2021/12/01 by Noël B. Salazar · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Migration and Labor Dynamics #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #China's Global Influence and Migration
paper · doi:10.3167/trans.2021.110302
openalex publication_date 2021/12/01 · openalex created_date 2022/07/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
In this article, I discuss immobility as both an analytical concept and a lived experience. I review contemporary scholarly understandings of immobility and disentangle the unavoidable relational dynamics with its positive linguistic opposite, mobility. Concrete illustrations from migration studies and the global coronavirus crisis illustrate how immobility, at various scales of analysis and experience, is not only theoretically but also socially, economically, and politically relevant. Together with the in-depth review of existing scholarship, these examples confirm that the conceptual distinction made between immobility and mobility is often purely heuristic. In the messiness of people’s lives, mobility and immobility are not mutually exclusive categories but, rather, two dynamic sides of the same coin.