Politics of Travel: Mobility, Neoliberal Capitalism, and the Production of Transcultural Knowledge
Description
Travel is more than a physical movement across space; it is also a complex cultural and socio-political practice that allows people to cross cultural borders and meet challenges in different cultural and political environments. In the contemporary era, travel has increased dramatically, becoming more frequent and more deeply embedded in global systems of power that impact who can travel, under what conditions, and how such movement is represented and circulated. Studying the politics of travel reveals not only how people and capitals of knowledge move, but also how these movements expose the structural inequalities, cultural negotiations, and geopolitical tensions that all contribute to defining the current geo-social order.
Our seminar warmly welcomes proposals on the politics of travel in the contemporary age and seeks to include a wide range of travel-related narratives—literature, film, graphic novels, ethnography, and online media. The current neoliberal market contributes to the growing global travel as it boosts the globalized economy and encourages cross-border communication. However, this apparent freedom hides the problem of inequality brought on by the asymmetry of power among countries.
By examining travel through the lenses of the interaction between mobility, neoliberal capitalism, and the production of transcultural knowledge, we attempt to address the following questions: In what ways does mobility reveal or reproduce the structural inequalities embedded in neoliberal capitalism? How do these narratives participate in the production of transcultural knowledge, and what forms of knowledge do they generate to legitimize the current global order? To what extent can contemporary travel narratives serve as tools to critique the current global order? Through these questions and the engagement with diverse travel-related narratives, our seminar aims to foster interdisciplinary conversations on how contemporary travel narratives both participate in and critique the global power dynamics.
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Speaker Bio
Rosemary Kasiobi Nwadike is a cultural studies scholar of Nigerian descent. She recently concluded a master's program in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University. She is currently a first-year PhD student in English and African Studies at Carleton University, where she is a recipient of the Naida Waite Graduate scholarship. She has interdisciplinary research interests in women’s studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, media studies, and Indigenous studies.
Speaker Bio
Yue Qi is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Humanities, ShanghaiTech University. She received both her BA and PhD in Chinese Language and Literature from Peking University and was a Research Scholar at Harvard University (2019-2020). Her research focuses on spatial imagination, cartography, landscape, and the body in contemporary Chinese cultural studies.
Speaker Bio
Fusako Innami is Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University and the author of Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (Michigan, 2021), recognized as runner-up for the British Comparative Literature Association’s First Book Prize 2025. Her current project, Dancing Traces: Performance, Topography, Gestural Writing, examines how bodies moving in space form gestural manners of tracing movements.
Papers
Speaker Bio
A specialist in contemporary literatures in Spanish from a transatlantic perspective.
Most of his research to date has focused on analyzing the relationship between avant-garde art and radical politics across the Atlantic, particularly during the two decades that preceded the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its ramifications to the present. Research interests also include political theory (with a focus on socialism/anti-imperialism), Black radical tradition, and Film and Media studies.
Speaker Bio
I am a professor at California Lutheran University and have taught broadcasting and the media industry, as well as in sports communication, sports marketing, and intercultural communication.
I have a Harvard A.M in Brazilian literature, a Stanford doctorate in communication for social and economic development, and an MBA from UCLA.
My research interests include disaster and media, the Caribbean and Latin American Studies, cultural studies, sport and development, and digital nomadism.
Speaker Bio
Qian Feng is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on graphic travel narratives and investigates how visual storytelling mediates cross-cultural encounters and constructs the representations of the Other. Working at the intersection of postcolonial theory, media aesthetics, and transnational critique, she explores how comics function as ideological and aesthetic devices within global circuits of knowledge production.
Speaker Bio
Professor of English at the University of the Federal District (UnDF). She holds a Bachelor in Portuguese/English Language and Literature from the University of São Paulo (USP) and in Journalism from Faculdade Cásper Líbero. Her Master and PhD degrees in Linguistic and Literary Studies in English from USP. She won Capes, CNPq, and Fulbright scholarships. Her areas of interest are: literature and film, discourse analysis, teaching English as a foreign language, and anti-racist education.