The Absent Presence of Aeromobility: A Case of Australian Academic Air Travel Practices and University Policy

Mobilities scholarship has paid considerable attention to the forms of presence enabled by air travel in hypermobile organisations (Elliott & Urry, 2010; Strengers, 2015; Storme et al., 2017). However, there has been less focus on the absences that these presences simultaneously generate. This chapter develops the concept of ‘absent presences’ enabled through the practices and policies of academic hypermobility. The chapter draws on qualitative interviews with 24 Australian-based academics, alongside a review of university policies that are relevant to air travel. We use these data to explore ‘absent presence’ in academic air travel. First, we suggest that there is an assumption in academia that embodied presence is required for authentic modes of knowledge sharing and networking, primarily at conferences and meetings. Yet this type of presence abroad requires that one is absent from home for extended periods. Second, we show how absent presence exists in academic policies concerning air travel. In university strategic plans, air travel is present as a means and measure of academic success. In university sustainability policies, however, air travel’s environmental impacts are often absent from consideration. We conclude by discussing the implications of absent presence in academic work life, as well as university policy and practice more broadly.

The Haunting Temporalities of Transplantation

This article examines the temporality of organ transplantation with a focus on memoirs where the recipient has received an organ from a deceased donor. I argue that death constitutes life. That is, this absent presence – that the organ is materially present but the person is dead and therefore absent – is the foundation for rethinking relationality as constituted through the haunting presence of those who remain central to the continuity of life but who are not alive in any strict definition of the term. This article is therefore attentive to the various meanings of haunting, drawing on queer theory to show how narratives of haunting are derealised experiences and thus a struggle for epistemological authority over specifically transplantation and relationality more broadly. It draws out how these epistemological challenges reimagine ontology as a haunted experience, and thus an intimate tie between the living and the unknown – and somewhat present – dead.

The Dialogical Attitude. the Priviledge of Dialogue in the Digital Age

The present paper aims to present some of the contradictions regarding the possibility of dialogue in the digital era. Communication ethics from a dialogic perspective emphasizes commitment to difference and alterity as key aspects of identity building, learning and critical thinking. A dialogical attitude is considered to be the foundation of any authentic communication, as being opposed to the monological arrogance, and as a first precondition of self-development. Despite the skepticism, internet communication can present dialogic characteristics. Social presence and media richness are two of the indicators of a dialogic digital interaction. Although some difficulties may occur, as the absent presence or the multitasking, researchers claim that difference will remain the fuel for the dialogic call of the 21th century communication, whether we will be ready to dialogically answer it or not.

Stowaway stories and mythological realism in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

This article examines how contemporary authors writing about migration turn to fantastic, spectral and mythical elements when writing about passages of transit. I turn to narratives written by Yuri Herrera and Mohsin Hamid and explore how these authors use mythology and magic to resist telling a ‘true’ story, creating what I call a stowaway aesthetic that hides away other stories in its narrative. By stowing away information and misrepresentation through magic, these authors create impossible stories that attend to archival silences. They enact a resistance against the ways in which the state extracts and polices narrative in the process of asylum-seeking. I argue that in the moments in which authors eschew realism, they direct the reader’s attention to the unknowable aspects of migrant lives that constitute an absent presence in the process of migration.