Mobility, spatial realities, and social changes in East Asia

Contemporary critical issues in Asia increasingly emerge at the nexus of the local, national, global, and digital realms driven by the dynamic interplay of varied forms of movement. These movements facilitate processes of transgression and inclusion, as well as border-making forms of territorialization. These processes shape everyday life and generate complex political exigencies. Such transformations configure social positioning that requires the continuous negotiation of values, relations, and practices. Therefore, it has become imperative for researchers to use spatial languages and concepts to analyze contemporary societal changes. To this end, this special issue curates a collection of articles examining the formative capacity of movement to elucidate social transformation and reconstruction across intra- and inter-Asian contexts. Drawing on insights from the notion of figuration, the contributors interrogate the connectedness and interdependencies of individuals, collectivities, and nonhuman actants (e.g. documents, senses, emotions, aspirations, and knowledge), which movement facilitates. The featured studies investigate class-based educational mobilities; the relationality between mobility and immobility; the emergence of multiple spaces within university classrooms; and a city as a hybrid of spatialized knowledge, belief, narratives, and strategic participation. Ultimately, this collection forges connections across interdisciplinary perspectives, transcending dichotomies between the material and the symbolic, the static and the fluid, and the micro and the macro. In doing so, it illuminates the relational and spatial dimensions of social realities as continuous states of being and becoming.