This research uses the concept of nomadism to go beyond socially or geographically bounded notions of diaspora, citizenship, or local communities that abound in urban and migration studies. An ethnographic study of everyday practices and routines in the lives of my interlocutors (snowballing from my Iranian networks in London) will map the micropolitics of how they build and maintain ties with their human-non-human environments as well as trace their mobile trajectories. The resulting ‘cartographies’ show the socio-material (dis)organisations of these transnational assemblages using insights from theories and historical examples of nomadism – especially the dynamic nomad/sedentary mixes found in ‘dimorphic societies’. In addition to an epistemic contribution to the study of these emerging modes-of-being-in-the-world, this study traces the lines of flight and novel becomings of these transnational assemblages with the phronetic hope of increasing the reflexive agency of the nomadic subjects to navigate their unpredictable lives and negotiate their instances of marginality.
Dr Pooya Ghoddousi
Geography, Queen Mary University London