Preface: Stuck in Motion? Capturing the Dialectics of Movement and Stasis in an Era of Containment

Abstract

In this special section we rethink the role of movement and stasis in an age of globalization from an existential perspective. We suggest that this theoretical avenue is particularly well suited to move beyond the dualistic binaries that have haunted much writing on mobilities. Rather than fixating movement and stasis into two opposite poles, this perspective allows us to productively work with the overlaps and paradoxes as they appear in the everyday, thereby carving out a dialectics of im/mobility. We argue that exploring the interplay of movement and stasis has become particularly important in the current global political climate, where the mobilities of people and groups deemed troublesome are violently cut short or obstructed in ways that keep them “stuck” in continuous loops of “motion”. By zooming in on the vectorial metaphors migrants and refugees seemingly stuck in immovable conditions deploy to make sense of their situations, we conceptualize both the existential orientation of migratory projects and the wider social and political coordinates impinging on these inner quests for (forward) movement and/or stillness.

Keywords

• mobility
• immobility
• migration
• existential anthropology
• experience
• containment
• dialectics
• ethnographic theory
• dialogical writing