ABSTRACT
Even though mobility has always played a big role in an ethnographer’s life, anthropological notions of fieldwork remained very much static. The field was there, ready to be analysed by the ethnographer, who simply collected the data. This conceptualisation went on until the rise of postmodernism in the late 70s and 80s. Then, new forms of conducting ethnography emerged, ranging from the multi-sited to the siteless and mobile approaches. Mobile ethnography entails both a physical displacement of the ethnographer (walking with the informants, travelling with them, following their patterns of mobility) and a theoretical focus on movement. The ethnographies presented in the chapters that follow make use of this methodology to shed light on how individuals appropriated mobile spatialities in the Schengen zone in a very particular moment of European integration. The ethnographies that follow give insights into how individuals lived and embodied Schengen’s freedom of mobility, at a time when it started to be challenged, when nations began to enfold themselves, nationalist discourses mounted and essentialisms returned, between 2010 and 2012. Making use of mobile ethnographic methods allowed me to witness in situ, through the very little details of everyday life, who was able to take advantage of this freedom and who didn’t, who conceptualised him or herself as a European citizen and who didn’t; who thought high of Europeanness, and who didn’t.
