The intersection of social protection and mobilities: a move towards a "Practical Utopia' research agenda

Currently, a number of contributions in mobility studies are looking for fruitful intersections with other adjacent' approaches . In this spirit, our theoretical paper argues to study one particular aspect: the intersection of social protection and mobilities. Currently, the provision of social services in the West' is strongly entrenched within nation-state logics, which assume that clients' immobility is a precondition of service delivery and that national citizenship is the desirable conditionality of gaining social rights. To overcome such a wide-spread conflation of social security with state security, we introduce the heuristic concept social protection'. It allows social security to be imagined beyond a state-centric perspective and avoids the pitfalls of either a citizenship or a migration approach by taking on a mobility perspective. Thus, for scholars anchored in mobility studies we propose how to develop a social security perspective in a progressive way. For readers from other areas, e.g. citizenship, migration or social policy, we will show how a mobility perspective enriched by a No Border approach can overcome a narrow Western, statist and static perspective on social security. Our goal is to conceptually open up what we call a practical utopia' research agenda, one that expands our political horizons for future and present socialities.