Julie Laplante

Preliminary abstract: The theme of this bilingual conference is movement. In an era of massive displacements caused by war, climate change, trafficking and economic desperation, we are called upon to make sense of movement through gaps, dams, borders, and camps. A longstanding concern of anthropologists, movement has been discussed as mobility, flows and scapes, flexibilities and foreclosures, disjunctures and ‘frictions.’ The notion of movement resonates in studies of political, ecological, religious and economic life as well as of kinship, gender and embodiment. Movement is associated with agency and freedom, yet as a technique and discourse of power may disrupt, uproot or dislocate. Amidst rising uncertainties and disappearances of experienced living possibilities, we must make sense of contexts marked by blockage and impasse. Emphasis on movement points to how past and future human lifeworlds and affective ecologies are continually imagined and remade. Our theme highlights processes of becoming, inviting us to attend to historicity of practices, remaining open to older as well as novel ontologies. Attention to movement opens anthropology up to new arrays of life forms. It enables us to address imperatives to decolonize our discipline. It implores us to explore emergent life-making processes that become open to improvisation, composition and hopeful futures.