Dato Laghidze, a PhD student at Ilia State University’s Doctoral Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology, participated in the Global Humanity Mobility Conference held from 24 to 26 October 2024 in Seoul, South Korea.
Dato Laghidze Participated in the symposium Aspirational Infrastructure Research: Mobilities, Airports, Place (AIR-MAP) organised by the International Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University. He presented a paper about the Kutaisi Airport: Migration, Infrastructure and Development.
The Global Mobility Humanity Conference studies the future of mobility, aspiration, and affect in a Global Context. The conference explores topics such as Airports and Aspirations beyond the global north, movement and aesthetics, migration, labour, and justice.
Panel: Airports and Aspiration Beyond the Global North (AIR-MAP)
Panel Description:
Recent decades have witnessed a burgeoning of research examining air travel, airport spaces, and the affective experience of aviation (e.g., Adey 2010; Adey, Budd, and Hubbard 2007; Cwerner 2009; Elliott and Radford 2015). This emerged in tandem with the broader intellectual shift toward questions of multi-scalar (im)mobilities (Sheller and Urry 2006). Within these literatures, airports have been conceptualized in a variety of ways—from enclosed micro-cities unto themselves to symbolic interfaces between different scalar territories (e.g., the nation, the region), from entry points into the rest of the world to nodes in an exclusionary network of the hyper-mobile elite. Yet much of this work remains tethered to prominent airports of wealthy global cities. Moreover, such work is often conducted by researchers and institutions based in the Global North. However, “peripheral” parts of Asia, Africa, and South America have increasingly pursued airport mega-projects, often within the funding and planning regimes dictated by wealthier countries. AIR-MAP seeks to redress these imbalances by shifting attention towards ambitious airport developments across the Global South, and by exploring the theoretical remit of aspiration and futurity in broader debates on affect and mobilities beyond the Global North.