AusMob 2025 Symposium: VOLATILE MOBILITIES

1-2 December 2025, UNIVERSITY OF Melbourne

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 • Title TBC

11:30 – 12:35 Paper session 1

Stream 1: Volatile Itineraries

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

Tom Fisher • Volatility and Vulnerability in Velomobilities

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

Stream 2: Volatile Lives

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

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

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

13:35 – 14:40 Paper session 2

Stream 1: Volatile Orders

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

Angela Smith • The Unconscious in Motion: Desire and Dissociation in Volatile Times

Bronte Alexander • Mobilising Militaries in Disaster Responses

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

Louis Everuss • Conceptualising sovereign border im/mobilities

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

14:40 – 15:45 Paper session 3

Stream 1: Volatile Governance

Jai Cooper • On the march for a Climate Army

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

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

Stream 2: Volatile Practices

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

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

Chris Gibson • Infrastructural labour: coordinating mobilities in volatile conditions

16:15 – 17:15 PANEL SESSION

Entangled Volatilities

DAY 2

09:20 – 10:20 PANEL SESSION

Methods for researching Volatile Mobilities

10:50 – 11:11 Paper session 4

Stream 1: Volatile Work

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

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

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

Stream 2: Volatile Futures

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

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

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

11:55 – 13:00 Paper session 5

Stream 1: Volatile Infrastructures

Adam Moore • Handling the volatile materiality of digital platforms

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

Michelle Daigle • The Volatile (Im)mobilities of Canadian Nation-Building: Insights on Bill 5 and Indigenous Sovereignty

Stream 2: Volatile Transitions

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

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

Kirsty Wild • Transport injury as community trauma

14:00 – 15:20 Paper session 6

Stream 1: Volatile Senses

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

David Bissell • Hallucinatory volatility

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

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

Stream 2: Volatile Materialities

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

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

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

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

15:50 – 16:30 CLOSING PANEL

Identifying future directions for volatile mobilities