Panel 10: To Leave or to Stay? Unpacking (Im)Mobility from Origin to Destination (EN)

Chair:

The celebrated “age of mobility” often foregrounds constant movement; however, most life trajectories oscillate between leaving, staying, and returning. Treating departure and arrival as separate events obscures the fact that mobility and immobility form a continuum, extending from the first impulse to depart, through periods of settlement abroad, to attempts — or impossibilities — of return. This panel invites scholars from migration studies, sociology, anthropology, human geography, psychology, and public policy to reflect (im)mobility holistically, demonstrating how choices, constraints, and aspirations are renegotiated at each stage of the journey of and across multiple scales — from the household to transnational regimes. We propose to discuss (but are not limited to):

• Multiple forms of staying — from choice to coercion: distinguishing voluntary/desired immobilities, tactical/strategic immobilities, and involuntary immobilities.
• Agency × constraint: how personal projects, family strategies, and structural barriers intertwine across the life course and interlinked lives.
• Well-being and subjectivity: the psychological, social, and economic effects of staying—by choice or coercion—at origin or destination.
• Origin–destination circuits: how immobilization in one context reshapes aspirations and opportunities at other points along the migration trajectory.
• Gender and information technologies: how gender norms, roles, and hierarchies shape different forms of staying—voluntary or imposed—and how digital platforms, social media, and apps become spaces for negotiating, supporting, and monitoring these (im)mobilities.

Rather than opposing mobility and immobility, this panel proposes a critical, in-depth examination of their intersections, temporalities, and ambiguities, underpinned by theoretical and methodological debates that can reveal the multiple (im)mobilities in a world where the right to go — and the right to stay — is increasingly contested.

Keywords: Voluntary/Desired; Immobility; Involuntary Immobility; (Im)mobility outcomes; Agency–Constraint Nexus