On imagination and imaginaries, mobility and immobility: Seeing the forest for the trees

Abstract

It is hard to talk about human mobilities without taking into consideration how mobility is being shaped by and shaping processes of imagination. The key concepts of imagination and mobility have rich and complex genealogies. The matter is even made more complex because there are many related concepts surrounding them. Imagination is associated with images, imagery and imaginaries, whereas mobility is connected to movement, motion and migration (not to mention its imagined opposite, immobility). To be able to see the forest for the trees, I focus in this critical reflection on a discussion of the concepts themselves. One of the analytical advantages of mobility studies, a relatively novel field of study, is that it shows us how imagination (a dynamic psychological process) and imaginaries (products of the imagination) are crucial for very different forms of human (im)mobility.

“Post-viral tourism’s antagonistic tourist imaginaries”

“…In Castoriadis' thesis, the individual ("radical") imaginary, which asserts its autonomous creative capacity over the collective, feeds into the collective ("social"), which acts as a community-making mechanism. We can easily ascertain how this applies to the tensions and collaborations between autonomous tourist subjectivity and the system of tourist representations: for example, in critical tourism analysis, Salazar and Graburn (2016) call attention to the ways imagined modes of place and culture contribute to their commoditisation, but Appadurai (1996), Salazar (2020) and Tzanelli (2020) also point in the opposite direction, stressing that imagining place can be subjected to the stylistics and rules of alternative realities produced by individuals or small groups, thus inducing social change. Representational assemblages of place and culture are both "out there", existing prior to our understanding or engagement with sociocultural problems, such as those induced by the COVID-19 lockdown, and processes taking shape "on the go" in our minds, as and when societal crises unfold.…”

The ‘soft infrastructure’ of the Belt and Road Initiative: Imaginaries, affinities and subjectivities in Chinese transnational education

“…The BRI's geopolitical and geoeconomic reframing of disparate places and territories into new regional spaces represent a major redefinition of local and regional imaginaries. But because imaginaries are ‘culturally shared and socially transmitted’ representations that interact with personal imaginations (Salazar, 2020: 770), such regional spaces are glued together by ‘rather fuzzy sets of imaginaries’ that enfold current institutional logics and practices into historical narratives of regional identities and connections (Kuus, 2020: 1186). The concept of imaginaries is thus useful in highlighting how institutional and everyday production of connective scripts co‐construct ‘invented’ knowledge and histories, including those of diasporic communities.…”

“…Nevertheless, a close examination of individual students’ imaginative post‐study geographies makes clear that ‘not all individuals are exposed to, nor value the same images or places’ (Lipura & Collins, 2020: 351; see also Salazar, 2020). Even as China's economic and political influence powerfully frames students’ economic senses around post‐study lives, other logics operate among the young people's imaginations to shape what they hope to achieve and where they want to be upon graduation.…”

Experiencias de movilidad residencial en jóvenes de barrios populares de Buenos Aires (Argentina)

“…Hablar de (in)movilidades no significa priorizar lo móvil o veloz por sobre lo fijo y permanente. Este enfoque no asocia la movilidad con una mayor libertad desde miradas romantizadas de los desplazamientos (Salazar, 2020). Rastrea las formas en que ciertas movilidades son reguladas, limitadas -por restricciones legales, económicas o simbó-licas-mientras otras son permitidas, impulsadas o deseadas (Salazar y Smart, 2011).…”