IAU Symposium No.248

We are in an era of upheaval in astronomy owing to the tremendous advances in technology being made. The more than a thousand-year-old field of astrometry is no exception to this. Space astrometry is now a reality, with achievable accuracies getting better by orders of magnitude. Astrometric information is available for nearly a billion objects and growing rapidly in numbers and quality. Another reality is the small number of dedicated state-of-the-art astrometric facilities. But can we do cutting-edge astrometry with `un-astrometric' instruments and observatories? The 10th anniversary of the revolutionary Hipparcos Catalogue and approximately five years prior to another crowning event - the Gaia mission - is the right moment to re-evaluate the whole field of astrometry in different wavelengths across the variety of techniques and instrumentation along with its applications and also glimpse into the future.