SYMPOSIUM Abstracts

DAY 1

09:45 – 10:00 Arrival and registration

10:00 – 10:30 Welcome and Introduction

Why Volatile Mobilities?

10:30 – 11:30 Keynote

Crystal Legacy • Volatile infrastructures: fragile solidarities and the careful art of structural gaslighting

There is a careful art to structural gaslighting, and it can thrive in environments where stakes are high, and resistance is likely.  In volatile planning contexts, such is the delivery of mega road projects in democratic societies, community solidarity to resist is greeted by state power to deliver. How these two forces collide, where they collide, and what transpires thereafter brings to the fore questions about volatility, and the practices and processes used to limit it. In this paper I consider these questions by bringing the concept of volatility into conversation with the growing body of literature on structural gaslighting. By reflecting on 10 years of research on contested tollroad projects in Melbourne, including the soon to open West Gate Tunnel, I will show that structural gaslighting is most acute when community solidarities provoke the precarious foundations that make these infrastructures volatile in the first place.

11:35 – 12:40 Paper session 1

Stream 1: Volatile Itineraries

Thomas Birtchnell • Capillary Despotism as a Source of Volatility in Wilderness Cycling Trails

A matrix of neo-despotism guides the logic of transport infrastructures wherein entities with more power—financial power, physical power, horse-power—are given leeway to exercise domination and oppression over other citizens within carefully agreed, but ill-defined, limits. Prosaic, everyday, despotism is enacted in a capillary fashion on roads, as if in finely branching networks, by motorists who are safe in the knowledge that ‘might is right’; capillary despotism is baked into mobility systems governing contemporary roadways. While manifestations of risky or oppressive motoring and the ever present threat of violence latent to powered mobilities are designed into infrastructures and road rules, the emergence of capillary despotism in wilderness spaces is a surprising evolvement. The research examines the introduction of formal cycling trails in an Australian national park, where capillary despotism has taken root in ways that conflict with the stated values and policies of governing bodies—institutions that, at least in print, are committed to making wilderness accessible to all, regardless of physical or financial capacity

Tom Fisher • Volatility and Vulnerability in Velomobilities

Too slow for automobilities and too fast for pedestrians, cyclists can be perceived as volatile inhabitants of public spaces when encountering other forms of mobility. Their relative vulnerability and occlusion in road policies designed primarily for easeful throughput of motorised vehicles renders cycling a problematic mode of mobility in popular discourse. The actual lived experience of cyclists stands in contrast to perceptions of them as wayward. Drawing on qualitative research in the regional Australian city of Armidale, this research presentation unsettles the notion of cyclists as problematic companions on roads and pavements instead displacing the projection of volatility to oversights and shortfalls in infrastructure and planning regimes deriving from policy incoherence. Instead of arising from unpredictable and ‘dangerous’ behaviours, the perception of volatility shadowing cycling emerges from prosaic strategies and visceral nuances, which cyclists develop as a repertoire of safety and care for themselves and others. The presentation interprets volatility in cycling practices as a dynamic force emergent from an acute awareness of the bodily vulnerability of themselves and others. In doing so, the research seeks to unseat the dominating and simplifying brutalism of transport policymaking and planning prevalent in contemporary Australia in favour of awareness and facilitation of textured and nuanced mobilities.

Gina Gatarin • The volatile lives of pedestrians crossing ugly footbridges: Fighting for the cities we deserve

Urban mobility is extremely challenging and dangerous in many cities of the Global South. Fragmented, poorly maintained, or entirely absent footpaths slaps pedestrians, though everyone is arguably a pedestrian at any given time, of living volatile lives. In Metro Manila, the capital of the Philippines, pedestrians usually endure hiking ill-constructed and ugly footbridges to cross major roads. A controversial example is the nine-meter-high Kamuning Footbridge (mockingly nicknamed in social media as Mount Kamuning), which became an object of public scrutiny and satire and a poster child for the hostility and corruption in public walking infrastructure, especially for low income public and active transport commuters. Using volatility as lens, this presentation seeks to navigate around how transport reform advocates are fighting for just transport systems and dignified commuting, for cities people deserve in a hyperinformal metropolis.

Stream 2: Volatile Lives

David Radford • Volatile and affective rural refugee (im)mobilities

In this paper I draw on a volatile mobilities framework to reframe and re-analyse research I have undertaken on rural and regional refugee migrant patterns of (im)mobility (Radford 2016; Radford et al 2023, Radford et al 2025). I argue that volatile responses and reactions from local community members and refugees, driven by real or imagined fears, uncertainties and ontological (in)securities are indicative of eruptive and disruptive affects that heighten both exclusionary and inclusionary behaviours (Radford 2017; Massey 2004; Amin 2002, Weatherall 2013; Noble and Poynting 2008, 2010). These acts and reactions of conflict and conviviality (Wise and Noble 2016; Watson and Saha 2013; ) demonstrate that volatility can have positive as well as negative affective impact resulting in (un)welcoming of refugee migration and their place, identity and (im)mobility in and through rural and regional communities.

Diti Bhattacharya • On the Volatilities of Feminized Unpaid Labour in Sport Volunteering

Sport volunteering can offer diverse range of social, cultural and emotional benefits. Yet, spaces of sport volunteering within the context of emotional transactions, characterised by affective flows of movement and labour remain complex, contested and under examined. Looking through a gendered lens, sport volunteering often manifests into unpaid feminist labour within a sport participation context. This presentation draws on the concept of ‘volatility’ in understanding the ways in which sport volunteering, as a community-based leisure activity, can create both spaces of inequity and empowerment, critically examining unpaid feminised labour. Dwelling on politics of invisibility through moments of waiting, commuting, and other forms of labour, this presentation examines spaces on the edges of sports volunteering as swaying between flexible/opportune and frozen/critical. In doing so, this research situates itself within the wider conversations on feminised migrant labour, (im)mobilities and dynamics of participation in sport volunteering.

Shiva Nouri • Immobile Mobility: Iranian migrant women’s “mobile practices” between here and there

Mobilities are at the heart of both migration and media practices, as migrants connect to left-behind places and people through social media. Social media constitutes an “affective atmosphere” that brings together migrants and their multiple audiences, with contrasting social norms and mobilities across here and there. Building on mobilities and affect literature, I explore Iranian migrant women’s “mobile practices” as they navigate everyday social media connectivity between here and there. I use “immobile mobility” as a concept to capture how gendered norms are simultaneously transgressed and reinforced through movement from there to here, and from the physical to the digital. While these women experience greater spatial mobility in their everyday lives here, their ongoing connections to there keep them entangled with the same gendered norms. As a result, they experience a form of “immobility” when shifting from the offline space of here to the digital space of social media. These findings contribute to digital geographies by highlighting the affective and embodied dimensions of digital connectivity, demonstrating that mobility extends beyond physical movement to include the navigation of socio-cultural norms in both physical and digital spaces.

13:40 – 14:45 Paper session 2

Stream 1: Volatile Orders

Holly Randell-Moon • Dispossession by air: Aero-nationalism, settler colonialism, and First Nations

This paper examines the role of aviation in the dispossessory practices of child removals from Indigenous families and communities in Australia. Synthesising Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories hitherto examined separately, the paper connects aero-nationalism and settler colonialism with First Nations experiences of the aviation industry and its development in Australia. Where aero-nationalism celebrates the accessibility of the interior through aviation, this enabled volatile mobilities for First Nations who were subject to repeated removals and relocations. The time-space compression and tumultuous experiences of early air-travel augmented the violence of child removals. This paper contributes research to aero-mobilities by showing how the development of aviation in Australian enhanced government practices of protectionism and assimilation. I situate child removals within mobilities of settler infrastructural incursion to illustrate the dispossessory practices of aviation on First Nations populations. The paper concludes by examining how the future-making practices of aviation can engage with reconciliation and colonial reparations.

Emily House, Kaya Barry, Robert Mason, Rafa Azeredo, Diti Bhattacharya • Museums of Cane and Control: Heritage Narratives and the Governance of Mobility in Queensland Sugar

This article interrogates how sugar museums narrate and often elide the volatile mobilities that built Queensland’s sugar economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We contend that the contingency and contestation that were integral to colonial state formation in the tropics are muted in dominant heritage practice. Across Australia’s regional labour museums, a familiar settler narrative foregrounds heroic European toil, “taming” an inhospitable environment and building enduring local communities. A local focus anchored in farms, landscapes, and community continuity renders migrant workers immobile, detaching their lives from the global sugar circuits that structured labour and capital. Consequently, exhibitions normalise or occlude the racialised labour regimes that organised production and the coercive logics of border and workplace regulation, historically and in the present. The analysis demonstrates the co-constitution of such mobility and colonial state formation through sugar, and shows how museum practices demonstrate shifting public reckonings with this history.

Clare McCracken • In response to Wild Country: imaginaries of the Ovens River

This paper grew out of 'Wild Country', an exhibition of site-responsive, performance-based artworks that examined the volatile history of the Ovens River since its colonisation in 1834. Visitors to the exhibition were invited to write a letter to the Ovens River, sharing a forgotten history, a memory, or an aspiration for its future. This paper provides an analysis of those letters, exploring how engaging with a river and its history through an exhibition—thinking with the mobilities of the more-than-human via creative practice—can generate meaningful insights about the imaginaries of waterways to their communities. This includes how they reveal the impacts of settler land use/violence and climate change, their capacity to preserve histories we may have actively tried to erase (sites of truth-telling), and their role as places of respite amid the uncertainties and volatility of our contemporary world. Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris argues that the Hydrocene—the Age of Water—is a disruptive, conceptual epoch and curatorial framework that underscores water’s critical role in the climate crisis and contemporary art. This paper traces how audiences respond to hydro-focused art, recognising that human and more-than-human pasts, presents, and potential futures are deeply intertwined with Rivers and their flows.

Stream 2: Volatile Borders

Johanna Thomas-Maude and Maria Borovnik • “A logistical nightmare”: Institutional ambiguity and seafaring mobilities during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the volatility of the global maritime industry, where the movement of goods was sustained but the freedoms of seafarers were severely curtailed. Drawing on interviews with seafaring organisations operating at global and local levels, this paper focuses on what one participant termed “a logistical nightmare” created by institutional ambiguity during the global crew change crisis. Although international organisations, governments, unions, welfare providers, and industry actors each held partial responsibility, no single authority ensured coherent responses to support the rights and wellbeing of seafarers during the height of COVID-19. Nevertheless, the volatility of the crisis also fostered new solidarities and relationships across the sector, with some international policy changes recently formalised as lessons learned from the pandemic. These dynamics illustrate how volatile (im)mobilities intersect with accountability, justice, and the everyday resilience of maritime labour both during and beyond times of crisis.

Chris Gibson • Oceanic volatility and the choreographic work of seaport mobilities

Research on cargomobilities has emphasised containerisation, algorithmic management, and the cost-driven calculus of logistics firms. Less visible is the necessary infrastructural labour that coordinates mobilities in volatile conditions—for example, those workers who manoeuvre ships at seaports. In response, we take to the water to learn how ports function as spaces of everyday mobilities work. We follow a day in the working life of marine pilots—a specialist, locally-based workforce who board foreign-flagged ships to dock them safely. Their labour process is, we argue, a form of choreography: executing motions in collaboration with other workers, infrastructures, vessels, and environmental forces. Increasingly volatile oceanic conditions require technical knowledge of ships and guiding equipment, plus deep place-based knowledge of port idiosyncrasies and responsiveness to elemental forces. Amidst worsening environmental hazards, we offer choreography as an analytical frame to centre the work, workers, and more-than-human interactions underpinning mobilities.

Meihuizi She • Walking with & through buckwheat: an experiment of (re)building the young Yi women’s identity with mobility research as the strategy in China

My interdisciplinary practice-based research, initiated in 2021, is rooted in my family history and the belated discovery of my Yi minority identity in early adulthood. It explores the diasporic identities of Chinese minorities, with particular attention to the processes of (re)building personal identity among young women. This exploration is culturally metaphorized through buckwheat, a staple food central to Yi community life in Southwest China. Through various experimental creative methods, the research develops speculative models of future identity formation, grounded in mobility studies and related practices such as walking, mapping, mobility-oriented video essays, and autoethnographic writing. This paper follows two parallel lines in discussing the multilayered identities of individuals from ethnic and marginal communities in today’s global and dynamic era, emphasising young ethnic women’s processes of identity (re)building. The first examines the impact of rapid infrastructural development on the lives and identities of young ethnic women. The second investigates how walking, as both an embodied practice and strategic insight, becomes a tool for potential social movements, tracing its shifting significance from traditional nomadic life to contemporary nomadic contexts.

14:50 – 15:55 Paper session 3

Stream 1: Volatile Governance

Jai Cooper • On the march for a Climate Army

Early in 2025, several ADF troops were injured in a truck crash while responding to a flood emergency in Northern NSW. Immediately, Senator Jacqui Lambie appeared across the media, highlighting pressures on the military and adding to calls for a ‘Climate Army’. In November 2025, the Senate Inquiry: ‘National Volunteer Incentive Scheme (Climate Army)’ will report its findings. The ‘Climate Army’ scheme proposes mobile labour for disaster response in Australia. Australia has a long history of pseudo-military environmental youth workfare programs. Offering precarious work, the Green Army, Green Corps and the National Green Jobs Corps have come and gone over recent decades. As disasters increase, the focus of both youth and volunteer mobilisation is shifting from biodiversity restoration and climate mitigation to emergency response. This presentation discusses the increased mobilisation of youth and volunteers to risky settings and engages with the ‘Climate Army’ Inquiry recommendations in real time.

David Conradson • “We need you to stay local”: compliance, disregard and volatile emotions during a pandemic lockdown

During the pandemic, governmental ‘lockdowns’ asked citizens to curtail their everyday mobilities for the sake of public health. As people sought to bring their bodies into line with these directives, varying degrees of compliance and disregard emerged, as did new forms of emotional intensity. This paper explores these phenomena with reference to Auckland, New Zealand, a city subject to an extended lockdown, beyond what the rest of the country had to endure. Particular attention is given to the interactions between restricted physical mobility and affective circulations of frustration, resentment and even outrage. I consider the case of two women alleged to have broken the lockdown travel restriction, noting the mediatised escalation of judgment and anger in response to their apparent ‘rule breaking’. The outrage directed towards these women was notable, as was the apparent desire to punish them. I explore how these volatile emotions were linked to the intense constraints of being expected to ‘stay local’.

Adam Keen and Jess Kruk • Crowdkilling as contested transgression: “being pushed just isn’t the same as getting kicked in the face”

Hardcore-punk (HC) is often framed through the valorisation of “transgression,” yet what counts as (un)acceptable transgression is constantly (re)negotiated and contested. This paper analyses Reddit discussions of crowdkilling—the controversial practice of punching, (spin)kicking, or cartwheeling at less active audience members during HC concerts—to explore how mobility, violence, and space are regulated in subcultural practice. We argue that crowdkilling represents a volatile mobility, simultaneously celebrated and condemned. Within “the pit”, violence is accepted only when it aligns with tacit, though contested, norms of consent and inclusion. Some participants frame crowdkilling as a way of reinforcing HCs ethics of inclusivity by policing belonging, while others see it as undermining those same ethics. In this way, the pit’s physical boundaries become analogous with broader political boundaries, where violence regulates inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately then, the pit crystallises how subcultural transgression reproduces contested boundaries of mobility and belonging.

Stream 2: Volatile Practices

Jake Smaje • Climate or Continuity? Understanding NGO visions of seasonal migration in Kaliganj, Bangladesh

Many forms of mobility are well studied in Bangladesh, however seasonal and temporary mobilities are less studied. The reasons for this can be seen in conversations with NGO workers, who either highlight the continuity of seasonal migrations or suggest it emerges out of the volatility of environmental and climatic change, often drawing from both explanations at the same time. Perspectives from migrants and the villagers in Kailganj stress different causes and changes over time. While often not climatic it speaks to a volatility that challenges visions of seasonal mobilities historical continuity. This paper demonstrates how NGOs view seasonal mobilities in relation to those of communities that partake in seasonal mobility. Highlighting the ways in which seasonal mobility is volatile, but the way that NGO visions of this volatility are often de-politicised and de-historicised, and as such fail to accurately represent the political economy of the village.

Louis Everuss • Conceptualising sovereign border im/mobilities

Research on sovereign borders has increasingly moved from studying abstract boundaries to examining relational and performative processes of ‘bordering’. Central to this shift in thinking has been the assertion that sovereign borders can be established anywhere, which has recently been emphasised by digital technologies expanding the spatial volatility of borders. However, something that remains understudied, is the role of movements and their hinderances, or im/mobilities, in the creation of sovereign borders. As such, border research is yet to comprehensively embrace a central tenet of the mobilities paradigm, namely that im/mobilities are ontologically significant because they produce identities, power relations, places and other social and political phenomena. Subsequently, this paper draws on mobilities theory to develop an analytical framework for the study of sovereign 'border im/mobilities', which distinguishes constituting im/mobilities that produce sovereign borders from the constituted im/mobilities of sovereign borders.

Tania Crivellenti • Bodies in Motion: Latin Dance as Embodied Resistance to Post-Pandemic Social Distancing in Australia

COVID-19 created volatile mobilities within Australia's Latin Dance communities, disrupting established patterns of movement, gathering, and embodied connection. Rather than retreating into post-pandemic caution, these communities have exhibited unexpected intensification — embracing high-contact practices despite contamination risks. This volatility manifests in participants' resistance to digital alternatives and safety protocols, choosing instead to inhabit spaces of physical proximity, sweat, and intimate movement. Through autoethnographic methodology and a dataset of current Latin Dance congresses in Australia, this research examines how Latin dance operates as volatile mobility — simultaneously dangerous and pleasurable, unpredictable yet essential. The data indicates event continuity despite post-pandemic economic challenges and numerous extended events, reflecting demand for expanded workshops, prolonged parties, and varied opportunities for embodied connection. These findings reveal Latin Dance as sites of resistance against sanitised social norms, where bodies assert agency through risk-embracing movement practices that prioritise embodied connection over safety imperatives.

16:25 – 17:25 PANEL SESSION

Methods for researching Volatile Mobilities

DAY 2

10:00 – 10:45 PANEL SESSION

Entangled Volatilities

10:50 – 11:55 Paper session 4

Stream 1: Volatile Work

Lutfun Lata • Volatile mobilities in the gig economy: Migrant gig workers’ everyday lives in Melbourne

This paper examines the volatile (im)mobilities of migrant gig workers in Melbourne, where everyday life is marked by precarious migration status, insecure labour and urban mobility. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 39 migrant food delivery riders and 18 ridesharing drivers, I explore how their movements are shaped by unstable border regimes, shifting platform algorithms and the hazards of city infrastructures. While gig work promises flexibility, workers face volatile earnings, unpredictable hours and heightened exposure to accidents, fines and deportation threats. Yet volatility also generates moments of agency, improvisation and solidarity, as workers navigate uncertainty and build collective strategies of survival. Situating these experiences within debates on volatile mobilities, the paper shows how volatility is not only a condition of instability imposed on migrant workers but also a resource through which they negotiate belonging, economic survival and collective future.

Richard Osei Bonsu • Migrants in turbulence times through the Journey to the land of Paradise

The Sub-Saharan African continent each day loses hundreds of unaccountable youth to irregular migration, not as a result of seeking refuge, but risking all to death in seek of greener pastures from the highly impoverished political economy in their country of origin. Postcolonial and decolonial approaches have opened fruitful conceptual and theoretical notions such as entangled (im) mobilities, connected histories and sociologies, and multidirectional memories, which together spotlight varied movements and influences beyond those of hegemonic groups. Migration is a universal phenomenon but the trend of these irregular migration represents one of the biggest humanitarian tragedies daily, rendering most African youths who were intellects and vision holders to be hopeless within the scope living as undocumented migrants for which they constitute the greater work force of their nation. Twenty-first (21st) century promises to be a new age of migration. African migrants will risk all certain to death to reach the West (The Americas or Europe), their dreamland of greener pastures ‘the land of Paradise’, thirty percent (30%) will be confronted with death whiles seventy percent (70%) do make it but are soon confronted with shattered dreams. Through an empirical research, this paper identified the most important factors which contribute to the amplified migration among African youths. We have also highlighted the motivational elements for returning to homeland, when the socio-economic situation is favorable. The paper includes also a set of recommendations that could create a proper framework to attract talented, skilled and creative youth, regardless their origin country to voluntary return to their country of origin to start afresh.

Maria Borovnik • “This job is my only choice”: A dilemma for seafarers during COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of seafarers were bound to their ship-environment with ever extending contracts, without shore leave, and with no or little prospect to return to their home countries. Drawing on survey data and interviews with seafarers from New Zealand and Kiribati, and on information from seafarer centres and welfare organisations, this presentation will highlight some of the extraordinary obstacles that many seafarers had to face during times periods of lock down. One recurring observation has revealed that seafarers are continuingly discriminated by the wider global shore societies. Despite their essential role as transporting consumer goods, and even after prolonged periods aboard, seafarers were not welcomed by most shore-based communities. Some important work by seafarer support centres has addressed these inequities, yet most participants have found that seafarers’ voices were usually not heard, and that their work is still not adequately acknowledged by consumers. This paper will highlight the need to establish more awareness of seafarers as essential workers among the mostly sedentary consumer populations. It will also underline the need for ‘blue corridors’ that would enable crew changes and deliver at least some job security for seafarers whose employment in the global maritime industry is often their only option to provide for families.

Stream 2: Volatile Futures

Diotima Chattoraj • "Stateless Childhoods: Bhutanese Refugee Youth Separated in Nepal"

This paper critically examines the lived experiences of Bhutanese unaccompanied and separated refugee children (UASC) residing in refugee camps in eastern Nepal, situating their experiences within broader debates on human mobility in the social sciences and humanities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, narrative interviews, and policy analysis, the study explores how these children navigate protracted displacement, legal statelessness, and institutional neglect. By engaging with critical childhood studies, intersectionality, decolonial thought, and mobilities scholarship, the paper considers volatility both as a diffuse background condition of displacement and as a lens through which the daily movements, waiting, and constrained mobility of refugee children are made visible. The analysis reveals how Bhutanese UASC are rendered politically invisible and administratively excluded, despite humanitarian narratives of care, inhabiting a “state-of-nowhere” characterized by denial of legal identity, citizenship, psychosocial support, and meaningful inclusion in protection frameworks. The findings highlight the epistemic and structural violences embedded in refugee governance and argue for rights-based, child-centred, and regionally coordinated responses. By centring the voices and agency of refugee children, this study contributes to migration, childhood, and mobilities scholarship, shedding light on one of South Asia’s most protracted and overlooked displacement contexts.

Meg Lee • Generative, volatile im/mobilities: Exploring the experiences of young victim-survivors of family violence

Despite im/mobility being an implicit theme in family violence literature— underpinning key concepts including entrapment, “leaving”, and relocation—to date, little exploration of im/mobilities has been made in this space. This paper explicitly takes up the framework of im/mobility—specifically, “volatile im/mobilities”—to explore the experiences of young victim-survivors of family violence, based on collaborative, arts-based research with young people in Victoria. Young people’s artworks, photography, and reflections illuminate their lives and im/mobilities as fundamentally relational and contingent—ultimately, as volatile—as they strategically adapted to volatile circumstances in pursuit of changeable possibilities for safer places and futures. These findings bring new insights into the strengths and strategies of young victim-survivors, the challenges they face, and how service systems might work more effectively with this group by recognising the relational, often volatile, yet generative im/mobilities of their lives.

Abdullah Faqih • Walking Through Volatility: Youth-Led Urban Tours and the Reimagination of Yogyakarta’s Urban Landscape

This paper examines youth-led walking tours in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as a form of mobility that responds to the volatility of urban life. In a city shaped by rapid urbanization, tourism development, and contested histories, these walking tours allow young people to reclaim agency over their urban environment. By engaging with cultural memory, forgotten histories, and shifting urban dynamics, these tours highlight the interplay between mobility and volatility in contemporary cities. Drawing on the concept of volatile mobilities, this study explores how walking tours navigate the unpredictable and unstable nature of urban spaces. Yogyakarta’s historical and cultural sites are often caught between preservation and redevelopment, creating tensions around identity, heritage, and gentrification. Through walking tours, young people reinterpret these spaces, offering new narratives that challenge dominant histories and shed light on marginalized voices. Walking, as a mode of mobility, contrasts with the city’s car-centric urbanization and tourism-driven volatility, providing an alternative way to experience and reimagine the city. Additionally, this paper considers the role of digital platforms such as Instagram in mediating these tours. Digital tools amplify the visibility and reach of walking tours, enabling organizers to connect with broader audiences while introducing their own forms of instability, such as algorithmic unpredictability and the pressures of digital visibility. By analyzing youth-led walking tours in Yogyakarta, this paper argues that they are not merely leisure activities but acts of cultural and spatial resistance.

12:00 – 12:50 Paper session 5

Stream 1: Volatile Infrastructures

Adam Moore • Handling the volatile materiality of digital platforms

The volatile push of digital platforms throughout everyday life parallels their own internal volatility. Facilitating mobilities of data, goods, and services, these infrastructures realise new forms of surveillance and control, socio-economic transformations and resistance, and collective affects of hope, anger, and doubt. Yet, being complexly networked, emergent, and fragile objects, digital platforms are immanently volatile as well. Behind veils of affirming spin and technical jargon, a precarious balance between stasis and change plays out, one that underpins a platform’s functionality, relevance, and persistence. Those making and maintaining platforms handle vital but volatile socio-technical relationships: they continually (en)counter disharmonies between the code, its dependencies, and wider software ecosystems; they shape users' (mis)understandings and expectations; and they navigate the pressures of their own livelihood precarities. As such, we might ask: how does platform labour make sense of, prepare for and respond to, even utilise and adapt to this volatility?

Daniel Vasconcelos • Volatile workplaces: multi-locational creative workers in-between “flexibility for predictability” and “flexibility for adaptability”

Boosted by the digitalisation of everything, contemporary workers are increasingly embedded in a post-industrial economic system of “flexible accumulation” (Harvey, 1989) – which, for many, is a euphemism for “flexible exploitation” (Hesmondhalgh, 2008). While much attention has been devoted to criticising labour dynamics under a “neoliberal governmentality” (Swyngedouw, 2007), less scrutiny is devoted to grappling with the geographies unfolding in such a flexible system of workplaces and work practices. By researching multi-locational creative workers in Melbourne, I argue that we can conceptually and empirically distinguish between these two forms of flexibility (Watson, 1995): flexible regimes for predictability, where labour precarity is in fact a great tool for employers’ predictability and control, and flexible modes for adaptability, in which workers are capable of capitalising their autonomy and make their occupations a meaningful aspect of their lives. The struggles between these two types of flexibility occur amid the (un)becoming of volatile, post-functionalist workplaces.

Stream 2: Volatile Transitions

Ben Iaquinto • The mobility politics of Hong Kong's high-speed rail

This presentation uses new evidence to demonstrate how Hong Kong’s express rail link (XRL) to Mainland China was implicated in attempts by both the Chinese state and various social movements to exert control over Hong Kong’s territory. Informed by a qualitative content analysis of media reportage, findings revealed themes of ‘rejuvenation’ and ‘integration’ circulated in Chinese state media in support of high-speed rail, while themes of ‘autonomy’ and ‘protest’ circulated in international media to oppose it. Such conspicuous flagship infrastructures like Hong Kong’s XRL and the associated West Kowloon station integrate Hong Kong more closely with Mainland China, while also providing various social movements a large target with practical and symbolic power. The XRL was simultaneously a mode of dominance and resistance for the ways it enabled competing mobilities to assemble to support or resist state objectives.

Theresa Harada • EV assemblages: feeling environmentally superior in a hairdresser’s car

What does the transition to electric vehicles mean for the future of automative mobility? In Australia, the uptake of electric vehicles has been slow compared to other jurisdictions, yet the EV market has expanded considerably. With more availability and choice, the shift has begun but there remain substantial barriers to overcome until EVs are integrated into mainstream automobility. In this paper, we utilise Deleuzian assemblage theory to point to the power of discursive ideas, the materiality of cars, and the affective relations that unfold between cars and bodies that drive. We suggest that the emotional and affective forces of EV assemblages are volatile, encourage driving, and can negate gendered discourses of EVs as weak. We draw on empirical material from a national RACE for 2030 project ‘Australian consumers at the heart of the EV transition’ to reflect on the implications for a just transition to net zero mobility in Australia.

14:00 – 15:05 Paper session 6

Stream 1: Volatile Senses

Michelle Duffy • Barely contained volatility, a dead body dancing: Akram Khan’s choreography of Giselle

In her book, Material Bodies (2012), Lisa Blackman argues that concepts such as movement, mobility, immateriality, multiplicity, and flow have radically transformed contemporary approaches to subjectivity and corporeality. Blackman suggests these concepts originated from an increased attention to the processes, practices, sensations, and affects that move through and between bodies in ways that resist conventional methods of observation and analysis. Bodily relations and the capacity for mutual affect – how bodies are affected and affect others – are produced through intensities that emerge “between bodies,” rather than being contained within a single, bounded subject. Dance, as an embodied practice, provides important insight into these theoretical framings due to its intertwining of subjectivity and corporeality. This paper analyses the volatile interplay of body, emotion and affect as choreographed in Akram Khan’s interpretation of Giselle. Khan’s reimagining of the classic ballet is not merely a stylistic transformation through the integration of Indian classical kathak technique; it is also a re-contextualisation of the narrative, set amongst migrant garment factory workers and driven by themes of love, betrayal, forgiveness – and notions of who belongs. In Khan’s choreography, the Willis’ corporeality channel affective forces that are at once barely contained and constantly shifting, where subjectivity and affect become a mutable force, circulating in and through collective physicality. Central to this paper’s analysis is the physicality and representation of the Willis – the restless spirits of young women destroyed by heartbreak, who exact revenge by dancing men to their deaths.

David Bissell • Hallucinatory volatility

We may be living in a new age of hallucination where perceptions of reality are becoming distorted. From the digital fabrications generated by artificial intelligence to the twisting of truth by political gaslighting, hallucinations have become both a cause and symptom of distortion in our post-truth era. The remedy to such distortion, or so we are told, is an increased demand to cultivate vigilance. And yet the idea of such a vigilant subject is itself, a strange kind of distortion. In this paper, I explore the contention that perception is actually much more hallucinatory than we often imagine. To do this, I introduce sunstroke as an intriguing kind of hallucinatory perception that pushes the boundaries of how we as mobility scholars theorise infrastructures. Pairing archival accounts of responses to sun exposure in nineteenth-century colonial Australia with more recent literary accounts of sunstroke, I trace some of the political and ethical consequences of this variability of perception and highlight dimensions of bodily difference. Drawing on both phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought, I develop the argument that all perception is, to a degree, hallucinatory, and I explain how and why this matters for mobilities theory.

Penny Dunstan • Blessings for the light: flyash, Country and the act of transfiguration

In this paper I consider the potential of art to transfigure our understanding of the world. I participated in the Arts Upper Hunter Artist Residency at the closure of Liddell Power Station in the Hunter Valley in 2023. From the carcass of Liddell, an engineer collected flyash from leaking hoppers. I took the fine, grey toxic powder to my studio to find a way to give agency back to the Permian derived minerals and metals. I chose to make resin bowls, to contain the toxicity of flyash, yet allow safe interaction by an audience. The bowl form traditionally speaks of sustenance and warmth, of food shared with kindness and generosity. The installation of 23 resin bowls, Blessings for the Light, seeks to enact transfiguration of what is poison into beauty. It asks us to remember that what was cast out as waste, is still Country to be respected.

Stream 2: Volatile Materialities

Louisa Brain • Fast water, slow water, absent water: rhythms of im/mobility in western Kenya

In western Kenya, where lake, river, swamp, and rain waters converge, residents have long been making their lives in and with water. This paper asks how residents practice im/mobilities to stay home and stay close by. Drawing on oral histories, focus groups, and interviews it theorises from a place in which people are ‘born in water’ and ‘stay in water’, yet where not all flood water is the same. Taking cue from accounts of faster, slower, and absent water, the paper develops a reading of im/mobilities—of residents and of water—that are seasonal and anticipated but at the same time characterised by difference and potential for change. That is, it engages with im/mobility rhythms. Thinking with rhythm nuances debates on flood mobilities by breaking down binaries of immobility–mobility, wet–dry, normality–disaster, and attending to the ongoing, entangled im/mobilities through which people forge lives in contexts of volatility.

Sami Zehir • Water in the wake of war: Exploring proposed futures for the mobility of water, labour and capital along the Euphrates-Tigris Basin

This paper explores the volatile geography of the Euphrates-Tigris Basin through investigating the shifting mobilities of water, capital and labour through past projects and into the future. It focuses on Turkey’s growth-orientated South-East Anatolia Project (GAP), and how these dams and irrigation infrastructure have reterritorialised the power geometries of livelihoods in the region. The re-ordering of these flows has exacerbated the region's vulnerability to broader trends of volatility, especially climate change and conflict, of which are mutually affective, in how they are both causes of volatility and consequences of it. The paper utilizes a future-focused methodology to investigate proposed futures of the basin and map alternative flows of water, virtual (embodied) water, labour and capital through the lens of a post-growth approach called 'regrowth'. It acts as a scoping study for a broader ethnographic investigation which aims to explore how affected people imagine their own future within/outside of these proposals.

Tarun • Volatility, Grief, Mobility and the Everyday in River Koshi

The construction of embankments on the Koshi River in Bihar, India precipitated an ontological rupture, reframing the river from a maternal spirit to an object of state control. This project of modernity introduced a new kind of volatility that destabilised the socio-ecological system, a precarity now intensified by climate change. The promised ‘stabilisation’ has proven an illusion, as the river's catastrophic behaviour creates differential (im)mobilities for Koshi dwellers. I explore this shift through three scenes, showing how a deep sense of grief, born from this rupture, is expressed in the ordinary language of the everyday rather than in lamentation. The article further examines care as a localised response to this instability, ultimately arguing that the state co-opts this care as a tool of governmentality; an apparatus to manage the very volatility it helped to create by embanking the Koshi in the first place.

15:10 – 16:00 CLOSING PANEL

Identifying future directions for volatile mobilities