Our Mission Statement

The European Network for Minor Mobilities in the Americas (ENMMA) situates itself within the broader, interdisciplinary field of mobility studies, shifting the field's attention to minor forms of movement and mobility. The way  we see it, mobility regimes discursively produce forms and classifications of movement that are uneven, differential, unrecognized, unmarked or invisible. As a result, minor mobilities are characterized by peripherality and marginality, unacknowledged agency (e.g., in domestic, carceral, or underage mobilities), limitation and failure (e.g., refugee mobilities). We examine their cultural work either as affirmation or critical transformation of mobility regimes. Relying on the Deleuzian understanding of "minor" and Mimi Sheller's concept of "differential mobilities," ENMMA aims at conceptualizing the multiple meanings of minor in the context of mobility and immobility research in literature and culture in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

In  our research, we use the concept of minor mobilities as a heuristic tool for examining mobility regimes and knowledge productions in regional, national, and globally implicated settings. Unfolding in four  research clusters, our projects take up different scenarios which enact mobility regimes. These clusters are:

1. Settler Colonial Scenarios
2. Scenarios of Cultural Memory
3. Border Scenarios
4. Fugitive and Migrant Scenarios

As "meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes" (Diana Taylor), scenarios provide particulars of the scenes and situations of mobility regimes and frame social dramas. As formulaic structures they are complicit with hegemonic discourses of mobility regimes; yet through their critical repetitions they also allow for reversal and destabilization, offering a space for minor mobilities to emerge.