20 June 2025
On an exceedingly hot Friday in June, colleagues from near and far gathered together in the Charles Carter Building at Lancaster University for CeMoRe’s Summer Symposium: a regular fixture in the CeMoRe diary for several years now.
With a new director — Jen Southern – at the helm, this was originally conceived as an ‘in house’ event: an opportunity to reach out to colleagues whose work may speak to mobilities research, either directly or indirectly (hence the decision to simply title the event ‘Making Connections’). Given Jen’s own interests, the CfP nevertheless indicated a particular interest in creativity / mobile methods and the ‘more-than-human’: suggestions which was taken up in several of the papers (see website for a full list of abstracts and speaker bios).
As it turned out, the Symposium evolved into a much larger — and decidedly extra-mural — event than we had originally intended owing to the coincidence of several visitors to the Centre at this time. Jason Finch ( Abo Akademi, Turku, Finland) was here as a Visiting Scholar; Kate Moles (Cardiff) had been examining a mobilities-related PhD in Sociology the previous day; and Lucia Quaquarelli and Adrien Frenay (Paris Nanterre, France) were in Lancaster as invited guests following CeMoRe’s reciprocal participation in a CRPM seminar in Paris last November.
These visitors were given the opportunity to present longer-form papers at the start of the afternoon (although Kate Moles regrettably had to withdraw at the last minute due to illness) and — as ever — it was inspiring to hear about mobilities research (and mobilities communities) elsewhere in the world.
The rest of the afternoon was divided into two ‘7 x 5’ panels (i.e., 14 speakers speaking for 5 minutes each), which one of our online participants likened to speed-dating! In the time-honoured tradition of CeMoRe’s lunchtime ‘stand-up’ sessions initiated by former director, Monika Buscher, speakers were strictly bound to the five-minute rule courtesy of a squawking cockerel alarm on Jen Southern’s phone. This resulted in an exhilarating showcase of contemporary mobilities-related research from across multiple disciplines, and with variable agendas. I did, nevertheless, spot a recurrent concern with the power of discourse and the imagination to shape our mobility futures — for better and for worse. Although this event was not recorded, the abstracts and bios are archived on the CeMoRe website which means that readers can share in our quick-fire ‘festival of ideas’ (and contact the speakers) if they so wish.
Many thanks to everyone who participated in this event — both in-person and online — and especially those (aside from the visitors mentioned above) who made the effort to travel to Lancaster for this memorable day. In these exceedingly challenging times for Higher Education in the UK, it was heartening to see colleagues still finding the time to engage in the research and creative practice that they love and taking inspiration from the mobilities paradigm.
Lynne Pearce
CeMoRe Co-Director (Humanities)
