Research symposium, June 25-26 2026, The University of Melbourne, Woodward Conference Centre
Societies across Asia are undergoing significant shifts in the social organization of space, time, and gender. First, urbanization, the consolidation of globally connected capitalist economies, and the expansion of transnational education and labour routes, alongside ongoing increases in the number of forcibly displaced people, mean that medium-to-long term geographic mobility is an increasingly common experience. Second, the expansion of precarious work in some places, and ongoing political instability in others, create radical uncertainty in life planning, making people’s long- and even medium-term futures more difficult to imagine and predict. Third, gendered life courses are changing and diversifying. Many societies, especially those with high levels of women’s education, are witnessing changes in the organization of families and relationships, as seen in increasing age of marriage, decreasing fertility, rising divorce rates, and the emergence of alternative forms of intimate life including same-sex relationships and long-term singlehood.
These are some of the ongoing macro-scale transformations in configurations of space, time and gender in Asia today––but what do these processes feel like, at the micro-scale emotional level of people’s everyday experience? What transformations in gendered subjectivities are occurring as a result of these developments, across classes, geo-cultural regions and diverse mobility types? What new challenges do such changes create for intersubjective relations and negotiations?
This symposium advanced research into the emotional dimensions of human mobilities by gathering 24 scholars working across a wide range of disciplines from law to public health, cultural studies, arts management, youth sociology, anthropology and the transdisciplinary field of migration studies to explore these and related questions. Bringing together researchers from PhD candidates to senior scholars, the symposium initiated fresh conversations on case studies from across Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Asia and focussed on diverse human mobility types while centering the key terms of mobility, gender, and emotion. Presentations and discussions were conducted largely in-person, and the event was open to the public online.
Organizers:
Prof Fran Martin (organizer): f.martin@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Annisa Beta (pre-planning): annisa.beta@unimelb.edu.au
Ms Pan Hsu Pyae Eain (project research assistant): pan.pyaeeain@unimelb.edu.au
Symposium schedule:
Day 1
Day 2
Download the full program here
After the symposium, in July-August 2026, selected presenters will be invited to contribute to journal special issue/s on the symposium themes, to be edited by Fran Martin and Charlotte Setijadi.
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