[ecrea] CFA Diffractions - Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture: "(Un-)Boundedness: On Mobility and Belonging"

Call for Articles

Diffractions - Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture

(Un-)Boundedness: On Mobility and Belonging

Deadline for submissions: November 15 2013

In a “liquid modernity”, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s terminology, everything 
is more fluid and flexible, “neither fix[ing] space nor bind[ing] time” 
(Bauman, 2000: 2). Whereas in the past, one could find deeply rooted 
social organizations and solid cultural configurations, in modern times, 
people and institutions have become increasingly deterritorialized. The 
fact that no one nor anything remains the same or in the same place for 
too long has had an enormous impact on how identities and communities 
are shaped, perceived and performed. They are no longer marked by 
permanence and stability but by mobility, change and imagination.

Time and space compression (Harvey, 1989) brought by late modernity as a 
result of new technologies, new means of transportation and new 
communication tools has played an important role in the devaluation of 
spatial delimitation, by nurturing a faster and continuous circulation 
of goods, ideas, information and people at a large scale. Traditional 
notions of home, homeland and nation have been destabilized by new 
cultural flows that challenge the symbolic boundaries of both domestic 
space and nation-state. In Manuel Castells’ terms, the “space of flows” 
keeps on replacing the old “space of places” (Castells, 2001), where 
“new strategies of flexible accumulation have promoted a flexible 
attitude toward citizenship” (Ong, 1999), “floating identities” (Abbas, 
1997) and “diasporic public spheres” (Shih, 2007). The emergence of this 
new “mobility paradigm” (Urry 2002, 2007) has certainly involved the 
creation of new experiences, the production of new layers of personal 
and social relations and the formation of new geographies. As claimed by 
Elliot and Urry, “changes in how people live their life today are both 
affected by and reflect the broader changes of global mobility 
processes” (2007: ix), with connectivity being exponentially dependent 
on “miniaturized mobilities” (ibid.) and lifestyles becoming 
increasingly nomadic. All these aspects are summoned up in the main 
argument proposed by the authors that people’s lives have become, 
indeed, mobile lives (ibid.).

Mobility is often depicted as the opposite of belonging. Yet, these 
constantly shifting spaces and relationships, these global cultural 
flows or interactions Arjun Appadurai calls –scapes (ethnoscapes, 
technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes) (Appadurai, 
1996), whilst pointing to a growing sense of heterogeneity and 
transiency, also promote cultural exchange and new scales of belonging. 
Indeed, people appear to be always in transit especially through 
“non-places”, “space[s] which cannot be defined as relational, or 
historical, or concerned with identity” (Augé, 1995: 77-78), yet, at the 
same time, foster a situational and transitory feeling of belonging.

Nevertheless, this rising globalized circulation does not necessarily 
imply the standardization of the social fabric. In fact, this mobility 
is taking place unevenly, at different paces and intensities, bringing 
visibility to globalization as a complex and multiform process, as the 
motor of both similarity and difference, dialogue and conflict, 
proximity and distance, boundedness and unboundedness. On the one hand, 
access to other cultures becomes easier and migratory movements 
increasingly more frequent, thus contributing to a regular contact with 
what is deemed different and unfamiliar. However, on the other hand, it 
is often the case that mobility, “frequent repotting” (Putnam, 2000: 
204), displacement and uprootedness lead to disparity, exclusion, and to 
the creation of hybridized (Bhabha, 1994; Canclini 1995) or liminal 
(Turner, 1967; 1969) forms of life. This tense relationship between two 
or more different cultures contributes to the development of hybrid or 
borderland identities built upon both negotiation and transgression yet 
allowing the invention of new subjectivities, cartographies and 
categories of difference and belonging.

Themes to be addressed by contributors may include but are not 
restricted to the following:

• Mobility and (Be)Longing: Migration, Diaspora, Exile and Homecomings

• Memory and (Up)Rootedness

• Cosmopolitanism, Hospitality and Global Citizenship

• Sovereignty and Nationalism

• Transnational Imagination and Cultural Transfers

• Liminality, Hibridity and Identity

• Peripheries, Remappings and Contested Cartographies

• Modern Cities and Urban Imaginaries

• Travel, Tourism and Mobile Lifestyles

• Artistic, Literary and Media Representations of Mobility and Belonging

• Scale, Geocriticism and World Literature

• Translation, Globalization and Alterity

• Digital Mobility, Communities and (Un)Connectedness

• (Im)Materiality and Belonging


We look forward to receiving articles of no more than 20 A4 pages (not 
including bibliography) and a short bio of about 150 words by November 
15, 2013 at the following address: (submissions /at/ diffractions.net).

DIFFRACTIONS also accepts book reviews that may not be related to the 
issue’s topic. If you wish to write a book review, please contact us at 
(reviews /at/ diffractions.net).

Please submit your contributions according to the journal's guidelines.

Find us at www.diffractions.net.

Diffractions - Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture

Catholic University of Portugal | Research Center for Communication and 
Culture

Palma de Cima | 1649-023 | Lisbon| Portugal

E-mail: (info /at/ diffractions.net) Follow us on facebook.com/diffractionsjournal












Sónia Pereira

....................................................................

Assessoria Científica do Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura

Faculdade de Ciências Humanas

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Palma de Cima

1649-023 Lisboa

Tel.: (+351) 217 214 018, ext. 3143

E-mail: (sonia.pereira /at/ fch.lisboa.ucp.pt)



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