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Overview

The symposium aims to map the intersecting cartographies of analog and digital justice encounters in im/mobile times, tracing how struggles over access, visibility, and participation unfold across material and discursive terrains. Justice is approached as a continuous process of contesting and rerouting the infrastructures, institutions, and power relations that shape who can move, who can appear, and who remains constrained, monitored, or erased.

Approaching access as a key register of social justice, the symposium centers what we call triadic mobilities: the entanglement of mobility as movement across spaces, collective political mobilization, and the technological infrastructures that mediate connection and access. Today, being mobile, being mobilized, and being on mobile devices intersect within increasingly datafied, surveilled, and platform-mediated environments.

We approach this gathering as a space to rethink in/access, in/visibility, and im/mobility in a moment marked by overlapping crises: intensifying border regimes, expanding digital surveillance, urban securitization, ecological disruption, and growing geopolitical tensions that reshape who can assemble, move, speak, and connect. Mobility, in this sense, is never simply about movement; it is organized through infrastructures of control and extraction — from biometric borders and platform governance to urban policing and algorithmic sorting.

The symposium therefore invites us to examine how contemporary regimes of access are organized across digital and non-digital terrains. Questions of who can gather, move, organize, and connect increasingly shape the political possibilities of our time. At the same time, struggles for justice emerge through hybrid forms of connection, where embodied mobilities, street politics, and analog networks intersect with digital platforms, algorithmic visibility, and technological gatekeeping.

From the opening plenary to the final fishbowl conversation, the symposium unfolds through interwoven questions that invite us to collectively interrogate how infrastructures of mobility and access are being reorganized — and how they might be contested, reimagined, and reclaimed.

• How are the cartographies of social justice redrawn in an era of intensified im/mobility — from urban struggles and local resistance to transnational organizing and diasporic solidarities?
• What does a politics of in/access reveal about freedom of movement when examined through processes of political mobilization, collective organizing, and the infrastructures that enable or constrain participation?
• What does participation mean in contemporary research marked by uneven access and persistent in/accessibility?
• How do mobile feminisms, critical disability movements, and migration justice struggles confront and reconfigure borders and barriers — across bodies, ideas, epistemologies, and both material and digital infrastructures?
• How are solidarities made mobile in struggles for social justice? What dynamics emerge when communities collectively confront, negotiate, and reshape the systems that install borders and barriers in their lives?

Schedule

Session Descriptions

Opening Plenary: Intelligibility, opacity, and the politics of in/access

Keynote: Dr. Ahmed Allahwala University of Toronto Scarborough

In organizing who can appear in public, who can claim protection, and who counts as a subject of rights, intelligibility is a fundamental dimension of any politics of in/access. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, I understand intelligibility as the condition under which a life becomes recognizable, livable, and grievable. Yet the processes that render subjects visible and legible in a politics of in/access also render them governable, classifiable, and exposed to surveillance. In/access thus operates through epistemic regimes that determine who qualifies as the “right” kind of body, citizen, or public. I place Butler in conversation with Édouard Glissant, particularly his call to “clamour the right to opacity.” For Glissant, opacity is neither exclusion nor withdrawal, but an ethical and political demand within colonial and racializing orders that exert control through visibility, transparency, and placement. Engaging empirical vignettes on racist violence, urban securitization, and struggles over queer public space from Europe and North America, my intention is to shift our cartographic imagination from maps as representation to maps as practice. If the symposium calls for mobile cartographies of social justice, I ask us to pause over the cartographic impulse itself: who gets mapped, who benefits from visibility and legibility, when does access become exposure, and when might justice require remaining partially—and deliberately—unmapped?

Roundtable: Looking for a Better Wor(l)d — Mobility in Multiple Registers

Moderation: Pinar Tuzcu (Sociology)

Discussants: burcu Baba (Gender Studies), Carolyn Prouse (Geography and Planning), Kristin Moriah (Black Studies), Marshall Hill (English Literature and Creative Writing), Samatha King (Kinesiology and Health Studies), Paul Akpomuje (Faculty of Education)

This roundtable brings together scholars from related fields to create a space for thinking across disciplinary boundaries. The conversation explores how mobility and access are experienced, regulated, contested, and reimagined from an interdisciplinary perspective. As these concepts move across discourses and material realities, the discussion draws on each discussant’s research to reflect on a set of shared questions: What do mobility and accessibility mean in neocolonial and increasingly authoritarian times? How do mobility and access resonate differently across fields of inquiry? What shifts when we approach these questions through the lenses of digital space, health, race, gender, class, and disability? Where do our approaches intersect — and where do they productively diverge?

Workshop I: Participatory Research in Contexts of In/Accessibility

Facilitated by: Robel Abay and Dahey Yim (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)

This interactive workshop explores the meanings and limits of participation, research ethics, and methodological design across uneven regimes of access in participatory research settings. It is open to all participants and especially recommended for graduate students from across campus and different departments.

Fishbowl Discussion: Mobile Feminisms and Queer Technologies of Access

Facilitated by: Dr. Yasmine Djerbal

In this rotating, participant-driven discussion, we collectively explore how migrant, internationalist, and anti-colonial feminist practices navigate and reshape regimes of in/access in the digital times. How do anti-colonial feminist, queer, and disability justice practices develop alternative technologies of access to navigate — or move beyond — the structures that dictate accessibility and regulate mobility? The conversation builds on insights that emerge throughout the symposium, inviting participants to collectively rethink how access, mobility, and solidarity can be reorganized.

Registration 

Please register in advance:

This symposium is open to faculty, staff, students, and community members. Lunch & refreshments included. 

Questions? Contact pinar.tuzcu@queensu.ca