Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and other refugees are rarely studied as fully social actors capable of (and compelled to) orienting their flight and new emplacements through their embodied sociality. Rather, refugees are easily perceived of as being without intentions, prospects, and agency. Transnational studies, on the other hand, tend to emphasise economistic and transactional aspects of the aspirations and mobility practices of labour migrants, economic refugees, or transnational families. Whereas refugee studies tend to overemphasize the disruptive effects and experiences of displacement, then, transnational studies may tend to focus too squarely on actual and/or imagined emplacements, thereby neglecting the existential experiences of disruption and loss.

The panel invites contributions that are willing to engage critically with the dialectics of displacement/emplacement, based on empirical research on displaced people, whether their movements were motivated by (threats of) physical or structural violence. Detailed studies of mobility practices – ranging from displacement by wars or natural disasters within or across (national) boarders to the quests for livelihood by labour migrants travelling familiar paths or unknown terrain – are invited to engage with the existentially disruptive and the inevitably social aspects of such movements. This implies alertness to the historical continuities that underlie particular instances of movement and the capacities of migrants to forge new meanings and relationships from the experience of displacement, and to consolidate established moral and social orders through the same movements. It also implies a questioning of received conceptual wisdoms, e.g. regarding the “place” in “displacement” and the nature of the boarder.