The Mediterranean in Motion, Izmir Mediterranean Academy, November 16–18, 2017

Motion and mobility are terms pointing towards functions and conditions of both the space and the body. They are inherent to humans, non-humans, and their world, both physical and social. They entail space and time, body, encounter, interaction, distance, while begging the conditions of rest, cessation, immobility, stillness.

Motion has always been inherent to the Mediterranean as a geography, as a world; the Mediterranean as a region has been in motion. It is now being reshaped by the termination of the bipolar world, globalization of capital, and the transformation of global economics and geopolitics. It is within this global context that we have to locate the Mediterranean.

On the distant shores of the Mediterranean, there are so-called “clashing civilizations”, “competing” religions, politics, and peoples, distant/close cultures and societies. Yet between these shores there is also interaction and motion. The Mediterranean Sea is a borderland that links and separates these diversities, and constitutes a place of [in]communication.

Linking the three continents and many regions in their complexities, the Mediterranean basin provides us with thought-provoking questions. How do “motion”, “movement”, “connectivity”, migration and asylum help us decipher the Mediterranean? What are the particularities and universalities in the Mediterranean in the political, social, cultural, temporal and/or spatial realms? What kind of ontological, historical, geographical and/or technological disparities exist in the Mediterranean? How do the various artistic, socio-cultural, political representations of the Mediterranean reshape identity- building processes in different parts of the region? How do ideas, people, cities, ecology and design interact and transform each other in the Mediterranean? How does the Mediterranean incorporate global changes and how do the changes in the Mediterranean affect the world beyond?

“The Mediterranean in Motion” symposium aims to discuss the questions of the Mediterranean through the lens of its endemic mobility and motion. It seeks to open up questions and debates on this subject in an interdisciplinary manner. In order to approach these questions from different angles, we invite contributions from humanities, art, architecture, design, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, geography, political science, literature, as well as other disciplines in conversation with them. The papers can be on- but not limited to- the following topics within the Mediterranean context:

1. People in motion: Migration, refugees, social and political movements, borders, and securitization of the Mediterranean;
2. Ideas in motion: War and art, language, culture, authoritarianism, populism, literature, justice, codification;
3. Design, architecture and art in motion: Art and artists; architectural perspectives, design from local handcrafts to industrial design;
4. Power and resistance in motion: Repertoire and future of control and discipline in the Mediterranean, camps, biopolitics, architecture, urban transformations, hidden cities and islands, identity of cities, urban movements, gentrification, city economies;
5. Environment in motion: Ecology, agriculture, land, sea, air, geography, environmental
6. Capital and labor in motion: Global economy, national economies, financial mobility, capital mobility, free/unfree labor forms.