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 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. 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, 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 – 16%
- Written responses – 24%
- 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.

Syllabus

Week 1. Introduction. Space and mobility in everyday life
This week introduces the course and its central question: how anthropology studies space and movement. We begin by questioning the idea of space as a neutral container and instead approach it as something socially produced, uneven, and lived. Through examples from everyday life and ethnographic research, students explore how movement shapes social relations, power, and environmental experience. The week also introduces ethnography as a method and discusses how anthropologists connect large-scale global processes to ordinary practices and embodied experience. During the seminar, students discuss the film Nomadland (2020) through the lens of mobility, nomadism, and power relations.
Recommended reading
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2017. What Is Anthropology? London: Pluto Press.
Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207–226.
Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Week 2. Mobility as power: who is able to move?
This week examines mobility as an unevenly distributed resource. Rather than assuming that movement is equally available to everyone, we analyze how mobility is shaped by borders, infrastructures, economic inequality, legal status, and political power. Through ethnographic examples and observations of transportation spaces, students explore how mobility regimes organize everyday life and produce social differences. During the seminar, students discuss observations at Santa Lucia railway station and analyze how different social groups use and experience mobility infrastructures differently.
Recommended reading
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.

Week 3. Routes, not regions: on translocality
This week focuses on translocal and transnational forms of life. Instead of understanding people as belonging to a single place or nation, we examine how social worlds are often organized through routes, repeated movements, and connections between multiple locations. The concept of translocality allows us to analyze migration, seasonal mobility, and fragmented forms of belonging beyond fixed territorial models. Students reflect on experiences of living between places and maintaining social ties across distance.
Recommended reading
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.
Greiner, Clemens, and Patrick Sakdapolrak. 2013. “Translocality: Concepts, Applications and Emerging Research Perspectives.” Geography Compass 7 (5): 373–384.

Week 4. Infrastructures and uneven connectivity
This week examines the infrastructures that make movement possible. Infrastructure is approached not only as technical material but also as a political and social system that organizes access, visibility, and inequality. We discuss maintenance, breakdown, and infrastructural violence, asking why some connections become highly supported while others remain fragile or neglected. Seminar discussions focus on the hidden infrastructures that make everyday life possible.
Recommended reading
Dalakoglou, Dimitris. 2017. The Road: An Ethnography of (Im)Mobility, Space, and Cross-Border Infrastructures in the Balkans. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2002. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.
Harvey, Penny, and Hannah Knox. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343.

Week 5. Informal mobilities
This week explores informal practices that sustain urban and social life beyond official systems and regulations. We examine everyday tactics, improvisation, and interpersonal networks that allow cities and infrastructures to function despite instability and uneven development. Informality is approached not simply as disorder, but as an important mode of coordination and survival. In seminar students analyze familiar informal practices that support formal systems in everyday life.
Recommended reading
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (3): 407–429.

Week 6. Logistics
This week introduces logistics as a system that organizes the global circulation of goods. We examine shipping routes, supply chains, and the securitization of flows that sustain contemporary capitalism. At the same time, we analyze the environmental and political consequences of logistical systems, including hidden labor, uneven access, and infrastructural violence. Students trace the movements of ordinary commodities and explore how global circulation depends on highly unequal infrastructures and forms of labor. During the seminar, students traced the logistical chains behind everyday products applying the theories studied in the lecture.
Recommended reading
Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 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.

Week 7. Mobility and technology
This week examines how technologies transform movement, perception, and spatial experience. Through examples such as railways and snowmobiles, we analyze how technologies reorganize distance, speed, orientation, and social relations. Particular attention is given to how mobility technologies reshape everyday life and alter people’s relationships to landscape and environment. Students reflect on other technologies that have changed the experience of movement and space.
Recommended reading
Pelto, Pertti J. 1973. The Snowmobile Revolution: Technology and Social Change in the Arctic. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings Publishing Company.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1977. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Week 8. Perception of landscape
This week explores anthropological approaches to landscape, place, and environmental perception. Rather than treating landscapes as neutral scenery, we examine them as culturally meaningful, emotionally charged, and socially inhabited environments. The class investigates how people perceive, narrate, remember, and move through places. Students create maps of meaningful locations and reflect on how attachment, memory, and embodied experience shape spatial perception.
Recommended reading
Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso, eds. 1996. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

Week 9. Nomadism: is it localized?
This week critically examines the concept of nomadism. Moving beyond romanticized images of constant movement and freedom, we analyze nomadic mobility as a complex social, economic, and political practice shaped by states, infrastructures, ecological conditions, and historical change. Through ethnographic cases and film discussion, students explore how nomadic life is organized through ecology, relations to territory, seasonal rhythms, and social obligations. The week also examines how nomadism has been represented, governed, and transformed in modern states. During the seminar, students discuss the film The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003) and analyze representations of mobility, pastoralism, and human-animal relations.
Recommended reading
Engebrigtsen, Ada I. 2017. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Nomad.” Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale 25 (1): 42–54.
Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 1999. The End of Nomadism? Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Week 10. Spatial orientation and local cartography
This week focuses on orientation and spatial knowledge. We examine how people learn to move through environments using embodied practice, collective knowledge, landscape categories, and social communication rather than abstract maps alone. Through examples from Indigenous navigation and anthropological studies of orientation, we question universal assumptions about cognition and spatial reasoning. Students reflect on how they orient themselves differently in Venice and in familiar environments at home.
Recommended reading
Gladwin, Thomas. 1970. East Is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Week 11. Making sense of uneven worlds
This week brings together the main themes of the course through Anna Tsing’s concept of friction. We examine globalization not as a smooth and uniform process, but as a set of uneven encounters between different infrastructures, environments, political systems, and forms of life. Friction refers to the unstable and unequal interactions that both enable and constrain movement. Through case studies, students analyze how global connections depend on local conditions, interruptions, inequalities, and environmental consequences.
Recommended reading
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Week 12. Discussion of final papers
The final week is dedicated to discussion and reflection on students’ final projects and on the broader themes of the course. Returning to key concepts such as space, mobility, infrastructure, unevenness, and landscape, we collectively reflect on how anthropological perspectives change the way we understand contemporary worlds. Particular attention is given to connecting personal experience, ethnographic observation, and larger political and environmental processes.

Course duration: 40 hours of tuition
Credits equivalence: 6 ECTS

Last updated: June 11, 2026