Mobile people own things and embed theirs lives in complex sets of material possessions. However, comparing recently arrived refugees with fully integrated citizens with migratory background, it becomes impossible to define one specific pattern of “mobile peoples’ material culture”. Acknowledging the wide range and diverse nature of what mobile people acquire and use as everyday material equipment, a categorization of households into “migratory” or “non-migratory” types seems unhelpful.

From an anthropological perspective, we expect to gain better understanding of the materialities of mobility by looking at how material practices are related to mobile identities on an everyday basis. Objects and people constantly interact; objects condition perceptions and experiences, and objects contribute to the specific place-making of mobile individuals and groups.

Conceptualizing the relations between materiality and mobility within specific temporalities, allows taking a look at continuities, irritations, breaks, transformations, as well as the production of connections and new boundaries. By stressing the complexity of modes of embedding, we intend to avoid simplifying representations of objects as “symbols of mobility”. Instead, we focus on how things are appropriated, modified and subverted in daily life in multifaceted and unpredictable manners.

In this panel, we seek to gain understanding of materiality as a specific way of constituting relations and constellations. After all, mobility means changing perceptions and practices, which are always intertwined in different life-worlds. In accordance to this assumption, we invite papers dealing with the materialities of mobile people as an approach to show the diversity of mobilities in everyday life.