Migration, liberal power, and the politics of differential inclusion

Abstract

The Handbook of Language and Mobility challenges the assumption that mobility is a new norm. It maps new developments in language and mobility scholarship, tracing how the mobility of language, people, and knowledge intersects with multiplicity, infrastructures, historicity, new political formations, and processes of world-making.

By decentering mobility, this handbook questions which processes come to be recognized as mobile, and how mobility is historically shaped, regulated, valued, and stigmatized. By recentering mobility, it explores its productive dimensions – how it sustains and aligns with celebratory ideologies of globalization, technology, and agency, creates value, and contributes to the management and legitimation of difference and inequality. Mobility here is not just about movement – it shapes time, space, subjectivities, power, and systems of accumulation.