Moving assemblies. Socio-political mobilization in Angola’s collective transport

Borderlands, 2022

It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all sorts are on the move, and that the politics around mobility and its regulation and meaning are critical to contemporary political and social life. Human migration has been globally intensive for well over a century; industrial economic production, consumption, and trade move goods around the world; transportation infrastructure moves all sorts of cargo around, human and nonhuman; regular and irregular ecological processes and changes are creating new patterns of nonhuman movement; variants of viruses race around the world; even geological elements are far from static. This special issue tackles the challenge of thinking about mobility, not only in its individual instances where it is treated in self-enclosed containers, and not only in its usual contrast to place, ground, sedentarism, and static forms of being; but rather, in the terms of the generative forces created when multiple mobilities come together and cross paths, for better and for ill-in short, intersecting mobilities.

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2011

In this introduction, we outline the general conceptual framework that ties the various contributions to this special issue together. We argue for the importance of anthropology to “take on” mobility and discuss the advantages of the ethnographic approach in doing so. What is the analytical purchase of mobility as one of the root metaphors in contemporary anthropological theorizing? What are the (dis)advantages of looking at the current human condition through the lens of mobility? There is a great risk that the fast-growing field of mobility studies neglects different interpretations of what is going on, or that only patterns that fit the mobilities paradigm will be considered, or that only extremes of (hyper)mobility or (im)mobility will be given attention. The ethnographic sensibilities of fieldworkers who learn about mobility while studying other processes and issues, and who can situate movement in the multiple contexts between which people move, can both extend the utility of the mobilities approach, and insist on attention to other dynamics that might not be considered if the focus is first and last on (im)mobility as such. In this special issue, we do not want to discuss human mobility as a brute fact but rather analyze how mobilities, as sociocultural constructs, are experienced and imagined.

This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.

Stichproben. Vienna Journal of African Studies, 2023

In this article, I reflect on approaches to African Studies and to Mobility Studies with the intention of elaborating on possible ways to bridge these two transdisciplinary fields. Thereby, I draw on published research in both fields as well as on my own research projects located at the junction of African Studies and Mobility Studies. An earlier version of this text has originally served as part of the introduction to my cumulative habilitation thesis (Englert 2022a). It does not aim at a comprehensive overview of those two fields but rather highlights how subjective trajectories shape the way in which research fields are being approached. 1 Several earlier issues of Stichproben, have engaged with notions of mobility and contributed to the increasing literature on Africa-related mobilities research. 2 This essay aims at raising some more general questions concerning the way these two fields take note of each other. In doing so, I touch upon debates on positionality, knowledge production, representation as well as the possibilities and limits of transdisciplinarity and argue for an approach that centres mobilities in, from and to Africa without separating them from ongoing debates.

2017

This paper concerns the social process of mobility control in four West African countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Ghana. Mobility has long been an important aspect of West African social, cultural, and political life, although now mobile people cross the borders of what are relatively newly-defined nation-states. Most migration research in this region considers international boundaries as merely theoretical and unimportant to the lives of migrants, and empirical research on borders focuses on the ethnic groups living in border zones. This study explores everyday enforcement of international and internal mobility control, and the ways in which mobile Africans respond to and resist the actions of security agents. I do this using ethnographic evidence gathered when traveling over 10,000 miles in Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire over a period of nine months. Data were gathered through participant observation at 23 international borders in West Africa, and...

Allegra Lab, 2024

William Walter, Charles Heller, and Lorenzo Pezzani’s Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion stands as a uniquely articulated materialist engagement with the political, governmental, and scholarly objectification of migration as a “social” issue. While positioning “viapolitics” within a trajectory informed by analyses of biopolitics, the governance of populations, and the formation of the subject, the volume displaces the centrality of migrant subjectivity by foregrounding the vehicle as an “epistemic device to unravel the edifice of scholarly analyses, governmental practice, and policy discourses built around migration and borders” (11). A focus on the vehicle allows for the ambiguous intersections between people moving, the things that move them, and the spaces in which they move to emerge as complex webs of contextualisation, interpellation, and assertion. Tracing migrant mobility through spaces, experiences, temporalities, borders, landscapes, and transformations, the volume asks how questions of belonging, distinction, and common cause come to be understood in terms of movement and how movement itself takes shape as a form of power.

Citizenship Studies, 2013

This collection of field-based case studies examines the role and contributions of Africa’s informal public transport (also referred to as paratransit) to the production of city forms and urban economies, as well as the voices, experiences and survival tactics of its poor and stigmatised workforce. With attention to the question of what a micro-level analysis of the organisation and politics of informal public transport in urbanising Africa might tell us about the precarious existence and agency of its informal workforce, it explores the political and socioeconomic conditions of contemporary African cities, spanning from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam to Harare, Cape Town, Kinshasa and Lagos. Mapping, analysing and comparing the everyday experiences of informal transport operators across the continent, this book sheds light on the multiple challenges facing Africa’s informal transport workers today, as they negotiate the contours of city life, expand their horizons of possibility and make the most of their time. It thus offers directions for more effective policy response to urban public transport, which is changing fundamentally and rapidly in light of neoliberal urban planning strategies and ‘world class’ city ambitions.

2013

Processes resulting from and in turn (re-)shaping translocal connectivities and entanglements in economic, political and cultural contexts have significant impacts upon the social dynamics within and between the groups involved.1 Thus they also affect the everyday lives of people. While such processes undoubtedly have a long historical dimension, they have intensified since European colonial expansion and industrialisation and acquired new dimensions »globalisation« processes since the late decades of the 20th century.2 First steamers, railways, telegraph and telephone rapidly in creased the speed, quantity and quality of travel and communication; then a further shift accompanied the invention and mass production of aeroplanes, computers and mobile phones. Yet we must be cautious not to ascribe too mono-centric a position to overarching Western paradigms and narratives of (first) an expansive imperial agenda, i.e. seeking to extend one’s own markets and political terrains at the cos...

2018