November 14^th 2025 was wet and windy. We met in a car park on Walney Island near Barrow and then gathered on the beach in an area where honeycomb worms have built structures that mussels, cowries, and seaweeds have settled in.  The experts amongst us pointed out the variety of seaweeds there. At 11am an eerie siren sounded, the nearby BAE Systems testing their ‘Public Nuclear Safety Alert’. We paused to consider other potential environmental alerts. On our way out we noticed a piece of a sargassum that is invasive in the UK and a small Kelp with holdfast knotted with fishing line and epiphytes.

The afternoon was hosted at Art Gene in Barrow and began with Lynne Pearce introducing mobilities research and how it is relevant to seaweed, Jen Southern’s tour of photographs of the Morecambe Bay seaweeds and the infrastructures they grow on, followed by an illuminating Q&A with Michele Stanley, a seaweed expert from the Scottish Association for Marine Science.

5 artists shared their rich as diverse works with seaweed: Amy Dickson, Jamie Jenkinson, Debbie Yare, Miranda Hill and Maddi Nicholson. They invited us to eat seaweed picked around this coast and consider its proximity to nuclear power stations; to watch films of dancing porphyra; to observe how quickly seaweed anchors on newly introduced rocks in a tidal zone; and invoke the rights of seaweed alongside the rights of water. At the end of the day we collaboratively wrote a seaweed mobilities manifesto as a record of our thoughts and conversations.

Themes included the resilience of seaweed, and its vulnerability to climate change. The mobilities within its own life cycle, how its spores anchor on substrate, and how it is mobile around the world through shipping and as food. We honoured the history of women working with seaweeds, particularly Kathleen Drew Baker known as the ‘Mother of the Ocean’, whose research led to a renewal of Japanese commercial seaweed production.

‘… there is so much exciting work being done on and with seaweed. I already knew it was super important in an ecological point of view, but seeing it through each others eyes and the way people are working with it, really installs some hope. The sense that seaweed isn’t just a resource but a storyteller. Hearing marine scientists and artists side-by-side helped me realise mobility, currents, tides, migration, shapes every strand of it. That connection between science and creativity has stayed with me.’ (participant feedback)

20 June 2025

On an exceedingly hot Friday in June, colleagues from near and far gathered together in the Charles Carter Building at ����̽̽App for CeMoRe’s Summer Symposium:  a regular fixture in the CeMoRe diary for several years now.

With a new director — Jen Southern�� – at the helm, this was originally conceived as an ‘in house’ event: an opportunity to reach out to�� colleagues whose work may speak to mobilities research, either directly or indirectly�� (hence the decision to simply title the event�� ‘Making Connections’).�� Given Jen’s own interests, the CfP nevertheless indicated a particular interest in creativity /�� mobile methods and the ‘more-than-human’: suggestions which was taken up in several of the papers (see website for a full list of abstracts and speaker bios).

 As it turned out, the Symposium evolved into a much larger — and decidedly extra-mural — event than we had originally intended  owing to the coincidence  of several visitors to the Centre at this time. Jason Finch ( Abo Akademi, Turku, Finland) was here as a Visiting Scholar; Kate Moles (Cardiff) had been examining a mobilities-related PhD in Sociology the previous day;  and Lucia Quaquarelli and Adrien Frenay (Paris Nanterre, France) were in Lancaster as  invited guests following CeMoRe’s reciprocal participation in a CRPM seminar in Paris  last November.

These visitors were given the opportunity to present longer-form papers at the start of the afternoon (although Kate Moles regrettably had to withdraw at the last minute due to illness) and — as ever — it was inspiring to hear about mobilities research (and mobilities communities) elsewhere in the world.

The rest of the afternoon was divided into  two ‘7 x 5’ panels (i.e., 14 speakers speaking for 5 minutes each), which one of our online participants likened to speed-dating!  In the time-honoured tradition of  CeMoRe’s  lunchtime ‘stand-up’ sessions initiated by  former director, Monika Buscher, speakers were strictly bound to the five-minute rule courtesy of a squawking cockerel alarm on Jen Southern’s phone. This  resulted in an exhilarating showcase of contemporary mobilities-related research from across multiple disciplines, and with variable agendas. I did, nevertheless, spot a  recurrent concern with the power of discourse and the imagination to  shape our mobility futures —  for better and  for worse.  Although this event was not recorded, the abstracts and bios are archived on the CeMoRe website which means that readers can share in our quick-fire ‘festival of ideas’ (and contact the speakers) if they so wish.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in this  event — both in-person and online — and especially those (aside from the visitors mentioned above) who made the effort to travel to Lancaster for this memorable day.  In these exceedingly challenging times for Higher Education in the UK,  it was heartening to see colleagues still finding the time to engage in the research and creative practice that they love and taking  inspiration from the mobilities paradigm.

Lynne Pearce

CeMoRe Co-Director (Humanities)

Please register here for tickets for online and in person attendance:

An opportunity to get together with mobilities researchers from Lancaster and further afield, to share our research, celebrate success, and maybe spark some new collaborations.��

We look forward to welcoming guest mobilities researchers Lucia Quaquarelli and Adrien Frenay from Université Paris Nanterre, France; Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University, Finland; and Kate Moles, Cardiff University, UK. 

If you can’t make it to Lancaster please join us online to hear this exciting range of quick fire presentations sharing new mobilities reserch!

Symposium Schedule

Charles Carter Building, Room A15, ����̽̽App.

12  – 1pm Sandwich Lunch

1pm Welcome – Jen Southern

1.10 Panel

Lucia Quaquarelli and Adrien Frenay (Université Paris Nanterre, France)
Shaping space in literary mobilities. “Espace, Déplacement, Mobilité”: inter-weaving narratives, space, and place from the perspective of mobility. A CRPM’s Research Project

Jason Finch (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)
Musical Railway Representations via Mobile Methods: Louis Jordan, James Brown, and YouTube

Kate Moles (Cardiff University, UK)
Swimming in Compromised Times and Places

2pm 7 x 5 minute presentations

Lynne Pearce: The Road that Keeps on Giving

Muren Zhang:�� Driving into the Impasse: Affective Adjustment and Backward Hope in Never Let Me Go (East China Normal University)

David Tyfield: A Chinese-inspired Civilisational Turn: E-Mobility’s Uneven Remaking of Space-Time and Beyond

Gerry Davies & Sait Toprak: Migrations, a mail art exhibition

Giovanni Bettini: Climate Borderscapes – borders, (im)mobilization and justice in the climate emergency

Bruce Bennett, Maryam Ghorbankarimi, Emma Rose: Site-seeing: making films with refugees

Nicola Spurling: Follow the Auto/biography

2.50 short break with tea/coffee

3.10pm 7 x 5 minute presentations

Monika Buscher: Changing Mobilities

Colin Pooley:�� Approaches to the study of past virtual mobility

Artist A & Artist B: Hauling with Intent

Xiao Geng: The Writing of Plant Mobility in 20th-Century British Literature

Rodanthi Tzanelli: Environmental imaginaria in the age of extinction: three biostyles of radical mobility

Serena Pollastri, Suzana Ilic : Doing research with water and sands: reflections on engaging with the fluidity of coastal environments.

Jen Southern: More-than-human mobilities and infrastructures

Abstracts

1pm Panel

Lucia Quaquarelli, Adrien Frenay

Université Paris Nanterre

Shaping space in literary mobilities. “Espace, Déplacement, Mobilité”: inter-weaving narratives, space, and place from the perspective of mobility. A CRPM’s Research Project

The presentation will introduce the international project «Espace, déplacement, mobilité», supported by the research centre CRPM-Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires et Multilingues at the University Paris Nanterre, which aims to explore the relationship between space (urban and non-urban) and narratives through a transdisciplinary approach and from a mobility perspective. Two ongoing research strands within the project will then be presented: one focusing on a recent Italian literary corpus of « narrazioni mobili » and the other dealing with mobilities as literary tools and functions in the 19th century French novel.

Jason Finch

Åbo Akademi University, Finland 

Musical Railway Representations via Mobile Methods: Louis Jordan, James Brown, and YouTube 

Heard on the move via a smart phone, music originally recorded in the mid-twentieth century can be reinterpreted in novel ways that contain elements of co-production. My talk examines this activity using research frameworks drawn from mobility humanities, urban cultural studies and the history of media. In a recent conference paper developed as part of the ongoing research project ‘Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities’ (RAILIMAGE), I considered the media and technological landscape of the period from the end of the Second World War until the mid-1960s, when this music was created and within which it was first consumed. In that environment, the dominant recording medium was the vinyl record. Popular music then was consumed at home using physical recordings such as records playing at 78, 45 and 33⅓ rpm, but also, through the juke box, in public places, as well as being heard perhaps more than in any other way over the airwaves via the radio. At the end of the period, in the United States, television in particular markets and as syndicated coast to coast becomes a factor. While the earlier paper concentrated on two pieces of music, ‘Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’ and ‘Night Train’, using critical infrastructure studies to put them into dialogue with the crisis of passenger rail which America experienced during the postwar decades, my talk in Lancaster will instead consider media production and consumption in the broadcast era (1940s–1970s) alongside the methodological and social affordances of current (2020s) technology. 

Kate Moles

Cardiff University, UK

Swimming in Compromised Times and Places 

Abstract: Water allows us to think about and with mobility; it ebbs and flows, runs and seeps, collects and disperses, evaporates and pools, erodes and deposits. Access to water – to drink, for sanitation, and for leisure – offers ways to see social inequalities and to think about interconnections, vulnerability and complexities. More specifically, water moves us to consider environmental and non-human assemblages and swimming, as a method and as a social practice, provides insight into how movement, and blocked movement, invites us to think about the world today and the world becoming. Swimmers immerse themselves in polluted, risky, grey, brown, green waters as well as the blue idyllic that is often portrayed. Making sense of their practice and their accounts of where they swim and why, allows us to consider how we might go about swimming ethically in shifting and compromised times and places. 

2pm  7 x 5 minute Presentations

Lynne Pearce 

Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Cemore Co-Director, ����̽̽App.

The Road that Keeps on Giving 

Even the most mundane of roads, and roadscapes, delivers a wealth of knowledge aside from the ‘system of automobility’ (Dennis and Urry 2009) in which it is enmeshed. The linear space of the road – and the fact it is often (though not invariably) apprehended from a moving vehicle and at speed — gives rise to transient and hence unique configurations of human and non-human forces. These afford novel insights into how, inter alia, road-users of different kinds orient themselves in space and time (including memory) via idiosyncratic landmarks, form powerful but paradoxical attachments to vanishing places, and participate in the production of everyday kin/aesthetics. Most importantly of all, the road demonstrates how change manifests itself in familiar and notionally unremarkable environments as well as the mechanisms by which change becomes visible. This is a snapshot of some of the topics addressed in my forthcoming book — Britain’s Changing Roadscapes: Mobility, Place, Attachment, Loss —  which I shall expand upon in this brief presentation, together with some signposts to where my road research is heading next: for example, a case-study capturing how roads — and the experience of driving them — are dramatically impacted upon by weather, including the consequence of climate change. 

Muren Zhang

East China Normal University

Driving into the Impasse: Affective Adjustment and Backward Hope in Never Let Me Go 

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), driving does not mark the possibility of freedom or forward movement. Kathy’s driving, often unmoored from destination or urgency, enacts a form of affective adjustment rather than escape. What unfolds is not a linear progression, but a spatial and temporal impasse – movement that suspends transformation while sustaining attachment to what has already been lost. Mobility in this context does not open the future; it manages the present. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s account of impasse and Heather Love’s concept of backward hope, I read this mode of mobility as part of the novel’s affective biopolitical logic: not a refusal of the system, but a technique of staying within it. 

Dr Muren Zhang is Associate Professor of English Literature at East China Normal University. Her research interests include affect theory, mobility studies and contemporary British Literature and Culture. She is the author of Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading (Bloomsbury, 2022). 

David Tyfield

Lancaster Environment Centre, Cemore Associate Director, ����̽̽App

A Chinese-inspired Civilisational Turn: E-Mobility’s Uneven Remaking of Space-Time and Beyond

Gerry Davies & Sait Toprak

Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, ����̽̽App / Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir, Turkey

Migrations, a mail art exhibition

The exhibition invited artists to respond to the following theme, submitted by post in 2025: Movement and mobility are features of developed organisms, they are also means by which creatures, including we, orientate ourselves in and across the world. Today people and populations shift and change location for opportunity or leave under pressure. Archaeology tells us that pre-history saw radiating flows from Africa toward new lives East and West. And our futures will be rich with new Migration. While there remain few migratory peoples today, the migratory movement of critters, of birds, land animals and sea creatures continue.  Migrations mysterious and essential, large and small: wildebeest move for pasture, zooplankton up for food and down for safety, but sand dunes migrating, who knew? Artists are migrants. We live, move, work, communicate and trade within flows of migrating information. Geographically and digitally our ideas and work travel. In the street, on the kitchen table or a screen, in the studio or workshop, we encounter each other. You are coming the other way with something new; I take it up, pass it on. Whether actual or virtual, migrants exchange, collaborate and offer aid, ideas and support through shared mobility and movement. We offer the idea of Migrations freely and in the plural. Interpret it as human, animal, mineral, biological, geographic, gendered, geologic, spiritual or cultural. The effect might be close or far, the scale, visibility and impact global, local or microscopic.

Giovanni Bettini

Lancaster Environment Centre, Cemore Associate Director, ����̽̽App.

Climate Borderscapes – borders, (im)mobilization and justice in the climate emergency

This intervention introduces the notion of ‘climate borderscapes’, which brings work on borderscapes (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, Brambilla and Jones 2019, Krichker 2021, Peña 2023) into dialogue with the emerging climate mobilities framework (Boas et al 2022). The concept of climate borderscapes recasts the focus of debates on climate migration away from the spectre of a feared ‘climate exodus’. Instead, it foregrounds more pressing questions on how climate change may intersect with current processes of borderization (Mbembe 2019) and expulsion (Sassen). The risk is an intensification of forms of forced mobilisation and immobilization – often mirroring racialised lines – to which growing segments of the Majority World are exposed. The notion of climate borderscapes offers insights into the territorialization of sovereignty, borders, justice, and political subjectivities amidst the ongoing climate emergency, opening space to challenge dominant regimes and proposing alternative visions.

Bruce Bennett, Maryam Ghorbankarimi, Emma Rose

Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, ����̽̽App.

Site-seeing: making films with refugees 

This presentation discusses a film-making course we ran in Spring 2023 and then again in 2024 for asylum seekers residing in the local area. Working in groups under our supervision, the participants devised, shot and edited a set of short films, and at the end of the course they presented their films on stage at the local independent cinema to a public audience. 

Many of the participants had been transported to temporary housing in Lancaster and Morecambe in Northwest England through the Home Office National Dispersal Scheme while their asylum claims were being processed, some only a few weeks previously, and so one of the functions of this course was to allow them to investigate their new home (however temporary it would prove to be). 

In this presentation we outline the principles behind the design of this participatory project, discuss the work produced by the filmmakers, and reflect upon its effectiveness. 

Nicola Spurling

Sociology Department, Cemore Associate Director, ����̽̽App.

Follow the Auto/biography

3pm 7 x 5 minute Presentations

Monika Buscher 

Emeritus Professor, Sociology Department & Cemore, ����̽̽App

Changing Mobilities 

Why is it so hard to change mobility systems even as natural, political, and social systems are collapsing? What can we do? These questions are at the heart of a book I have co-authored with Greg Marsden, due out in 2025. In this presentation I give a glimpse of our research and conclusions. Many analysts suggest a crisis of imagination, and it can, indeed, seem easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But we find that there is nothing natural about this, it is a crisis manufactured by powerful people and interests. Part of their strategy is suppression of a vibrant world where alternative mobilities are not just imagined but made real against huge odds. We argue that mobile methods can help infrastructure resistance and allow these alternatives to take hold and spread. 

Colin Pooley

Emeritus Professor, Lancaster Environment Centre & Cemore, ����̽̽App 

Approaches to the study of past virtual mobility. 

Virtual mobility is usually associated with the internet age and the rise of social media. It is a term often applied to distance learning, but can also apply to any media through which people make connections and learn about distant places. My research has been using a large collection of letters written by a young lady in Toronto to her pen friend in north Lancashire. They began corresponding in 1946 and continued until 2013. Pen pal correspondence was common in the mid-twentieth century and the Toronto correspondents wrote to at least 40 different pen pals scattered all over the globe. Through these she made connections, swapped personal information and learned about distant places and cultures. Letters were not the only way in which virtual mobility took place in the past, but I argue that they could provide a dense network of interaction long before the internet age. 

Artist A & Artist B

University of Central Lancashire / Independent Artist

Artist A & Artist B: Hauling with Intent

‘Artist A & Artist B’ is the collaborative name for Dr Jackie Haynes and Dr Heather Mullender-Ross. Since 2020 they have developed a series of multimedia, performance-based and mobilised artforms under the project title ‘Statement of Intent’. Their respective art practice-based PhDs focussed on the German Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters, and the wider legacy and contemporary relevance of Merz, Dada and Fluxus. They are currently working on a 7” vinyl recording of shanty songs reflecting on their project (A-Side) and the working terms and conditions of the contemporary artist (B-Side). The forthcoming songs, accompanying exhibition and live event will inform a co-written book chapter fuelled by the creative exchanges and collaborative strategies of Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters, during their period of enforced exile. Both Statement of Intent and the book chapter seek to illuminate the work of both sets of collaborators by asking, what forms of art practice can articulate ideas arising from persistence, non-fixity and the pooling of skills and ideas?  

Xiao Geng

College of Foreign Languages, South-Central Minzu University 
Visiting Professor, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge 

The Writing of Plant Mobility in 20th-Century British Literature 

This paper explores the concept of botanical mobility in British literature, examining how plants—both literal and symbolic—traverse geographical, cultural, and metaphorical boundaries across key literary works. Focusing on texts from the Romantic era to postcolonial narratives, the study analyzes how authors such as John Keats, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, etc employ botanical imagery to interrogate themes of colonialism, ecological interconnectedness, and human displacement. By tracing the movement of plants as symbols of migration, hybridity, and resilience, the essay reveals how flora in literature often mirrors socio-political dynamics. Drawing on ecocritical and postcolonial frameworks, the paper argues that botanical mobility serves as a narrative device to critique power structures and envision ecological solidarity. Ultimately, it contends that British literature’s engagement with plant life transcends mere pastoral aesthetics, offering a radical reimagining of nature’s role in shaping identity and resistance. 

Rodanthi Tzanelli

School of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Leeds, UK 

Environmental imaginaria in the age of extinction: three biostyles of radical mobility 

Abstract: Environmental imaginaria is my own umbrella term, as featured in my last monograph, which explored different schools of critical thought, travel style and artistic creativity addressing planetary crises, and especially those triggered by climate catastrophes (Tzanelli, 2025). It refers to multiple sites, physical, virtual and audiovisual, which preserve traces of actual and imagined species and habitats extinct or at risk of extinction. The spectrality of these sites is conducive to imaginaries of loss, ecocide but also hope and hospitality extended to more-than-human life.  

Rather than discussing the sites themselves, I focus on three styles of human mobility enacted in and through them, each of them corresponding to the moving subject’s radical habitus: posthuman countertravel (Tzanelli, 2017, 2025), planetary drifting (Szerszynski, 2018), and last-time travel (McGaurr and Lester, 2018).  Each of these styles relates to the mobile subject’s attitude towards climate change (catastrophist, gradualist and denialistist – Urry, 2016). Not only each style imprints attitude as their (post-)biopolitical signature, but it also situates them within different arguments in the ‘Critical Zone’ (Latour, 2018). 

Serena Pollastri, Suzana Ilic

Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts / Lancaster Environment Centre, ����̽̽App

Doing research with water and sands: reflections on engaging with the fluidity of coastal environments. 

The seashore is an elusive and arguably arbitrary border between sea and the coast: it moves with the rhythms of the tides and through sudden shifts caused by storms, winds, erosion and sediment accretion. In intertidal saltmarshes this border becomes blurred and frayed, as it seeps through the pockets of vegetations that exist in the wet spaces between water and land.  

These areas are also site of intricate entanglements between human and non-human animal communities whose lives are affected by water, its movements, and its often-unpredictable effect.  

Drawing from the experience gained in a recent project of design and deployment of nature-based solutions in intertidal zones, this contribution reflects on the importance of situated knowledge in coastal areas. Specifically, it argues for incorporating fluidity in research and design methods that fully embrace the dynamic nature of the shore – and resist the temptation to fully rely on computational models and predictions.  

Jen Southern

Cemore Director, Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, ����̽̽App

More-than-human mobilities and infrastructures

This presentation introduces the mobilities and anchoring of seaweed as a site for study of relational more-than-human mobilities. This research collaboration with Prof. Lynne Pearce focusses on relationships between seaweed archives and seaweed in the wild to explore mobility and infrastructure. I will start by looking at the discoveries of phycologist Kathleen Drew-Baker that led to modern methods of Japanese Nori cultivation. Then, through an introduction made by artist Debbie Yare, I focus on the close observational work of W.B. Kendall found in Barrow Archives. As railway engineer, geologist, and seaweed collector his work offers a useful example to explore connections between surveys, collections and engineering infrastructures.

Deadline: 28 April 2025

Exhibition Dates: 13 May-27 May 2025

Exhibition Place: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA)

Contact: saittoprak01@gmail.com

Curators: Sait Toprak & Gerry Davies

Submission Address: Sait Toprak & Gerry Davies, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA). ����̽̽App. Lancaster. LA1 4YW. England. United Kingdom

• All submitted work will be exhibited
• No technical limitations
• Work should be about ‘Migrations’
• No artwork will be returned to participants

MAIL ART: MIGRATIONS

Movement and mobility are features of developed organisms, they are also means by which creatures, including we, orientate ourselves in and across the world. Today people and populations shift and change location for opportunity or leave under pressure. Archaeology tells us that pre-history saw radiating flows from Africa toward new lives East and West. And our futures will be rich with new Migrations

While there remain few migratory peoples today, the migratory movement of critters, of birds, land animals and sea creatures continue.  Migrations mysterious and essential, large and small: wildebeest move for pasture, zooplankton up for food and down for safety, but sand dunes migrating, who knew?

Artists are migrants. We live, move, work, communicate and trade within flows of migrating information. Geographically and digitally our ideas and work travel. In the street, on the kitchen table or a screen, in the studio or workshop, we encounter each other. You are coming the other way with something new; I take it up, pass it on. Whether actual or virtual, migrants exchange, collaborate and offer aid, ideas and support through shared mobility and movement.

We offer the idea of Migrations freely and in the plural. Interpret it as human, animal, mineral, biological, geographic, gendered, geologic, spiritual or cultural. The effect might be close or far, the scale, visibility and impact global, local or microscopic. Over to you now!

Chaired by Dr. Rolien Hoyng (Dept of Sociology, ����̽̽App) and Dr. Andy Yuille (LEC, ����̽̽App), the event will feature contributions from:

• Prof. Hannah Knox (Social Anthropology, University of Manchester)
• Dr. James Keeble (LEC, ����̽̽App)
• Dr. Nils Markusson (LEC, ����̽̽App)
• Dr. Jen Southern (LICA, ����̽̽App)

Uncertain Climates: An Interdisciplinary Roundtable

The climate crisis confronts us with uncertainty and is negotiated through a host of speculative technical epistemologies and apparatuses. However, rather than resolving uncertainty, it is translated and reconfigured, and it reverberates across social contexts. The dominant impulse has been to double down on certainty. But what consequences do discourses of certainty have and how do we understand the ethical possibilities of the uncertain?

At a time of flourishing new and old climate scepticisms, a wildly interdisciplinary panel combining speakers from atmospheric science, social science and art will reflect on this question.

Event details

• Time: 4pm to 5.15pm on Friday January 17th
• Attend in person in the Management School, ����̽̽App, Lecture Theatre 14
• Attend online, via Teams. Email j.a.southern@lancaster.ac.uk for the meeting link

Photo by on

by Aleksandra Ianchenko, Cemore Visiting Researcher, 2024.

Image: Frottage from the milestone along the Lancaster Canal

In June, I was lucky to be a visiting scholar at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and the Centre for Mobilities Research (CEMORE). I am grateful to Lynne Pearce, Professor at the Department of English and Creative Writing and CEMORE’s Co-director, and Jen Southern, Senior Lecturer at LICA and Associate Director of the CEMORE who invited and welcomed me in Lancaster. This research stay was possible thanks to the financial support of the H. W. Donner Foundation Travel Grant.

Upon my arrival, Jen welcomed and briefly showed me the LU Campus which is like a small town with many office and living buildings, cafes, shops, and even hairdressers. She also passed me the key from the CEMORE lab. I was thrilled when I unlocked the door and stepped inside the lab which I have heard about so much!  

It was about five years ago when I first browsed the webpage of the Centre. I got so excited that I emailed the Centre introducing my artists practice and my proposal for a future PhD project. I received an encouraging response from Jen who soon after invited me to newsletter through which I eventually found the PhD position in the project. Now, I have submitted my thesis for the final defence and am grateful to think what role the Centre played in my career. That is why visiting the Centre and ����̽̽App meant a lot for me.��

Eightieen days of my stay passed very quickly. I was happy to meet another visiting at that time scholar, Elisa Mozzelin, PhD student from Italy, who is doing a fantastic project to establish a philosophy of walking. Together we participated in the CEMORE Summer Seminar entitled ‘ (chairs: Jen Southern and Lynne Pearce). There, I received stimulating questions and comments from the audience when presenting my paper ‘Walking and Drawing as a Method for Urban Hauntings’. In addition,��I got a chance to see LICA’s and participated in a critical seminar for MA Fine Art students (MA group crits) where I presented my practice and commented on students’ works in progress.��

I also got a chance to discover the city of Lancaster. I was surprised that rural and natural areas so close to the city centre: just walk 10 minutes and you are out there in green meadows. In the summertime, this proximity was a bliss and I enjoyed it very much. The most fascinating discovery for me was the Lancaster Canal. I did several walks along the Canal: from the city to the Lune Aqueduct (2,4 miles) and from the Glasson Dock back to the city (11 miles). During my walk, I made sketches with oil pastel.

Observational sketching in situ is one of my art and research methods. It allows you to get ‘attuned’ to the location: physically by positioning your body and moving a hand over paper, sensory by paying attention to sounds and smells around you, and emotionally by establishing a closer connection to the location. Sketching sometimes feels like touching when you palpate objects with your eyes, and examine their shapes and positions. Through this process, objects and scenes become closer, more familiar and intimate. Sketching is always selective. Selecting what to draw helped me process my impressions and experience of the Canal, which was an unknown and exciting place for me.

The environment along the canal was very colourful and full of detail. It felt overwhelming, but the limited choice of materials and colours helped me to cope. I mainly used brown and green, with some yellow, blue and orange. The oil pastel, as a soft material, allowed me to vary this palette with different shades, pressing the pastel stick onto the paper with different pressures. The limited colours and tools help to reduce the rich experience of the place to key elements, which in turn helps to develop a coherent series of drawings as one project. In addition to drawing on the canal, I also researched its history, which helped me to understand the place better. In this blog post, I juxtapose quick facts about the canal with my drawings, creating a visual story.

The construction of the Canal started in 1792 to transport goods, limestone from quarries in Kendal, and coal from mines in Bolton. It was an expensive and ambitious project. Due to its costs, there were delays and deviations from the initial design. However, the connection between Kendal and Bolton was created, and the stretch to the Glasson Dock was made in 1826. In 1885 the Canal Company dissolved and the construction finished.

Besides transporting goods, there was also a passenger service by so-called packet boats which operated from 1833 to 1846. Boats were pulled by horses who walked on the towpath along the canal. The speed was about 9 miles per hour and the number of passengers was up to 70. However, the opening of the Lancaster and Carlisle railway put an end to packet boat service. There is a fantastic exhibition about the canal at Lancaster Maritime Museum. One of those boats was called Water Witch. Today, it is the name of the pub on the canal in Lancaster.��

The construction of the Canal was an impressive and laborious task. The plan was made by young talented civil engineer John Rennie, whereas construction work was undertaken by diggers or as they were called, navvies. In his fascinating book Building the Lancaster Canal (1979), Robert Philpotts describes their work as low-paid and hard when they had to work ten hours a day for six days a week. Philpotts also describes the construction process:

“The cutters would begin digging along the certain section making a trench about 20’ wide and 7’ deep. When this was done then the bottom and sides had to be made watertight by a process known as puddling. Puddling comprised of filling the bottom and sides of the canal with a waterproof lining of clay and this could vary in thickness…Sometimes it was a yard deep. The clay had to be treaded to make it impervious to water and one method of doing this was to have navvies stamp up and down on it in their bare feet until all the air bubbles were driven out.” (Philpotts, 1979, pp. 23-24). 

When the canal was properly padded, the towpath for horses was paved along the canal. Whereas cutters were digging a canal, stonemasons built accommodation bridges above the canal. Today, various bridges are highlights and points of attraction for everyone walking along the canal. 

One of the most spectacular objects of the Lancaster Canal is Lune Aquaduct. It was designed by John Rennie and constructed by architect Alexander Stevens. The construction took place between 1794 and 1797. It was an expensive project. For instance, Rennie insisted on using a special volcanic powder, pozzolana, as a mortar, which had to be shipped from Italy. To meet the deadline, the work went around the clock.��

Today, on the way to the Aquaduct, one can see a memorial plate. It was designed in 2012 by local artist Rachel Midgley together with Central Lancaster High School. The plate features the portrait of Rennie and notably, a figure of ‘an unknown navvy” whose hard labor enabled this impressive infrastructural object.

Intuitively, I placed a paper onto the plate and rubbed it with an oil pastel. This technique known as rubbing or frottage was popularised by the surrealists Max Ernst who regarded it as a sort of automatic drawing. It could be seen as a type of drawing from life in a very direct sense by literary making a cast of the real object. 

The development of the railway (and subsequently motorised transport) downplayed the canal as a transportation channel. Gradually, its role diminished and the last commercial service was carried out in 1947. There were calls for draining and closing the canal, but it eventually it was preserved by the formed in 1963. Today, the Canal is a part of the UK canal network. It is used for private and excursion boats, and there are walking and cycling paths along the canal.��

The Canal is also a . During my walks, I have seen not only domestic sheep, cows and horses herding on meadows along the Canal but also the variety of water birds: ducks, swans, herons. It was great to watch a swan family with seven ducklings swimming down the stream. These ‘encounters’ – places, creatures, or activities – I tried to capture on paper. Later, I have learned that there is a term what what I did –�� gongoozling. It means watching boats and activities on canals and is similar to trainspotting.��

The CeMoRe strand of the conference was the final event in a twelve-month programme celebrating the Centre’s twentieth anniversary while its theme – ‘Rocky Futures’ – was chosen to complement our current focus on the climate emergency.

While not all of the panels and papers included in our strand focused on the climate emergency, many did, and it was inspiring to see such a wide variety of research – from the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences – engaging with these debates.

The event was the most fully-hybrid that the Centre has ever hosted and combined fully in-person Lancaster panels (broadcast to the main conference in Seoul and participants around the world) with others in which in-person and online presentations were combined. There were also three panels which were entirely online, but with which we engaged as a collective in-person audience. Given that the carbon footprint of academic travel is such a pressing concern, we were delighted that the technology worked as well as it did and enabled us to connect with friends and colleagues around the world.

As well welcoming ‘old friends’ back to Lancaster (the team from Aalbourg) , we hosted panels based in Padua, Finland/Estonia and a large, double panel on post-colonialism and mobility led by Anna-Leena Toivanen (who was herself based in Seoul for the conference). Details of all these panels and presentations may be found on the final version of the conference programme.

Alongside these academic panels, the Hub also broadcast the ‘’ live video-art exhibition, curated by Rebecca Birch, Sarah Casey and Jen Southern, and supported by arts organization This brought together 14 international artists and researchers who are concerned with mobilities and instabilities (temporal, spatial, cultural, environmental) of rocky landscapes in uncertain times. The live Zoom conversations were hosted by the artists, from the field, on laptops and mobiles. Each artist draws on a deep knowledge of materiality learnt from their art practice to devise ways to make the rocky environments more ‘present’ at a distance, through strategies such as story-telling, touch, lens, sound and speculation. Linked to the exhibition were a further two panels in which artists and academics reflected further on the ‘Rocky Futures’ theme in relation to their own work.

Finally, the Hub was also the sad and yet inspiring occasion of Monika Buscher’s retirement from ����̽̽App. As mobilities scholars will be aware, Monika has been a leading figure in the field for over two decades and is known, in particular, for her innovations in mobile methods (and their application) and her success in winning multiple large research grants – many with a mobilities focus. We celebrated Monika’s legacy with a participatory lunchtime event – devised by Monika herself – which required everyone present – in person and online – to speak to two prompts: … to two prompts: ‘What if .. .? and ‘What Now . . .’? As we came to the front of the room to make our contribution, we were invited to pick up a card with a number on one side and a letter on the other, and to arrange ourselves in a row according to the numbers. By the time everyone had spoken, the letters spelt out Monika’s own contribution: Mobilities for  (Mobilities for ‘good living) – a call to recognise the contribution and to develop the potential of mobilities research for living in harmony with nature and more-than-human democratic negotiation of just relational interdependence. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the unique contribution Monika has made to CeMoRe over the years.

Lynne Pearce and Jen Southern (Conference Organisers)

20th ANNIVERSARY (2003-2023)

Programme of Events

**F E B R U A R Y   U P D A T E **

Academic year 2022-3 marks the twentieth anniversary of Lancaster’s Centre for Mobilities Research which was founded by John Urry and Mimi Sheller in 2003. The current CeMoRe team would like to celebrate this special occasion by reaching out to friends and colleagues around the world who have been on the mobilities journey with us in the hope that we can meet with you – virtually or in person – at some point over the coming year.

To this end, we share below our continuing programme of events for 2023 and we would like to thank everyone who has attended our events that have taken place thus far. The programme of events culminates in a strand dedicated to the CeMoRe Anniversary at 2023’s Annual T2M Conference. 

We will be hosting an exhibition and in-person event at ����̽̽App to run alongside the main conference taking place at Konkuk University in Seoul (South Korea). The hybrid format of the conference will also facilitate the participation of groups and individuals from around the world who would prefer to join us remotely.  We will be writing to colleagues who we believe may be interested in this opportunity soon.

In the meantime, we would be delighted to welcome colleagues based in the UK to the Lancaster-based events listed below as well the online workshops and seminars.

10^th March, 1.00-2.30pm (British Standard Time): CeMoRe Spring Webinar (Online)

Dr Stephanie Sodero (Climate Change and Health, Manchester University) 

‘UNDER THE WEATHER: REIMAGINING MOBILITY IN THE CLIMATE CRISIS’ 

 At this online event Stephanie Sodero will be talking about her new book, ‘Under the Weather: Reimagining Mobility in the Climate Crisis’, with discussants Monika Buscher and Mimi Sheller. There will also be an opportunity to participate in the discussion and ask questions.

Follow this link for more information and to .

12^th May: Art Mobilities Webinar (Online) 4.00-5.30pm BST

Dr Jen Southern (����̽̽App) and Kaya Barry. 

Details to be confirmed at a later date, please refer to our website and mailing list for upcoming information. 

25^th May:  CeMoRe Summer Seminar with Dr Sharon Wilson (����̽̽App / in-person) 4.00-6.00pm BST (Room to be confirmed).

Dr Sharon Wilson (Northumbria University and Mobilities Futures Research Network)

PUTTING “FLESH ON THE BONEYARD”; EVERYDAY MILITARIES AND MUSEUM, A MOBILITIES PERSPECTIVE.

This is an in-person event, exact location on campus to be confirmed closer to the date. For more information and to register for the event please .

17^th July 2023:  CeMoRe 20th Anniversary Colloquium (����̽̽App / in-person and online) 

This event will incorporate presentations from CeMoRe’s past and present directors, a PGR/ECR workshop/masterclass (with competitive travel bursaries for up to four students) and Mimi Sheller’s 20th Anniversary Lecture:

‘MOBILITY JUSTICE AND CLIMATE REPARATIONS: REFLECTING ON 20 YEARS OF MOBILITIES RESEARCH’

Eventbrite registration (online and in-person) will be advertised via the CeMoRe website and mailing list in the near future together with details of PGR/ECR funding for the workshop.

Early expressions of interest are also welcome: please contact us at cemore@lancaster.ac.uk  

October 25-28th 2023:  Annual T2M Conference (Seoul, South Korea and ����̽̽App / in-person and online)

CONFERENCE THEME: MOBILITY, AESTHETICS AND ETHICS

A conference strand will be dedicated to CeMoRe’s 20th anniversary at this year’s T2M conference and we will be reaching out to colleagues around the world in the hope of putting together a series of online panels. In the meantime, if you would like to propose your own panel please contact us at  cemore@lancaster.ac.uk.

 To coincide with the conference, Jen Southern will be curating an online international exhibition – ‘ROCKY FUTURES’  (see link following for details) – and at least two in-person / live-stream panels relating to the exhibition will take place at ����̽̽App.

CeMoRe is also happy to host in-person / live-stream panels convened by UK/European conference participants, with ����̽̽App  functioning as a European hub for those unable to travel to South Korea. 

26^th October 2023: Annual John Urry Lecture (����̽̽App/ in-person)

Alice Mah (Professor of Sociology and Head of Department, University of Warwick). 

Full details and registration to be confirmed at a later date. 

To be kept up to date on future events and activity at CeMoRe please view our website. 

CeMoRe Website:  /cemore. 

If you are not already signed up the CeMoRe mailing list and would like to be kept updated, please email cemore@lancaster.ac.uk to be added to the list. 

If you have any other queries please contact:

Lynne Pearce (Co-Director Humanities and Acting Director): L.Pearce@lancaster.ac.uk

Harriet Phipps (CeMoRe Administrator): cemore@lancaster.ac.uk

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS.

A one day symposium organised by (Arts) Territory Exchange, Centre for Mobilities Research (Cemore) LICA, ����̽̽App and Ströndin Studio, Seydisfjördur, Iceland. 11^th June 2021.

Iceland has long been considered a home for arts and cultural tourism. From WH Auden’s letters from Iceland, where British readers contemplated Iceland from a distance to the Artist Residency Industry which attracts thousands of artists from Europe, the US, Canada and elsewhere every year. This symposium plans to ask what it is about Iceland in particular that ignites such desire to travel and what has the travel hiatus meant for the touristic imagination? The symposium will investigate our desires as cultural producers, to touch, breathe and tread the Icelandic landscape and explore digital and postal alternatives to encountering ‘place’ as well as investigating the impact of digital travel on the cultural tourism economy.

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In Light of Covid’s forced travel hiatus this symposium seeks to think about Iceland through the dimensions of Mobility, Spatiality and Virtuality.

Referencing the text “Understanding and Constructing Shared Spaces with Mixed-Reality Boundar- ies”(1998)by Steve Benford et.al which describes different properties of “Shared Spaces” and the complex social and performative sphere made of mixed-reality boundaries and the joining real and virtual spaces across what he names as Transportation, Spatiality and Artifici-ality, it becomes clear that the travel hiatus forced by Covid created a disorientation of these established concepts and their hierarchies in relation to experiencing ‘research’, ‘field work’ and emotional connectivity (with loved ones and landscapes) across terrains of the embodied, physical, spatial and cognitive. The in-between spaces, digital terrains deemed as artifical have been deepened as relational and embodied in a new way as we have had to rely on others to vicarously demonstrate and share landscapes and their sensory contents across distances.

As a prompt we will look at these ideas alongside Lucy Lippard’s critique of the research trip model of artists ‘parachuting in to soak up place’ (2018) how can we think about non-extractive and respectful means of cultural production that go beyond re-hashing the typical views of Iceland and ways to merge both remote and on the ground or ’embodied’ experiences which may eskew what Jóhannesdóttir (2016) calls the striving towards controlling and owning landscapes as we begin to travel again.

Confirmed contributers

Keynote Speaker – Jessica Auer.

Jessica Auer is a Canadian photographer and visual artist who works between Montréal, Québec and Seydisfjördur, Iceland. Her work is broadly concerned with the study of landscapes as cultural sites, focusing on themes that connect history, place, journey and cultural experience. She is best known for her large format photographs that examine the ways in which landscapes have been preserved, altered or commodified for sightseeing. In the last decade, she has completed over a dozen photography and video projects and published two photo books. An avid wanderer, she has participated in several international artist residencies, working in many Nordic and island environments across Canada and Scandinavia. While in Montréal, Jessica teaches photography at Concordia University.

Artist presentations.

Rhona Eve Clews and Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir.

The artist/photographers will talk about their collaboration through (Arts) Territory Exchange which has taken place between London, Iceland and Sweden since 2018, touching on their postal exchanges, distance and proximity in their collaboration and the relationship to both their locations as they have deepened their exchange through lockdowns, thinking about the female body, landscape and alternative photography.

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We are looking for; papers, artist presentations and experimental responses to the material. – Please send a 100 word bio, 200 word abstract, (with weblinks to images and digital material if necessary) to both gudrun@artsterritoryexchange.com and j.a.southern@lancaster.ac.uk by May 20^th.

We want to accommodate as many proposals as possible so each presentation will be 8 – 10 minutes long. We will accept pre-recorded presentations if you are in a different time zone or have caring responsibilities which preclude attendance on the 11^th June.

There may be opportunity for papers to be developed for publication at a later date.

Proposals will touch on but not be limited to the following in regard to Iceland: Experiences of past travel and travel longing, telepresense, co presence across distances, desires to ‘touch’ across distances, missing, sensual experience of place, mediated experiences, long distance exchange (postal and digital) telematic art and the arctic regions, digital environmentalism, post-tourism, touristic extractions and souvenir collecting, itinerant research methods, cultural residency and travel cultures (and their virtual counterparts), flight and slow travel, Covid and effects on the cultural tourism industry, Instagram and tourism, how Icelandic artists view cultural tourists, archeology, excavation and tourism in Nordic countries. Iceland as metaphor (queerness inbetweenness – Myles 2009), alternative photography and Iceland.

Refs.

Image Credit: Jessica Auer.

Benford, Steve. Greenlaugh, Chris. Understanding and Constructing Shared Spaces with Mixed-Reality Boundaries. .ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interactions 5 (3):185-223. DOI:10.1145/292834.292836. September 1998

Jóhannesdóttir, Guðbjörg Rannveig Phenomenological Aesthetics of Landscape and Beauty in Phenomenology and the Environment, edited by Bryan Bannon, 187-214. Rowman & Littelfield, 2016

Lippard, Lucy. Canadian Art 2018 https://canadianart.ca/essays/lucy-lippard-then-and-now/

Myles, Eileen The Importance of Being Iceland Travel Essays in Art Semiotext(e) 2009.

The work will be hosted within the conference virtual platform at Methods and Practices of Mobilities Research conference.

Thursday July 8th and Friday July 9th 2021, hosted by MFRN (Mobilities Research Network).

After the conference the exhibition will be hosted on a wordpress website.

We are seeking submissions for an online exhibition.

In turbulent geo-political, social and technological times attention to the role of im|mobilities is important. This is both true in relation to mobilities as a diverse area of academic enquiry, but also in terms of what it means to make art related to mobilities and movement.

The diversity of mobilities research, from the politics of migration control to corporeal acts of stillness and movement, provide insights that demonstrate crucial relations across multiples sites and scales of life, and across disciplines. The complex contextures of life and social order are made in and through the interconnected im|mobilities of people, goods, resources, particles, viruses, ideas, information and more. Turbulent times demand creative agility in art works and creative research methods that explore, for instance: the micro-mobilities of CO2, soil, and microbes, intentional and forced migrations, more-than-human mobilities of both animals and technologies, to transport systems from walking to flight, and interplanetary imaginaries of escape.

We invite submissions of existing work from any artist or researcher working with the conference themes.

The exhibition will be in a virtual space online, with three options for submissions:

• Banner Image on the ‘wall’ of the virtual space = 1MB and 435x300px.
• Video as part of a showreel within the virtual space = 1920 x 1080px, no longer than 5 minutes. Link for YouTube, Vimeo or Twitch.
• A link to an external webpage or an online document.

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Submit your artworks and a 300-500 word text for the catalogue by Friday May 14th 2021 to j.a.southern@lancaster.ac.uk & k.barry@griffith.edu.au ��

We aim to collaboratively write a multi-authored journal article based on the short texts, and reflections on the virtual exhibition. If you would like to be part of this, please indicate in your submission.