The Micropolitics of Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 2nd Research Forum of the Tübingen Center of Advanced Studies “Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages”, Tübingen, July 19–20, 2018

Narratives of the age of migrations tend to privilege the large-scale mobility of ethnically denominated groups. Recent research has questioned this focus from many angles and has led to a growing consensus that new approaches are needed which put the large-scale migrations into perspective, integrate other forms of mobility into the picture, and develop a clearer understanding of the social processes involved, both among the mobile groups and individuals as well as within the societies where they arrive. This conference proposes to explore an approach to the age of migrations that takes account of these redirections in scholarship by focusing on the micropolitics of mobility in late antique and early medieval local societies in a broad timeframe from ca. 250 to 900 CE.

By exploring the micropolitics of mobility on a broad basis of case studies we hope to achieve a clearer understanding of a number of key problems in the social history of migration and mobility in the period. Questions we wish to address include:

• How did local societies accommodate and integrate immigrants of different kinds?
• What were fields of ensuing social conflict (e.g. in the areas of religion, economy, political participation) and how were these conflicts settled?
• How did local societies transform in reaction to immigrant groups?
• Which differences can we observe between individual and group immigrations?
• How did geographical mobility translate into social mobility?

We invite papers from younger as well as established scholars working in all relevant fields (history, archaeology, literature) which discuss these or other related aspects of the micropolitics of mobility.