[Commlist] 2026 symposium: Kinetic Lives

Kinetic lives in precarious times: Genders and emotions on the move in Asia

https://mobileselves.org/symposium/kinetic-lives-2026 
<https://mobileselves.org/symposium/kinetic-lives-2026>

Research symposium, June 25-26 2026

The University of Melbourne, Woodward Conference Centre

Societies across Asia are undergoing significant shifts in the social 
organization of space, time, and gender. First, urbanization, the 
consolidation of globally connected capitalist economies, and the 
expansion of transnational education and labour routes, alongside 
ongoing increases in the number of forcibly displaced people, mean that 
medium-to-long term geographic mobility is an increasingly common 
experience. Second, the expansion of precarious work in some places, and 
ongoing political instability in others, create radical uncertainty in 
life planning, making people’s long- and even medium-term futures more 
difficult to imagine and predict. Third, gendered life courses are 
changing and diversifying. Many societies, especially those with high 
levels of women’s education, are witnessing changes in the organization 
of families and relationships, as seen in increasing age of marriage, 
decreasing fertility, rising divorce rates, and the emergence of 
alternative forms of intimate life including same-sex relationships and 
long-term singlehood.

Linking intensified human mobilities with transforming gender regimes, 
current research suggests that for young women and sex-gender 
minorities, personal geographic mobility may spur transformations in 
gendered life-course by distancing them somewhat from normative hometown 
pressures and opening up new horizons for post-traditional biographies. 
Conversely, in other cases mobility may support the reproduction of 
gendered conventions, as when heterosexual marriage migration enables 
the perpetuation of patriarchal family structures and power dynamics. 
Groups who have become mobile, whether through voluntary migration or 
forced displacement, may find that both specific changes in 
socio-cultural context and the experience of mobility itself reconfigure 
gender relations in unexpected ways; while mobility opportunities are 
themselves fundamentally shaped by gendered power relations.

These are some of the ongoing macro-scale transformations in 
configurations of space, time and gender in Asia today––but what do 
these processes feel like, at the micro-scale emotional level of 
people’s everyday experience? What transformations in gendered 
subjectivities are occurring as a result of these developments, across 
classes, geo-cultural regions and diverse mobility types? What new 
challenges do such changes create for intersubjective relations and 
negotiations? This symposium will explore these questions by gathering 
scholars working on contemporary Asia-related cultural research to 
consider sub-themes including:

  * Gendered and emotional aspects of experiences of (im)mobility and
    (un)settlement among students, workers, displaced people and other
    mobile groups;
  * The inflection of gendered (im)mobilities by class, sexuality, and
    racialization;
  * Existential precarity in forced migrations (EG among refugees,
    asylum seekers, trafficked people, stateless people, internally
    displaced persons), and how displacement may reproduce and/or
    entrench gendered power relations;
  * Spatio-temporal entwinement: how being (im)mobile affects gendered
    experiences of time; and how temporal patterns shape gendered
    experiences of (im)mobility and place;
  * Everyday temporalities of (im)mobile gendered lives: tempo, rhythm,
    acceleration and deceleration;
  * Gendered and emotional aspects of downshifting, lifestyle migration
    and the middle-class commodification of slowness and locality;
  * Representations of (im)mobility, gender, emotion and spatio-temporal
    uncertainty in film, video, music, social media and other forms of
    art, media and creative and cultural production;
  * New kinds of gendered belonging, care, hope and future imagination
    amid intensified mobility and precarity.


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