CFP: Radical History Review Issue on Mobility Regimes
Enotie, “Desperation in Motion” (2022)
The Radical History Review is seeking submissions for a forthcoming issue titled “Mobility Regimes.”
Scholars of migration have made tremendous strides in interrogating the structural conditions that impact the ability of people to move across and within borders and, as crucially, to stay in their homes. Often, however, these interrogations have led to the mobility and displacement of peoples being studied in isolation from each other—immigrants as strictly opposed to refugees, international migrants contrasted with internal migrants, and so forth. It is of course always paramount to acknowledge the many different contexts that have shaped particular kinds of migrant experiences in the past and in the present. Yet in a world in which people in motion and those who wish to be who they are, where they are face ever more pervasive forms of precarity, an overreliance on distinct migrant categories in law and policy—descended as they are from political and legal officials acting in the interests of state, imperial, colonial, and capital formations—may 1) flatten the complexity of migrant experiences and 2) obscure how various and overlapping frameworks of dispossession together threaten the mobility of a wide range of populations, including groups who have typically been relegated to the margins of migration history.
This issue will bring together scholars, practitioners and historically-minded activists from a wide range of subfields and disciplines in order to make critical connections across the expansive world of migration studies. Doing so, we hope, will encourage more capacious understandings of migration driven by questions including: How does migration history shift if it makes more intentional connections to Indigenous history, histories of slavery, histories of (de)colonization, and histories of empire? How do our understandings of racial capitalism, (settler) colonialism, and imperialism shift when we center their impact on peoples’ mobility? How do movements and efforts to regulate mobile peoples from the local to the global relate to and inform each other? In what ways might we put international migration in conversation with other forms of travel, transportation, and connection? How might the history of mobility shift if we focus on the struggle for the right to remain rather than the right to move? How do wide ranging scholarly and activist approaches to the study of migration and mobility regimes reflect and help foster expansive, inclusive solidarities toward migrant justice during a contemporary moment in which migrants and those facing the prospect of displacement are increasingly under attack?
Click here for more details on the issue and for instructions to submit a proposal! Submissions are due by July 7, 2025.
