Alltagsgeschichten von Flughäfen

Conference website

The perception of airports fluctuates between dreams of utopian progress and nightmares of crisis, fed by terrorism, climate debates, and pandemic mandated travel restrictions. But what is the significance of airports when they are viewed from the perspective of everyday life and everyday history?

Actors with their everyday experiences and routines are surprisingly seldom at the center of airport history(s) – despite the fact that airports, like all public places, are shaped by the people who work in them, travel through them, and stay there for other purposes: ground staff, cleaners, vendors, researchers, jet-setters, law enforcement officers, the unhoused, refugees, social workers, and many more. The conference will shed light on the various actors, their different (im)mobilities, actions, their interpretations of themselves and others, as well as their inclusion in and exclusion from airport spaces. How is the everyday in the airport cosmos connected to social, political and transnational processes? And how do social crises, ruptures and continuities affect a place that for many people was and is not an exception but an everyday place?