The Fifth Annual Conference of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: “Processes of Spatialization under the global Condition” is committed to “The Making and Unmaking of Spatial Orders: Mobilities under the Global Condition from the 19th Century to the Present”. Researchers from Germany, Austria, Finland, the UK, the USA, and Canada will present their research results on and insights into the topic.

This year of “social distancing” has drastically changed the perspective on forms, practices, and borders of mobility for various groups of people by interrupting international (and sometimes national) routes of travel while forcing many of us to explore the realms of “virtual mobility”. A wider public has also begun to understand the different meanings and effects of mobility for groups as diverse as migrant workers, managers of multinationals, tourists, refugees, artists, and international students and researchers alike. Accordingly, there has also been growing uncertainty about perspectives on age-old patterns and infrastructures of mobility. At the same time, consequences of these mobilities for different worlds regions and social groups have been clearly unequal. The global pandemic and the very diverse reactions it has shed light on the challenges to addressing mobility and processes of spatialization as entangled phenomena – an endeavour that will allow us to better understand and react to similar crises in the future.

Accordingly, this is why the annual conference addresses the question of how to conceptualize different practices and forms of mobility as practices of spatialization as well as how to understand mobile actors as spatial entrepreneurs. We thereby react to scientific debates and discussions that link mobility and immobility together and that problematize the “mobility bias” in research on migration. Specifically, we want to ask how research on mobilities might be compared and connected in a transregional and global perspective as well as in an interdisciplinary manner.

The annual conference will be held in English. We are inviting you to attend virtually the keynote lecture “Valueing Mobility in a Post COVID-19 World” by Tim Cresswell (University of Edinburgh), one of the leading scientists of social science research on mobility. You are also warmly welcomed to join our roundtable, panels, and other working formats that are outlined in the programme attached. The conference website https://research.uni-leipzig.de/~sfb1199/annual-conference/ further provides all necessary information and is regularly updated. Upon registration on the conference website, you will receive a code that enables you to enter the virtual meeting rooms and panels.