Call for Papers
Sixth New Zealand Mobilities Symposium: Mobilities in a ‘Dangerous World’
25 and 26 June, 2015, University of Waikato
The contemporary world and its real and imagined ‘dangers’ offers us with a variety of challenging themes to explore in this Sixth New Zealand Mobilities Symposium, including sustainable mobilities, climate change and human mobility, mobility justice, historical mobilities in new perspective, the mobilities of disease and war, and mobilities and the borders of the nation state. We have conceptualised ‘danger’ as the risk and threats that mobility might pose in the contemporary world, such as climate change refugees, pandemic disease transmission via people and movement, among other aspects of perceived dangers in our shared mobile world. We are also inviting papers relating to various other topics, including sport, leisure, health and tourism mobilities; human and object transport and mobilities; refugee and migration, especially Pacific peoples; mobile media technologies; and moving methods.
We expect to conclude the conference with a panel focused on theorizing mobilities/moving methods. This conference places additional emphasis on capacity building for research among emerging researchers and postgraduate students in mobility studies. We are aiming to keep all sessions as plenary sessions, so spaces will be limited at the time of the selection of abstracts.
Keynote presenters will include
Dr Holly Thorpe (Sport and Leisure Studies, University of Waikato, and author of Transnational Mobilities in Action Sport Cultures, Palgrave 2014): ‘Youth and Sporting (Im)mobilities in Disrupted and Conflicted Spaces’.
Professor Mimi Sheller (Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Director, Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel University, Philadelphia): ‘Connected Mobility in a Disconnected World: Moving people, information and aid after disasters’. [Please note: Mimi Sheller will present a virtual keynote.]
Other invited speakers to be advised.
Abstracts due: Friday 6 March 2015. Please send a 250 word abstract and a 100 word biography to dangerousworldmobilities@gmail.com
Decisions on paper offers will be made by 1 April 2015.
We are hoping to offer student bursaries to support postgraduate students from beyond the Waikato to attend this conference. More information will be made available in April of 2015.
Contacts and organisers:
Professor Cathy Coleborne (History Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences): cathyc@waikato.ac.nz
Dr Holly Thorpe (Sport and leisure Studies, Faculty of Education) hthorpe@waikato.ac.nz
Dr Gail Adams (Geography Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) gaila@waikato.ac.nz
