Centre founder returns to Lancaster University for celebratory anniversary lecture
A founding director of a pioneering Lancaster University research centre returns to the city to celebrate the organisation’s 20th anniversary.
Professor Mimi Sheller, who, together with the late Professor John Urry, co-founded the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University, will give a special lecture on July 17 to mark the milestone anniversary.
She will present her paper: “Mobility Justice and Climate Reparations: Reflecting on Twenty Years of Mobilities Research” at the event on July 17 at Lancaster University Management School’s Dormer Lecture Theatre.
CeMoRe was responsible for initiating a whole new field of scholarship around mobilities in the social sciences, arts, humanities and sciences, which encompasses the analysis of global, national and local movements and immobilities of people, objects, capital, information, knowledge and material things which combine to engender the economic and social patterning of life.
Professor Sheller now works at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, in the USA, where she is the inaugural Dean of the University’s Global School.
Prior to this, she spent 11 years as Professor of Sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia where she was also founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy.
But it was at Lancaster University where Professor Sheller began her academic career in 1998 and, where her early collaborations with Professor Urry, led to the naming of the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ and the birth of the Mobilities journal as well as the founding of CeMoRe itself.
It was the first such centre to focus on mobility as a unique lens through which to view the contemporary world and continues to be at the heart of this burgeoning global field of research.
Professor Sheller is an interdisciplinary scholar with wide-ranging interests in Caribbean Studies and Social Theory as well as Mobilities and who has published over one hundred influential articles as well as multiple landmark books.
Organiser of the CeMoRe celebration, Professor Lynne Pearce, from the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University and the Centre’s Acting Director, said: “It is no exaggeration to say that Mobilities has developed into one of the most dynamic, innovative and successful fields of scholarship in the world.
“So, we are particularly proud to welcome Professor Sheller - for many years one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of mobilities studies - back to Lancaster University. Her work on mobility justice has had tremendous resonance across all manner of disciplines and debates and at our event she will speak on this in relation to the issue that has been at the top of CeMoRe’s own agenda for the past four years, namely the climate emergency.”
The lecture will take place in the Management School Lecture Theatre Dormer 14 at 5pm on Monday July 17. All welcome.This free lecture will also be live-streamed. To join online please register here:
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