfolk, performers and travellers continues to be seen as backward, degenerative and unproductive. Policies and development interventions seek to settle, disenfranchise, and oppress mobile peoples. Shifts in political economies and growing social inequalities, coupled with crises like the climate emergency and the covid pandemic, further reinforce old hierarchies and marginalise itinerant, nomadic and mobile communities.
This panel proposes to disrupt this binary and explore the space between these many mobilities. It will draw on the fluid experiences and practices of mobile peoples to understand how they navigate and engage with new and uncertain circumstances. The panel asks: What can we learn from the experiences of mobile peoples about contemporary modernity? What arenas of action can open through these new understandings? It will bring to attention the neglected, ‘subalternized’ narratives that have been usurped and suppressed by dominant conceptualisations and opens to inquiry an interactional space of creative difference.
Learnings from mobile peoples offer a plural understanding of progress and modernities that incorporate different visions of the future. Such an understanding serves to upset the reifying, unitary and linear vision of modernity. Hybrid, porous, layered multiplicities of modernity emerge through the cracks between the dichotomy of ‘new’ and ‘old’ and ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ mobilities, and ‘nomads’ and ‘neo-nomads.’. Modernity at these intersections emerge as adaptive, heterogeneous, experimental, accidental, ambiguous and uncertain.
