Soziologie

On 9–10 October 2025, AB 6 hosted the final workshop for the DFG-funded network Migration and Im/Mobility in the Global South during a Pandemic, led by Prof. Dr. Antje Missbach. The event brought together contributors from across the world, both in person and online, to discuss and refine their contributions for the forthcoming volume Pandemics and Mobilities (Brill, 2026), co-edited by Amrita Datta (Bielefeld University, Germany), Jonathan Ngeh (University of Cologne, Germany) and Arani Basu (Krea University, India). The book adopts a transdisciplinary approach and situates pandemics as transformative historical moments that not only disrupt but also catalyze new forms of mobility and governance, offering com-prehensive and interconnected perspectives that integrate historical, anthropological, socio-political, economic, and technological perspectives on pandemic-induced mobility shifts.

This volume differs from earlier publications by focusing on the pandemic-mobility interface as a distinct analytical framework, addressing underexplored themes like pandemic histo-ries, anti-mobility and immobility choices and compulsions, platform economies, and the biopolitics of the "risky" mobile body, as well as the global inequities in vaccine access and surveillance practices. It moves beyond traditional migration studies by incorporating the post-pandemic future of mobilities, thus providing a timely, holistic understanding of how pandemics redefine mobility in a hyper-connected yet unequal world.

The workshop examined multiple linkages between pandemics and mobilities, with a partic-ular focus on the Covid-19 pandemic and its enduring impact on transnational movements, migration regimes, and mobility perceptions. The discussants explored how the pandemic both restricted and reconfigured mobility, exposed global inequalities, and thus reshaped the imaginaries of migration and belonging across the globe.

Over two days, the participants presented their chapters along six thematic clusters that reflected the book’s interdisciplinary scope: (1) historical and comparative perspectives on pandemic-related mobility; (2) global labour migration and its disruptions; (3) marginalisa-tion of mobile subjects as risk-prone bodies; (4) role media, technology, and digital commu-nication during a pandemic; (5) gendered mobility experiences; and (6) anti-mobility trajec-tories and post-pandemic effects?. Each session featured designated discussants and collec-tive feedback to strengthen theoretical and empirical coherence across the volume.

The workshop underscored the volume’s core ambition: to build an empirically grounded, comparative, and theoretically nuanced understanding of how pandemics transform global mobilities. The workshop received logistical support from the Secretariat headed by Ms. Ro-switha Rohlfing and student assistant Ms. Charlotte Scholl.