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In 2018, Noel Salazar presented a paper at the 5th World Humanities Forum in Busan, South Korea, entitled “Moveo Ergo Sum: Mobility as Vital to Humanity and Its (Self)image,” in which he reflected on the existential need for people to move. Moveo ergo sum became the motto for the 2021 Global Mobility Humanities Conference (GMHC), encouraging us to think about the multiple ways in which mobility intersects with the construction of modern subjectivities (Salazar, “Introduction”). The expression recalled a quote from one of Fabiola Mancinelli’s research participants, a digital nomad from the US, whose words and unusual biography as a location-independent entrepreneur read like a declaration of selfactualisation through mobility, the desire to realise her full potential by constantly putting herself outside her comfort zone: “Travel is who I am, and this is not negotiable” (426). This remarkable coincidence was the trigger for us to propose the panel “Understanding Neonomadic Mobilities beyond Self-actualisation” to unpack the mobility-identity nexus as an analytical lens to explore the phenomenon of contemporary nomads.

Full-time RVing is a mobile lifestyle consisting of living year-round in a recreational vehicle (RV). Called full-time RVers or vanlifers, their RV becomes their only dwelling and their only mode of transportation. By being constantly mobile, their conception of home changes and brings a new relation to the world in neo-liberal times. It differentiates them from other mobile people, such as tourists, who still have a located place to come back to, or migrants, who want to settle in their new place of residence. This lifestyle on the road sheds new light on the concept of lifestyle mobilities. Based on research material from several fieldworks in North America and online, this paper focuses on this relationship to place developed by full-time RVers, their idea of home, their ways of making it a home, their ideas of roots, their capacities to be both at home and away, and the challenge they all face with respect to the structural rules of state operation: their need for a home address.

Research on neo-nomadism has focused mainly on privileged forms of lifestyle migration, portraying these practices as individual choices but paying little attention to their embeddedness in constraining socioeconomic structures. Yet, neo-nomadic practices are increasingly involving lower- to middle-class people. They may experience a sense of freedom and subjective upward social mobility; however, their lives are also marked by precarious conditions. We investigate this tension through ethnographic research and interviews with digital nomads in coworking spaces in Barcelona and street vendors in São Paulo. We analyse the links between selfemployment and neo-nomadism in their trajectories by drawing on literature on subjective social mobility. We find that emic definitions of “moving up” among our research participants involve three existential dimensions: (1) the quest for freedom, or the subjective sense of social mobility associated with mastering one’s time and choices; (2) the valuation of flexibility, or positive imaginaries of (transnational) spatial mobility and its advantages; and (3) the desire for personal growth, connected with discourses of self-improvement, self-reliance, and individualisation. We argue that entrepreneurship can be analysed as a frame for developing self-reliance and self-improvement in neoliberal contexts where individuals face increasing levels of uncertainty and precarisation.

This paper explores the lives of “liveaboards” in the Mediterranean; people who travel, work, and live on sailing boats. It starts from the premise that these individuals’ and groups’ “quest for a better life” should not be treated as an elite phenomenon that exists in the vacuum of wider social, political, and economic relations, but is part of the wider story of the 21st century. The paper presents the expectations and experiences of maritime lifestyle migrants, how their stories develop over time in the course of their personal life, but also in relation to sudden recent events and changes such as Covid-19 and Brexit. The introductory sections are followed by two ethnographic portraits to showcase the complexity of maritime lifestyle migration, specifically concerning notions of stillness and movement. The portraits are written in a creative non-fiction style, a form that brings to the fore emotional and everyday details, as well as atmospheric descriptions that allow us to “inhabit the problem.” The two portraits are followed by a discussion on the circular stillness that focuses on biographical details of maritime lifestyle migrants in a longitudinal perspective, highlighting the processual and often unpredictable nature of maritime lifestyle migration.

This paper examines the commodification of the digital nomad lifestyle by private and public sector actors. Since the 2010s, there has been an ever-increasing number of services, infrastructures and events (i.e., digital nomad infrastructure, DNI) tailored to the growing digital nomad consumer segment. Previously approached as a counter-cultural and alternative lifestyle, the increased commodification of digital nomadism speaks of it becoming more mainstream. Yet, little is known of how the DNI conditions a digital nomad’s mobile lifestyle, and more broadly, how the commodification of the digital nomad lifestyle shapes the digital nomadic mobilities. The data for this paper consists of 1) multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, including observation and forty-six interviews with digital nomads and different stakeholders in Spain (2021-2022), Bulgaria (2021) and Thailand (2019) and of 2) online data, including a mapping of services digital nomads employ. The rise of the DNI, a diverse set of services and infrastructures of which nomads can take advantage, evidence the rapid commodification of the digital nomad lifestyle. The DNI shapes nomads’ mobility trajectories, smoothens their transition into the digital nomad lifestyle and offers them a social infrastructure. It is argued that the commodification shapes digital nomadic mobilities in such a manner that it opens to question as to what extent digital nomadism can be considered a counter-cultural lifestyle.

Lynne Pearce is a scholar who has been involved in bringing humanities approaches to bear upon mobility practices since around the time Lancaster University’s Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) was established by John Urry and Mimi Sheller twenty years ago. Whilst literary scholars, in particular, have been slow to respond to the invitation to engage in challenging interdisciplinary scholarship, she has been actively involved in the Centre since 2014, and is now serving as its co-director (Humanities). In recent times, Pearce has published two landmark books focusing on literary and cultural mobilities—Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness (2016) and Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture (2019)—and is also co-editor of the collection Mobilities, Literature, Culture (2019) (with Marian Aguiar and Charlotte Mathieson). In addition, she has been guest editor of several pioneering special issues—for example, “The Urban Imaginary” for Mobilities (February, 2012), “Mobility and the Humanities” for Mobilities (April, 2017) (with Peter Merriman), “Mobilities and Memory” for Mobility Humanities (July, 2022), and the double special issue, “Unruly Landscapes,” for Transfers (March and July, 2022) with Margherita Cisani, Laura Lo Presti, Giada Peterle, and Chiara Rabbiosi from the University of Padua.

Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK. She is also Co-Director (Humanities) of the University’s Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) and has been involved in the Centre as an Associate Director since 2015. With Peter Merriman (Aberystwyth University, UK), she has played a leading role in developing the field of Mobility Humanities following a landmark colloquium hosted by CeMoRe in 2014 (see special issue of Mobilities12.4). While her early publications were in the field of feminist theory and reader theory (e.g., Woman/Image/Text (1991); Reading Dialogics(1994); Feminism and the Politics of Reading (1997); Romance Writing (2007)), since 2010 her research has focused on mobilities (see Drivetime (2016) and Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse (2019)). She is also co-editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture.

In the 4th century, some regions of the Roman Empire had already been conquered by Germanic tribes. Yet, the continuous road network of about 100,000 km of paved roads still functioned properly. That changed in the 5th and 6th centuries when the Western Roman Empire disintegrated and was completely conquered by Germanic tribes. The result was an enormous depopulation and state of unrest. The continuous interregional road network transformed into a fragmented local one and, in many places, the roads completely disappeared. Since the country road network had deteriorated in the north of the former Roman empire, nowadays known as the Netherlands, goods traffic took place almost exclusively over water. Only cities with an ecclesiastical centre, as well as harbour cities situated along a navigable river, had a chance to survive as economic centres. This was the situation at the beginning of the reign of Charlemagne (768-814). He is usually considered a restorer of the former Western Roman Empire; but was he also a restorer of the ancient Roman road network and mobility? There is a lot of discussion concerning the fate of the post-Roman infrastructure. Several decades ago, scholars argued that after the splitting up of the Roman Empire, the infrastructure collapsed, resulting in scarce traffic in these so-called Dark Ages. Over the past few decades, this image has increasingly changed; the former Roman infrastructure was in part still intact and in use by messengers, traders and officials. In this article, I share this latter opinion; I outline how in order for new towns to arise, they need not only an old infrastructure but also a brand-new one—true even in Merovingian times.

Roger Bromley’s Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture studies different narrative modalities in order to assess different perspectives of those displaced. Multiple gazes from the Global South are examined through different narratives: novel, film, memoir/testimonial and graphic novels, some of which were written by or produced with the collaboration of the displaced persons. The selection of the primary texts and the choice of the theoretical lens are aimed at redirecting the current anti-refugee rhetoric that has been over-represented within Euro-centric discourse. Divided into six chapters, the book seeks to unlearn the discourse and offer a number of alternative views narrated from the perspective of the subaltern of the Global South.