Afterword

Kallis, Aristotle

Abstract

This afterword to the Ideas section starts by considering the role of ‘contact zones’, which are places of accumulation and organisation of differential knowledge that were already pronounced in early historical periods. However, from the expansion of the field of inscription and circulation over time, two paradoxes emerged. The first is that contact has become less the outcome of encounters with mobile information and, increasingly, the product of a significantly more active and actor-driven process of selective affective engagement. This means that understanding modern ideational mobilities concerns primarily accounting for the ‘stickiness’ of particular ideas over many other alternatives in a given context. The second paradox of more recent ideational mobilities is that in a world that is deluged with inscriptions and behaves like a slippery plateau of incessant superfluidity, scholars have become understandably fascinated with occurrences of creative contact as adhesive and not just mobile events. Therefore, the role of context is more essential than ever in understanding the ‘miracle’ of engaged contact across difference and productive friction when it actually occurs. Appreciating this diachronic–synchronic significance of the context in ideational and other mobilities may be the most compelling argument in favour of the productive ‘friction’ between humanities and mobilities studies.

Citation

Kallis, A. (2023). Afterword. In Reimagining Mobilities across the Humanities. Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

• Acceptance Date: Jun 1, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Jun 2, 2023
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Book Title: Reimagining Mobilities across the Humanities