The (Im)mobility Chessboard: Conceptualizing Movement and Coercion

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 24. Structures of citizenship

Abstract

The (im)mobility chessboard has evolved alongside our efforts to grapple with the complexity of displacement. What began as a challenge to the refugee–migrant binary, first reframed as a spectrum (FitzGerald and Arar 2018) and later expanded into a matrix (Arar and FitzGerald 2023), has continued to develop as we worked through its analytic limits.Mapping the experiences of the Asfour family marked a turning point, transforming the chessboard from a static representation into an animated one as described in this extended abstract. This shift revealed the chessboard’s potential not merely to classify legal categories, but to function as an analytic tool in its own right. By introducing time as an additional dimension and annotating shifts in legal status, mobility, and constraint, the animated chessboard captures processes that resist representation in a single image. Our next goal is to introduce an expanded model, which allows us to trace historical and contemporary cases involving communities and cohorts whose members occupy multiple, shifting positions on the board. In doing so, the animated chessboard offers a more dynamic way to visualize displacement as an unfolding, uneven process. We will push the chessboard beyond its current limits to consider what is missing, and grapple with more complicated time horizons.

Authors

• Rawan Arar, University of Washington

• David Scott FitzGerald, University of California-San Diego