Mobilities of Insurance: the everyday, shifting geographies of property insurance

Engaging with everyday, shifting sensibilities and ontologies of movement can unsettle a priori understandings of time and space and produce accounts of place and space that are more reflexive, open and creative. In this paper, I look at where insurance is located and how it moves within everyday life, and draw upon work of economic geographers to problematize insurance as a benign fiscal tool, the disaster management tool of choice or, as some Foucauldian scholars have observed, a temporally diverse technology. Insurance is constituted through socio-material relations that embody the emotional and the moral, and I introduce insuring-feeling as an alternative way of locating insurance with the shifting messiness of everyday life. Referencing both macro- and micro-politics at play here, I point towards how re-thinking insurance may influence how we understand the role and function of insurance in disasters and everyday life, and how and why we might research this key safety net.