Capturing Mobility through the Multilocality Lens; Cases from Russia and the Balkans

University of Vienna, Austria

This joint presentation aims at re-assessing the conceptual potential of the notion of "multilocality". While it marks the beginnings of the critique of "locality" in the early 1990s (Rodmann 1992), the notion of "multilocality" soon retreats into the background of notions such as "multi-sitedness" (Marcus 1996), "translocality" (e.g. Hannerz 2009), or anthropological appropriations of Foucault's "heterotopia". Its history keeps on unfolding in the interdisciplinary space with strong impulses from human-geography (e.g. Weichhardt 2015).
Based on two ethnographic cases -  mobile and multilocal lives of petroleum workers in the Russian Arctic and historical migration and politics of belonging in an Eastern-Adriatic Borderland - the joint presentation discusses how the conceptual lens of multilocality can crucially add to current debates in mobility studies. The particular conceptual potentials of multilocality we focus on in this rgegard are: attachment/agency related to, both, concrete and imagined/remembered places; the dialectics between mobility and immobility; and the interrelation of place and time.

G. Saxinger

J. Tosic

Gertrude Saxinger is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna.

https://univie.academia.edu/GertrudeSaxinger

Jelena Tosic is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna.

https://univie.academia.edu/JelenaTosic