Course Description
This course explores how mobility and space can be studied and analytically described from an anthropological perspective, with particular attention to their environmental, infrastructural, and governance dimensions. Rather than treating them as self-evident phenomena, the course examines how different theoretical concepts – such as routes, infrastructures, navigation, logistics, landscapes, and regimes of mobility – foreground particular aspects of reality while obscuring others. Through this lens, students are invited to reflect on how analytical categories shape what we are able to see, describe, and problematize in relation to space, mobility, and environmental change.
A central organizing concept of the course is unevenness. Following Anna Tsing, unevenness is approached not simply as inequality or imbalance, but as a generative condition through which mobility, social life, and human-environment relations emerge. Space, in this view, is not continuous or homogeneous, but textured and differentiated; movement unfolds along uneven paths, shaped by asymmetries of power, access, and vulnerability. The course examines how mobility in uneven worlds is never evenly distributed. Some movements scale up, accelerate, and circulate globally, supported by infrastructures, technologies, and political regimes, while others remain slow, constrained, interrupted, or rendered invisible. Particular attention is given to how states, governance systems, development policies, and logistical arrangements shape mobility regimes in ways that have direct implications for resource access, environmental management, and sustainability.
Empirically, the course is grounded in ethnographic studies from diverse regions of the world, with a deliberate emphasis on global and non-Western perspectives. Through engagement with ethnographies of infrastructure, migration, informal mobilities, landscapes, and environmental encounters, students explore how space and movement are lived, perceived, governed, and contested across different socio-political and ecological contexts, including nomadic settings. This comparative approach highlights how unevenness takes distinct forms in different settings, while remaining a shared condition of contemporary worlds shaped by development processes and environmental transformation.
Methodologically, the course emphasizes an autoethnographic and reflexive approach. Students are invited to critically reflect on their own mobility experiences, spatial practices, and environmental encounters. Seminar discussions are based on case studies that illuminate how space and movement are lived, governed, and contested across diverse social, political, and ecological settings.

Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will:
• Gain an understanding of key anthropological approaches to space, mobility, and infrastructure;
• Become familiar with debates on orientation, landscape, cartography, logistics, and the politics of mobility, including their environmental and sustainability implications;
• Learn to connect embodied and personal experiences of movement and space perception to broader analytical frameworks;
• Acquire skills in analyzing case studies of mobility across different social, political and ecological settings, with attention to global diversity and non-Western perspectives;
• Strengthen their presentation and discussion skills through seminar participation and project work.

Teaching and Evaluation Methods
Attendance and active participation in discussions – 40%
Seminar presentations – 40%
Final essay – 20%

Each week is dedicated to a single thematic topic. The first class is structured as a lecture introducing key theoretical perspectives related to the theme. The second class takes the form of a seminar focused on guided reflection and discussion. During seminars, students are facilitated in reflecting on their own experiences of space and mobility, conducting small-scale observations, or analyzing visual materials through the lens of the weekly topic.
The final essay (approx. 1,500 words) is designed as an in-depth analytical reflection on one of the practical or reflexive course assignments, explicitly engaging with anthropological theory and addressing questions of mobility, inequality, environmental conditions, or sustainability in uneven worlds. Students are encouraged to expand and deepen their seminar-based work by further developing the empirical observations, reflections, or materials produced during class assignments, situating this experience within relevant theoretical and methodological frameworks.

Weekly structure
Week 1. Introduction. Space and mobility in everyday life
Week 2. Mobility as power: who is able to move?
Week 3. Routes, not regions: on translocality
Week 4. Infrastructures and uneven connectivity
Week 5. Informal mobilities
Week 6. Logistics
Week 7. Mobility and technology
Week 8. Perception of landscape
Week 9. Nomadism: is it localized?
Week 10. Spatial orientation and local cartography
Week 11. Making sense of uneven worlds
Week 12. Final discussion

Readings
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso, eds. 1996. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc. 1992. “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 (1): 1–24.
Hage, Ghassan. 2021. Waiting Out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Care in Times of Pandemic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Harvey, Penny, and Hannah Knox. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Harvey, Penny, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita, eds. 2017. Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. London: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343.
Low, Setha M. 2000. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Low, Setha M. 2017. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. London: Routledge.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207–226.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (3): 407–429.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.