Mobility Humanities

Emergencies or disasters have been acknowledged by mobilities and migration researchers for some time as crucial interruptions or threats to mobile life. Indeed, in the first edition of the journal Mobilities, Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller and John Urry suggest, through a range of disruptive events, natural disasters, environmental crises, and pandemics predating COVID-19, that “issues of ‘mobility’ are centre-stage.” In this collaborative paper we present and reflect on a workshop on “Emergency (Im)mobilities” which took place in Brisbane—Meanjin, Australia in 2023, where we engaged in an activity to explore different key terms and concepts attached to, and that might have potential for, research on “emergencies” in mobilities. While some of the authors have worked directly on, and had experience in, more obvious emergencies including so-called “natural disasters,” others reflected on the workshop theme through their own interests in creative arts, literature, migration studies, and more. We offer this reflective, collaborative, and creative paper to future mobilities research that engages in emergencies and crisis in order to reflect on current and future emergency aesthetics (in its sensory, emotional and affective registers), including diagrams, procedures and communications that simultaneously shape our engagement as researchers and as community members who have faced, and will continue to face, emergencies that both mobilise and immobilise us.