This panel explores how moving bodies, spaces, and experiences are represented and mediated across literary, visual, and cultural contexts. Focusing on mobility as both a lived experience and an aesthetic practice, it examines how migration, exile, displacement, travel, and transnational movements reshape narrative structures, affective experiences, spatial imagination, and modes of representation across cultures. Rather than viewing mobility as mere physical relocation, this panel considers movement as a cultural and narrative practice through which subjects negotiate identity, belonging, and forms of agency. While literary and visual forms play a crucial role in shaping the meanings of movement, they are not the only forces that determine how mobility is understood. Historical conditions, institutional categories and archives also influence which mobile experiences become narratable and whose accounts gain authority. This panel therefore examines not only how moving subjects represent their own experiences, but also how cultural, historical, and institutional frameworks mediate and shape the meanings of movement.

Drawing on mobility studies (Cresswell; Sheller), narrative theory (Ricoeur), and theories of cultural representation (Hall), this panel investigates the relationship between movement, mediation, and power. Mobility studies demonstrates that movement is socially organized, historically situated, and unevenly distributed. Narrative theory examines how experiences of movement are shaped into temporal and meaningful narratives, while theories of representation explore how mobile subjects become visible, intelligible, and capable of articulating their own identities through cultural forms.

Bringing together perspectives from comparative literature, film and visual studies, and cultural studies, this panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches that investigate how literary, cinematic, visual, performative, and digital forms mediate mobility and reshape experiences of time, space, memory, identity, and belonging.

We welcome topics including, but are not limited to:

• Literary, cinematic, visual, performative, and digital representations of mobility, with attention to narrative form, aesthetic strategies, emotional experience, identity, and belonging

• The ways cultural forms mediate mobility by reshaping experiences of time, space, body, memory, and subjectivity

• Social and institutional classifications of mobile subjects, including those shaped by law, medicine, race, gender, citizenship, and other systems of categorization

• The changing meanings of movement across time and the reinterpretation of past mobility through memory, archives, historical writing, and cultural representation

• Tensions between mobile subjects’ own narratives and meanings produced by states, institutions, media, and public culture

• The conditions under which mobile subjects claim, negotiate, or are denied narrative agency and authority over the meanings of their movement