Mobilities

Led by Rodanthi Tzanelli

cultural globalisation, liquid/multiple modernities, tourism and travel, mobile technologies, virtual and literary cultures

Our work in this area encompasses varied explorations of the dimensions and tensions of movement across time and space, as this is shaped into purposeful activity, such as virtual or embodied travel, tourism, free movement, migration and diasporic community formation. Considering the poetics and politics of mobility, place and space, we consider the phenomenological and material arrangements infrastructures assume to organise our social lives and cultural habits, and new or emergent cosmologies and ontologies. Among them, we include those associated with urban, exurban, rural and island-based lifestyles and modes of engagement with social and natural worlds; and the means, tools and capacities for connectivity with them, including embodied performance and performativity, local and global telecommunication systems, and varied forms of auto- and aero-mobilities — and the regimes that shape them. Research in this area also invites the interrogation of the invisible cosmological underpinnings of all these phenomena as they contingently or rhizomatically produce entangled, multiple or dominant versions of modernity (or modernities) and experience. Modernities are products and producers of local and global connectivity and/or inequalities. As modal forms of being, belonging and becoming, they invite the rigorous study of social conflict, cross-cultural co-option or political and cultural friction in particular contexts or across different cultures and states. The contexts studied highlight how liquid or fixed mentalities inform sociocultural transformation in contemporary settings, without discarding their genealogies and potential futures.