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.
Linking intensified human mobilities with transforming gender regimes, current research suggests that for young women and sex-gender minorities, personal geographic mobility may spur transformations in gendered life-course by distancing them somewhat from normative hometown pressures and opening up new horizons for post-traditional biographies. Conversely, in other cases mobility may support the reproduction of gendered conventions, as when heterosexual marriage migration enables the perpetuation of patriarchal family structures and power dynamics. Groups who have become mobile, whether through voluntary migration or forced displacement, may find that both specific changes in socio-cultural context and the experience of mobility itself reconfigure gender relations in unexpected ways; while mobility opportunities are themselves fundamentally shaped by gendered power relations.
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 will explore these questions by gathering scholars working on contemporary Asia-related cultural research to consider sub-themes including:
- Gendered and emotional aspects of experiences of (im)mobility and (un)settlement among students, workers, displaced people and other mobile groups;
- The inflection of gendered (im)mobilities by class, sexuality, and racialization;
- Existential precarity in forced migrations (EG among refugees, asylum seekers, trafficked people, stateless people, internally displaced persons), and how displacement may reproduce and/or entrench gendered power relations;
- Spatio-temporal entwinement: how being (im)mobile affects gendered experiences of time; and how temporal patterns shape gendered experiences of (im)mobility and place;
- Everyday temporalities of (im)mobile gendered lives: tempo, rhythm, acceleration and deceleration;
- Gendered and emotional aspects of downshifting, lifestyle migration and the middle-class commodification of slowness and locality;
- Representations of (im)mobility, gender, emotion and spatio-temporal uncertainty in film, video, music, social media and other forms of art, media and creative and cultural production;
- New kinds of gendered belonging, care, hope and future imagination amid intensified mobility and precarity.
Approaches and aims: This small, in-person 2-day symposium will encompass both humanities and qualitative social sciences approaches, and transdisciplinary methodologies are especially welcome. Research methods may include ethnographic, representation-based, spatial and digital approaches. We seek new, unpublished papers from both early-career and more established scholars for possible inclusion in one or more special journal issues to be edited by the convenors. We aim to break down scholarly silos not only by working across disciplinary boundaries, but also by bringing together research from across Southeast Asia, South Asia, West and Central Asia, and East Asia, and focussing on a diversity of human mobility types. Each paper should address the project’s key terms of mobility, gender, and emotion; papers connecting these themes with considerations of time and precarity are especially welcome.
Funding note: The event is funded by the Australian Research Council (Martin, grant #DP230100442) and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, and presented by the University of Melbourne’s Asian Cultural Research Hub.
A small amount of funding support is available to contribute toward participants’ accommodation costs in Melbourne where needed.
Enquiries:
Ms Pan Hsu Pyae Eain: pan.pyaeeain@unimelb.edu.au
Organizers:
Prof Fran Martin: f.martin@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Annisa Beta: annisa.beta@unimelb.edu.au
Proposal submission and timeline:
Please download and complete the proposal form [900KB .DOCX] and email it to Ms Pan Hsu Pyae Eain (pan.pyaeeain@unimelb.edu.au) with subject line: Kinetic Lives Symposium Proposal.
Please submit proposals by November 15 2025.
Applicants will be advised of the outcome of applications by December 8 2025.
Accepted participants will be asked to submit an extended (1,000 word) abstract/ paper summary by May 22 2026, for pre-distribution to all participants.
After the symposium, in July-August 2026, selected presenters will be invited to contribute to journal special issue/s on the symposium themes.
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