Movement is a key marker and maker of twenty-first century life. From travel to communication, in social and political life, technological developments have nurtured ever-quickening and ever-intensifying flows of bodies, materials, ideas and commodities. But the challenges of migration, climate change and political violence are turning mobility, as freedom and as control, into one of the key frontiers of contemporary politics. The experience of covid-19 has, moreover, forced us to look again at the dynamics of mobility and immobility, and at the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility around us. What can we do to address these perilous exigencies? Which spaces might be claimed for enabling the emergence of transformative social movements for change? How can we harness the power of art and creativity to such movements? What will be the role(s) of law and politics in shaping the imaginaries of the future? 

This year’s Critical Times workshop will take the form of a week-long research-led intensive that engages with contemporary questions around movement – as a technology that connects spaces, places, ideas, bodies and the law. Organised by a consortium of partner institutions from leading universities on four continents, the workshop presents an opportunity to think critically and creatively about the relations between im/mobilities and justice, about the entanglements of movement with questions of meaning and power, and about law’s own patterns of motion – across multiple contexts, scales and situations.

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