Preface: Stuck in motion? Capturing the dialectics of movement and stasis in an era of containment

Abstract

In this special section we think through the role of movement and stasis in an age of globalisation from an existential perspective. We suggest that this epistemological avenue is particularly well suited to moving beyond the dualistic binaries that have haunted much writing on mobilities. Rather than fixing movement and stasis at two opposite poles, this perspective allows us to work productively with the overlaps and paradoxes as they appear in the everyday, thereby carving out a dialectics of im/mobility. We argue that exploring the interplay of movement and stasis has become particularly important in the current global political climate, where the mobilities of people and groups deemed troublesome are violently cut short or obstructed in ways that keep them 'stuck' in continuous loops of motion. By zooming in on the vectorial metaphors that migrants and refugees seemingly stuck in immovable conditions deploy to make sense of their situations, we conceptualise both the existential orientation of migratory projects and the wider social and political coordinates impinging on these inner quests for (forward) movement and/or stillness.