The 45th Southeast Asia Seminar on (Im)mobility & Infectious Disease: Toward Trans-disciplinary Approaches? Phuket, Thailand February 20-27, 2022 COVID-19 pandemic has been wreaking havoc the world over. While the virus has raged all kinds of terrain, humans have, at one time or another, been immobile – stranded at homes, in hospitals, or in spaces of community isolation. Before COVID-19, however, other infectious diseases have been detrimental to varieties of communities, especially marginalized peoples whose livelihood have become even more vulnerable due to their limited access to health care. For instances, Tuberculosis prevalence has been found among the poor, the unemployed, or those living in overcrowded areas. Malaria can trap many peoples in a downward spiral of poverty, disproportionately affecting many marginalized communities. Under such dark clouds of infectious diseases, the notion of mobility is the focus of this year's SEA Seminar – with human, disease, and the nation-state as its so-called “objects of investigation.” The seminar is open to explorations from varieties of disciplines, ranging from medical sciences, social sciences, to humanities, hoping to develop a certain form of trans-disciplinary approaches. Not only will we explore the mobility-immobility nexus of both human and disease, we will also look at how the nation-state has attempted to mobilize vast resources at its shrinking disposal to revive its economy; and tourism – itself another form of mobility – is a key economic engine. Two key questions that guide the seminar are: what are basic characteristics of the relation between human (im)mobility and infectious disease?; how can a nation-state effectively deal with the disease/human (im)mobility during a pandemic so as to ensure its security, economic or otherwise? Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple models have been floated; one of which is the idea of tourism "sandbox," whereby at least a chosen tourist spot in a nation-state will be a quarantined space with majority of residents vaccinated. Fully-vaccinated tourists from designated low to medium risk countries can fly to such locality/ies, enjoying multiple enviable leisure-experiences, with routine medical testing conducted. These countries hope that if and when their larger areas can contain the disease and decrease its infection to a safety level, experiences from the "sandbox" will be employed to other localities therein. Thailand's Phuket island is chosen as this year SEA Seminar's location precisely because of this experiment: A space where the well-off can fly in and be confined in the island enjoying sea, sand and sun, while the marginalized are also confined and attempting to survive the devastating COVID-19. While the former are the fully vaccinated, the latter may not, especially if they are marginal migrant workers from other countries; and some of them are ‘illegal’. Phuket is, thus, a space where we can explore both the mobility from above and the mobility from below, as it were. The group of core participants that will be brought together for this Seminar will be carefully selected to assemble people evincing adequate potentials to connect with and interpret experiences of (im)mobility from across that spectrum. At the same time, we are highly conscious of the power dynamics that may be shaped by the presence of our own self-differentiating identities in the context of contemporary Phuket: a group of researchers concerned with the fates of marginal peoples amidst a pandemic, but who are themselves mobile subjects from above. With such awareness we hope not to avoid, but to critically anticipate, the ethical problematics entailed in such scholarship on mobility and its limits. Apart from a series of excursion trips to learn from differing sectors involved or neglected in the Phuket's sandbox – the marginalized, public health personnel, business people, governmental and security forces – we will also be learning from researchers and practitioners whose expertise will help both broaden our horizons and deepen our understanding on the notion of mobility and its relation to infectious diseases.