Mobility from a cultural perspective: connections between cultural histories, cultural geographies and literary studies

In their recent delineation of the new subfield of Mobility and the Humanities, Merriman and Pearce (2017) focused on the specific contributions that a humanistic perspective can bring to the well-established field of mobility studies. First, the Humanities allow the exploration of the experience of mobility in addition to the factual movement of people, objects and ideas; second, they introduce a historical perspective, stressing the temporal dimension of mobility processes and practices; third, the Humanities work with texts and representations; forth, they are particularly capable of generating theoretical possibilities for the interpretation of mobility in its nuanced variations. Merriman and Pearce (2017) also underline the need to rediscover the alternative genealogies that offered early or implicit theorisation of mobility in the humanistic field. This project uses what Bal (2002) called a ‘concept based methodology’ to study ‘travelling concepts’ in the Humanities to propose a mobility-based methodology for fields such as cultural history, cultural geography and literary studies (but also visual and classical studies). The temporal frame extends from antiquity to the present and to possible futures. The mobility of people and objects, of ideas and cultural products, as well the contexts and the infrastructures hosting these mobilities may be captured from research angles that help not only to explore the meanings of movement but also to reimagine mobility studies from a humanistic and cultural perspective. How does the evocative concept of mobility impact our intellectual creativity? What is the potential of this concept to generate transdisciplinary and transmedial nexuses? If movement becomes mobility when it ceases to be factual evidence and becomes practice and discourse, experience and meaning (Cresswell, 2010), what are the different nuances of mobility in past, present and future times?

The project includes a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the University of Padova and the CRPM at the Université Paris Nanterre, networking activities, meetings and seminars, a joint conference, and the publication of an edited collection.