The Spaces & Flows Research Network is brought together around a shared interest in the changing shape of human spaces and the social, economic and informational flows that connect these spaces. Its 2018 conference has a special focus on “Mobilities in the Global North and South: Critical Urban and Global Visions,” and takes a closer look at mobilities and urban spatialities in the social sciences.
Mobile perspectives underline how the experience of globalization is in myriad ways defined through ever‐increasing qualities of mobility: ranging from the concrete transportation systems and infrastructures enabling the flows of people negotiating everyday urban and global mobilities, to the movement of capital and socio‐economic classes into or out of urban habitats; from the manufactured goods and hazardous wastes carried across extensive and intricate logistics networks, to the transfer and diffusion of urban governance policies, practices, and ideas; and from the variations of migration in the face of war, changing labor patterns, climate change, or social conflict.
Far from simply being a “marker of an era” or a “neutral means to an end”, mobilities are deeply meaningful and embodied, gendered and racialized, and bound up in social, cultural, and political struggle from the local to the global. Particular challenges emerge from studying mobilities in various disciplines, affecting our epistemologies, methodologies, and theoretical concepts of the global and the urban.
The conference will address the topics „Urban and Extraurban Spaces,“ „Human Environments and Ecosystemic Effects,“ and “Material and Immaterial Flows;“ a special focus is on „Mobilities in the Global North and South – Critical Urban and Global Visions.“ There will be a diverse range of interactive formats, ranging from plenary sessions to garden conversations, talking circles, workshops, and focused discussions. Keynote speakers are Melissa Butcher (University of London), Timothy J. Cresswell (Trinity College), and Jason Henderson (San Francisco State University).
The annual conference is organized by the HCTS professor of Visual and Media Antropology, Prof. Christiane Brosius, Ulrike Gerhard, Gregg Culver and Svenja Kück from the Institute of Geography as well as David Wilson (Urbana-Champaign) on behalf of the Spaces & Flows Research Network. The Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, the Institute of Geography, and the Marsilius Kolleg at Heidelberg University are the 2018 conference partners. Brosius, Gerhard, and Culver will also participate in the closing panel discussion “Mobilities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Presence and Future of a Cricual Concept” on October 26.
For further information, please visit the website or write to urbanmobilities@uni‐heidelberg.de.