What is it about?
People often assume that mobility is desirable and that immobility means being stuck, left behind, or unable to move. This article challenges that assumption by examining immobility not simply as the absence of movement, but as an important social, cultural, political, and personal experience in its own right. Drawing on research from migration studies, mobility studies, and examples from the COVID-19 pandemic, the article shows that mobility and immobility are deeply interconnected rather than opposite conditions. People may choose to stay put, be prevented from moving, or experience different forms of movement and stillness simultaneously. The article explores how immobility can involve waiting, caring, resisting, belonging, or coping with constraints, and how its meaning depends on social position, power relations, and personal circumstances. Ultimately, it argues that understanding human lives requires paying attention not only to movement but also to the many ways people experience and negotiate staying in place.
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Why is it important?
This article offers one of the most comprehensive anthropological reviews of immobility at a time when questions of movement and restriction have become globally significant. The COVID-19 pandemic made billions of people experience forms of restricted mobility, highlighting how access to movement is unevenly distributed and shaped by power, privilege, infrastructure, and social inequalities. The article moves beyond the common tendency to celebrate mobility as freedom and to portray immobility as failure. Instead, it demonstrates that immobility can be voluntary or involuntary, empowering or constraining, productive or harmful. By showing that mobility and immobility are two interconnected dimensions of the same social process, the article contributes a more nuanced understanding of migration, globalization, inequality, citizenship, health, and everyday life. Its insights are relevant not only to researchers but also to policymakers, practitioners, and anyone interested in how people navigate opportunities and constraints in an increasingly interconnected world.
Perspectives
From my perspective, this article emerged from a concern that scholarly debates had become heavily focused on mobility while often overlooking the significance of immobility. The COVID-19 crisis offered an unexpected reminder that movement cannot be taken for granted and that moments of stillness, waiting, restriction, and confinement are fundamental aspects of human existence. What interested me most was not merely who moves and who stays, but how people experience these situations and the meanings they attach to them. Throughout my work on mobility, I have been struck by how mobility and immobility continually produce one another. People may feel trapped while moving, or feel empowered while remaining in place. This article was therefore an attempt to rethink immobility not as a residual category, but as a dynamic and relational process that deserves analytical attention in its own right. I hope it encourages a more balanced understanding of human movement, one that recognizes the importance of both motion and stillness in shaping social life.
Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Immobility, Transfers, December 2021, Berghahn Journals,
DOI: 10.3167/trans.2021.110302.
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