The Center for Place, Culture and Politics’ Annual Conference 2025:
Mobility: Transit and Transformation
Friday, April 25th and Saturday, April 26th
The evening of April 25th and the day of April 26th, please join the Center for Place, Culture and Politics for our annual conference on next year’s seminar theme of Mobility: Transit and Transformation.
Day 1 – Friday 04/25
5:30–6:00
Welcome and Introduction
6:00–8:00
Forced Mobilities and Desired Immobilities: Medical Deportations and the Fight for the Right to Stay
Lisa Sun-Hee Park + Adrianna Torres-García of the Free Migration Project
Day 2 – Saturday 04/26
10:45–11:00
Coffee and Settle In
11:00–11:15
Welcome and Introduction
11:15–1:00
Crises of Mobility and Immobility
Karim Mattar + Shailja Patel
1:00–2:00
Lunch
2:00–3:45
Transit: Moving People, Building Power
Kafui Attoh + Monique McClain (Tennessee Drivers Union)
3:45–4:00
Break
4:00–5:45
Transformations: Possibilities and Impossibilities
A. Naomi Paik + Natasha Iskander
Crises of mobility have become a key integer of social struggle in the world system. Whether one considers the explosion of different forms of movement—and the unending state efforts to classify them as deserving or undeserving, as economic, environmental, or asylum-based—or the production of immobility, in carcerality, wagelessness, enclosure, or via the securitization of borders, mobility and its discontents are central to radical activism across local and transnational communities. How do shifts in forms of mobility inform or mediate the conditions of social change? What are the links between transit and transition? Do contemporary logics of mobility, at different scales, temporalities and intensities, represent counter-hegemonic realms of possibility, political imagination, and new ways to think and express transformation?
This conference will examine mobility and immobility from a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches. What are the relevant conditions of material change for organizers and scholars? How should we understand mobility: as a way to rethink political economy, as the inevitable undoing of the nation-state, as an ontological condition? What methodologies are adequate to understanding the movement (or not) of people across the planet, and what happens when we broaden the frame to include the things that people move with and against: commodities, capital, viruses, racialized infrastructures, ecologies, abolition imaginaries and practices? The conference will explore the possible parameters of praxis and the production of knowledge that attends them. How can mobility itself be mobilized?
This conference is organized and sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. It is co-sponsored by The Futures Initiative, the Center for the Humanities, and the Departments of English and Anthropology. It is free and open to the public.
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