Shaping Mobile Worlds in Asia: Human and Nonhuman Socialities

Abstract

In these difficult, pressing and uncertain times, migration and mobility in Asia have been incorporated into the projects of state institutions, media and a range of civil society actors. These agendas engender and shape debates that include belonging and exclusion; social mobility and inequality; conflict, violence and persecution; economic growth and labor market outcomes; state regulation, governance and governmentality; as well as diversity and innovation. Where migratory flows and mobility are advancing significant economic, social, political, environmental and ethical concerns, it becomes imperative for us to rethink and unpack these core concepts in creative and multidisciplinary ways. To do so, we assemble a group of scholars from disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and geography who work on a variety of topics related to migration studies, sensory scholarship, anthropology of documents, religion, knowledge mobilities, citizenship, and education. Various case studies to be featured in this special issue include Timor Leste, Singapore, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, and Taiwan. Collectively the authors critically consider the centrality of both human and non-human actors in constituting the different types, degree, and scales of migration and mobility. The articles in this collection engage with how people, objects, things, deities, discourses, and knowledge move across the different and multiple pathways that constitute everyday life in Asia, the shared regional focus of our various research projects. The collection further elicits the connectivities (or entanglements) and comparisons evinced in our individual research, and collectively, with the goal of critically revisiting and reworking our conceptual toolkits and methodologies.