[csaa-forum] Fw: 2026 symposium: Kinetic Lives

[Fran Martin]

Dear CSAA’ers,

Annisa and I are thrilled to share the CFP for this 2026 symposium: please take a look and consider applying, if these are your areas ☺

https://mobileselves.org/symposium/kinetic-lives-2026

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Research symposium, June 25-26 2026
The University of Melbourne, Woodward Conference Centre

Societies across Asia are undergoing significant shifts in the social organization of space, time, and gender. First, urbanization, the consolidation of globally connected capitalist economies, and the expansion of transnational education and labour routes, alongside ongoing increases in the number of forcibly displaced people, mean that medium-to-long term geographic mobility is an increasingly common experience. Second, the expansion of precarious work in some places, and ongoing political instability in others, create radical uncertainty in life planning, making people’s long- and even medium-term futures more difficult to imagine and predict. Third, gendered life courses are changing and diversifying. Many societies, especially those with high levels of women’s education, are witnessing changes in the organization of families and relationships, as seen in increasing age of marriage, decreasing fertility, rising divorce rates, and the emergence of alternative forms of intimate life including same-sex relationships and long-term singlehood.
Linking intensified human mobilities with transforming gender regimes, current research suggests that for young women and sex-gender minorities, personal geographic mobility may spur transformations in gendered life-course by distancing them somewhat from normative hometown pressures and opening up new horizons for post-traditional biographies. Conversely, in other cases mobility may support the reproduction of gendered conventions, as when heterosexual marriage migration enables the perpetuation of patriarchal family structures and power dynamics. Groups who have become mobile, whether through voluntary migration or forced displacement, may find that both specific changes in socio-cultural context and the experience of mobility itself reconfigure gender relations in unexpected ways; while mobility opportunities are themselves fundamentally shaped by gendered power relations.
These are some of the ongoing macro-scale transformations in configurations of space, time and gender in Asia today––but what do these processes feel like, at the micro-scale emotional level of people’s everyday experience? What transformations in gendered subjectivities are occurring as a result of these developments, across classes, geo-cultural regions and diverse mobility types? What new challenges do such changes create for intersubjective relations and negotiations? This symposium will explore these questions by gathering scholars working on contemporary Asia-related cultural research to consider sub-themes including:

  *   Gendered and emotional aspects of experiences of (im)mobility and (un)settlement among students, workers, displaced people and other mobile groups;
  *   The inflection of gendered (im)mobilities by class, sexuality, and racialization;
  *   Existential precarity in forced migrations (EG among refugees, asylum seekers, trafficked people, stateless people, internally displaced persons), and how displacement may reproduce and/or entrench gendered power relations;
  *   Spatio-temporal entwinement: how being (im)mobile affects gendered experiences of time; and how temporal patterns shape gendered experiences of (im)mobility and place;
  *   Everyday temporalities of (im)mobile gendered lives: tempo, rhythm, acceleration and deceleration;
  *   Gendered and emotional aspects of downshifting, lifestyle migration and the middle-class commodification of slowness and locality;
  *   Representations of (im)mobility, gender, emotion and spatio-temporal uncertainty in film, video, music, social media and other forms of art, media and creative and cultural production;
  *   New kinds of gendered belonging, care, hope and future imagination amid intensified mobility and precarity.


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