In what ways can literary mobilities provoke questions about social movements and forms of resistance in the current global order?

Mobility is not simply the physical navigation of spaces, but an embodied and affective act with deep socio-cultural and political significance. Literary and cultural work that represents varied forms of mobility can reveal contradictions between the exercise and assumption of agency and uneven historical and social conditions of restriction. Whether mobilities are framed as environmental, diasporic, colonial, or decolonial, they pose questions about material and symbolic conditions of power that dictate who can move and in what ways.

This session welcomes proposals on subversive mobilities in cultural production to interrogate the connections between mobile subjects and wider mobilization efforts, resistance movements, protest cultures, and expressions of dissent. In investigating the links between mobility and mobilization, this session seeks to engage a wider conversation about the relationship between movement and resistance. Central questions this session will address include: How do different narratives–literature, film, graphic and visual arts, or other forms of storytelling–connect mobilities to activism and resistance movements? How do narrative forms participate in protest cultures? How do mobilities articulate political claims?

This session welcomes papers with interdisciplinary approaches to narrative forms and textual cultures.

Please submit online through the NEMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22444