Our contemporary geological moment is shaped by the circulation of commodities, people, plants and even disease that can be traced back to 1492. In this  historical  context, this panel invites interrogations and reflections on migration, unequal mobilities and their relationship to the environment. How has traveling given rise to different perceptions of environments and people inhabiting those environments? With some migrants being deemed desirable and some being deemed “vermin beings” (Mavhunga, 2011), we are interested in narratives that respond to the unequal patterns of mobility and exchange set in motion with the events of 1492. 

This panel is concerned with texts and narratives that probe the links between mobility, environment and agency. With the shift in perceptions that travel brings, we ask about the role that travel plays in placing lifeforms along a continuum of humanness, stretching from human to the subhuman and to the nonhuman. Taking travel and mobility as potential avenues to think of altered bodily perceptions and experiences, this panel is interested in analysing how the figure of the traveler/tourist/settler can become a conduit for strange and uncanny bodily experiences. Examples include settler journals from the tropics and works of speculative fiction (new weird, body horror), narratives of real and imagined travel. Papers that study the figure of the traveler in specific historical contexts,  including but not restricted to colonialism and neocolonialism are welcome. 

Is mobility in itself something that can provoke bodily estrangement, and if so how are they linked? In investigating the links between mobility and estrangement, we are equally interested in how ‘being mobile’ can lead to a decentering of anthropocentric worldviews. 

   We welcome papers that consider the following topics:

• Travel narratives
• Environmental narratives and environmental humanities
• Globalization, mobility, and migration
• Tourism and the ethics of leisure travel
• Medical humanities, medical, wellness or health tourism pre and post the age of mass tourism
• Bodies: transformation, change, in motion, illness, disease
• Nonhuman and its relationship to environment, travel
• Nonanthropocentric worldviews