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Approaching immobility as a dynamic, relational and meaningful experience embedded in power structures, this volume offers a critical anthropological examination of immobility as a central condition shaping contemporary lives. Across diverse ethnographic contexts, it shows how people live through imposed stasis, prolonged waiting and constrained futures, while negotiating uncertainty and limited control over their lives. It foregrounds how immobility is unevenly produced and sustained, yet also inhabited through everyday practices, moral reasoning and acts that seek to preserve dignity, purpose and a sense of possible futures.
This is a timely collection of chapters that speaks to a growing interest in immobility within migration studies and related research fields. It will be a seminal reference in the study of immobility.
Jørgen Carling, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)
Diana Mata-Codesal is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Barcelona in Spain. She publishes mostly on migration and human mobility with a focus on Latin American migrants. She was the co-convenor of the Anthropology and Mobility Research Network (AnthroMob) of EASA 2022-2024 and previously the co-coordinator of the Migrant Organizations research cluster of IMISCOE (European Network for Migration Studies) 2015-2018.
Contents
Introduction. Immobilities. Anthropological appreciations.
Diana Mata-Codesal and Maarja Kaaristo
Part I: Emic understandings of immobility
Chapter 1. Taaxu (sitting). Entangled Immobilities in the Gambia.
Paolo Gaibazzi
Chapter 2. Sumud (steadfastness) Amid Immobility and Fragmentation in Palestinian Communities.
Joshua Rickard
Chapter 3. From Staying to Looking After Chicks to Staying to Working for Oneself. Changing Meanings of Immobility Among the Ngäbe of Panama.
Anna Peñuelas
Part II: The Production of Immobility
Chapter 4. Resisting Overlapping Sub-Regimes of Im/mobility. Migrant Agency in the Canary Islands.
Ignacio Fradejas-García, Kristín Loftsdóttir and Franziska Zanker
Chapter 5. Border Impasses. On Waiting and Immobility in Asylum.
Caterina Borelli
Chapter 6. Attempting to Resist Life Outside. Negotiating and Justifying Im/mobility in a Bosnian Supermarket.
Milana Čergić
Chapter 7. The Im/mobility of Undocumented Migrants Crossing the Balkans. The Emergence of a Moral Economy of Migration and Moving Horizons.
Synnøve Bendixsen
Part III: Temporalities of Immobility
Chapter 8. Inherited Immobility and Practices of Hope Among People Seeking Protection in Hong Kong.
Elena Nichini, Honglin Zhu, Gary Ka-ki Chung, Dong Dong
Chapter 9. Fearing and Desiring Mobility. Continuum of Carcerality Among the Detainable and Deportable Asylum Eeekers in Japan.
Taku Suzuki
Chapter 10. Temporal Im/mobility in Cross-Border Railways. Perspectives from Two European Border Regions.
Alastair Mackie and Aleida Bertran
Afterword. Reframing Immobility. Ethnographic Explorations of a Multifaceted Concept.
Noel B. Salazar