Disruptive Mobilities: Unsettling Law, Space, and Identities through Movement

The onset of the pandemic generated a powerful, universal newfound currency for mobility. Around the world, many yearned to exercise their freedom of movement, even those who had long settled into sedentary lives. In this context, this seminar series asks: what does mobility mean in today’s times?

While the practice of mobility has been normalised as the physical movement across space, its conceptual understanding reveals a more complex relationship between the body, agency, and the State.

At least three aspects of mobility warrant deeper inquiry. First, with the turn of the millennium, the migratory identity of the nomad has come to be conflated with liberal ideas of ‘choice’. This romantic prefiguration of the nomad by the State hides the more insidious processes of capitalist accumulation and governing through displacement that compel movement. Second, mobility exposes the absurdity of man-made borders - a colonial tekhné that encloses and orders people to fabricate a shared sense of belonging to the nation-State. The border, as both myth and mechanism, allows the State to engage in spacemaking that delineates the ‘Self’ from the ‘Other’. Third, mobility also invites attention away from the point of origin-destination and instead pushes to study the process of journeying or becoming; an embodied, affective, and reflexive process that resists static and Statist understandings of body, place, and identity.

This seminar series seeks to open a continuing conversation on these shifting meanings of mobility by bringing together perspectives from across disciplines. From the everyday realities of sex workers and digital nomads to those of pastoralists, diasporas, and tourists, this online series aims to explore new conceptual registers of movement and call for a radical reimagining of mobility in today’s world.

Please reach out to us if you have a published paper or book in-progress work you would like to present at the series:

- Dr Raghavi Viswanath (rv13@soas.ac.uk)

and Dr Fariya Yesmin (fy7@soas.ac.uk)

- or write to: sociallifeoflaw@soas.ac.uk

The social life of Authoritarian Legality is a five-year research project based at SOAS University of London, funded by the Leverhulme Trust

Upcoming Seminars:

1. Hoofprints in the City: Articulating More-than-human Mobilities

   01 Dec 2025, 15:00 – 16:30 (BST), Virtual Event