The Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series is a forum for leading scholars invited by the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy to present new research in the fields of mobilities research, tourism studies, migration and border studies, mobile communications, new mobile media, and related interdisciplinary areas. The talks are open to the entire Drexel community and invited guests from the region. Refreshments will be served. For more information about this free series, please contact Mimi Sheller at mimi.sheller@drexel.edu.
Spring 2011
April 21st, 12:30-2pm
Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan will discuss their work at Drexel University, followed by a screening of their films at International House Philadelphia in the evening, introduced by Professor Mimi Sheller, Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and PolicyMonument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers
dir. Lonnie van Brummelen in collaboration with Siebren de Haan, The Netherlands, 2007, 16mm, 63 mins, color, silent
Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers explores subsidized economy, the globalized sugar market, and how artistic practice can disrupt and reverse economic policies. Upon the discovery of anti-competitive policies set by the European Union to protect its native sugar production, and the detrimental impact of this on other countries, van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan staged an intervention. Their goal was to work around EU restrictions on sugar importation by turning European sugar dumped into Nigeria into sculptures, and returning it as an artistic product: a Monument of Sugar.
Grossraum (Borders of Europe)
dir. Lonnie van Brummelen in collaboration with Siebren de Haan, The Netherlands, 2004-2005, 35mm, 35 mins, color, silent
Grossraum is a “triptych” filmed along three sensitive crossing points on the European Union border: Hrebenne, a border post between Ukraine and Poland; the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco; and the green zone which splits Cyprus in two. By directing our gaze to the demarcations of the geopolitical “greater area” or “Grossraum” of the European Union, van Brummelen reveals the paradox of a zone of freedom whose development is dependent on the strength and policing of its borders.
Winter 2011
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 10-11am, Macalister Hall 2019
Dr. Lee Schipper
Carbon in Motion 2050 for North America and Latin America
See more interesting data here on global carbon dioxide emissions: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121240453
Global trends in CO2 emissions by region
This study presents a set of two low carbon transportation scenarios, Globalization and Glocalization, where carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions could be heavily reduced in North American and Latin America. The scenarios illustrate how different policy assumptions and energy intensities could reduce emissions through a long-term projection approach. Three main policy groups, transportation technologies and strategies, land use planning and pricing instruments design, are assumed to trigger modal shifts and trip reductions. In Globalization, strong international cooperation to decrease CO2 emissions leads to innovations in vehicle technologies and stricter standards, while in Glocalization, local concerns for reducing transportation problems lower distance traveled and create modal shifts to less CO2 intensive modes, through significant changes in land use and transportation planning. Under Glocalization, total transportation CO2 emission in 2050 is approximately 78 percent less than in the “Business as Usual” (BAU) scenario for North America. Similarly for Latin America, CO2 emission in 2050 is 76 percent less than BAU. The changes envisaged in these scenarios differ for the highly motorized North America and the currently less motorized Latin America. North America must bring about reductions in total distance traveled by automobiles and air, whereas Latin American is still able to expand automobile use and air travel, yet not at its existing rate. Both regions must adopt low-carbon technologies, which may be easier for Latin America, since there is less capital sunk in a carbon intensive transportation system.
Dr. Lee Schipper
Lee Schipper joined the Precourt Institute of Energy Efficiency at Stanford in September, 2008 to develop his research and policy studies of efficient energy use in transport systems into a unique course, “Sustainable Mobility”. Dr. Schipper earned his B.A. in music and Ph.D. at Berkeley in astrophysics, but has devoted his career to earthly problems of transport, energy and environment. He is also currently Senior Project Scientist at Global Metropolitan Studies, UC Berkeley. From 2002 to 2007, Dr. Schipper was Director of Research for EMBARQ, the World Resources Institute (WRI) Center for Sustainable Transport, which he helped found in April, 2002. He came to EMBARQ from the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, where he had been visiting Scientist from 1995 to 2001. Previous to that he was Staff Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for two decades. He worked in Group Planning at Shell International Petroleum Company in the 1980s and again in 2001, where he worked on two sets of Shell Scenarios. He has been a guest researcher at the World Bank, VVS Tekniska Foerening (Stockholm), the OECD Development Center, and the Stockholm Environment Institute. Dr. Schipper has authored over 100 technical papers and a number of books on energy economics and transportation around the world.
Fall 2010
Monday, October 18th, 2010, 6:00-8:00pm
Behrakis Hall, Creese Student CenteR
DrEXEL UNIVERSITY (32nd & Chestnut St.)
The Neighborhood Narratives Project: Investigating Public Sites for New Encounters
by Hana Iverson
Hana Iverson
Location aware art and media technologies expand the dialogue around concepts such as place, space, and location. Art that incorporates cell phones, GPS and other mobile technology encourages the viewer/user to unearth the layers of information that occupy a space and make known the complex influences that affect location specific interactions. In this layering of space and place, the definition of public site opens to new interpretation. In this paper I discuss the Neighborhood Narratives project and its relationship to these concepts. Neighborhood Narratives is an international education project that explores the issues that surface when new ideas made possible by locative media technologies are applied to space and place. http://neighborhoodnarratives.net/
Monday, November 8th, 2010 6-8PM
PAUL PECK CenTER, 32nd & Market St.
Drexel university
Children’s (Im)mobilities: The Effects of Transnational Migration on Children’s Circulation in Ghanaian Households
by Cati Coe
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University, Camden
In households in Ghana, children, like adults, are often mobile, visiting a variety of different households and changing their residence often. Like children in the Caribbean, many children live with adults other than their parents, such as with a grandmother, uncle, or family friend. Often, children move from poorer to richer households, in situations sometimes seen as mutually beneficial and at others as exploitative. International migration of parents and other relatives, however, changes children’s patterns of mobility. Despite their wealth relative to their relations back in Ghana, international migrants are more likely to leave behind or send back their children to live with relatives than to bring their relatives’ children to live with them, as would be expected. This paper explores the residential mobility of children vis-a-vis adults; how their residential mobility is linked to their relative status, power, and relationships; and what such mobility (or immobility) means in how the joys and costs of raising children are distributed between households and across the globe.
Summer 2010
Drew Hemment
“FutureEverything – New Mobilities”
Talk by Drew Hemment
Founder of the FutureEverything Festival and Associate Director of ImaginationLancaster
Friday, 16 July 2010: 5:30-7:00 pm @ NextFab Studio: 3711 Market Street, Philadelphia, on the campus of the University City Science Center
FutureEverything is an art, technology and social innovation organization that runs innovation labs and an annual festival of art, music and ideas. It is recognized around the world for leading pioneering projects and important debates on innovation, technology, art, society and the environment. FutureEverything is an innovation incubator with a long history of creative leadership in areas such as mobile and locative arts, social media, & the environment — more ‘do tank‘ than think tank. Winner of the prestigious Lever Prize 2010, Shortlisted for the Arts & Business Award 2010 and the Big Chip Award 2010, Honorary Mention for Director at Prix Ars Electronica 2008. Read more in BBC news story.
The FutureEverything Festival (formerly Futuresonic, est. 1995) is a crucible that allows artists, technologists and future-thinkers to share, innovate and bring the future into the present. Attended by 75,000 people, it is completely unique, bringing together world premieres of astonishing artworks, an explosive city-wide music program, and visionary thinkers from around the world. The FutureEverything Conference is the place to go each year for the important international debates in the field, bringing 500 opinion formers, futurologists, researchers, artists, technologists and scientists together to explore the latest upgrade affecting today’s digital culture. The FutureEverything Award – an international £10,000 prize to celebrate the creative imagination that will shape our future in 4 categories: for artworks, social innovations, software and technology projects which bring the future into the present, awarded by an international jury.
FutureEverything 2011 will take place 11-14 May 2011 in Manchester England and internationally through the GloNet, or Globally Networked Event. The theme is New Mobilities in 2011.
Dr. Drew Hemment is an artist, curator and researcher based in Manchester England. Recent projects have been on open data, remote collaboration, new mobilities and environmental mass observation. He is Director and Founder of FutureEverything (formerly Futuresonic), and is Associate Director of ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University.
Co-Sponsored by: mCenter@Drexel; Breadboard : breadboardphilly.org & NextFab Studio: nextfabstudio.com
Winter-Spring 2010
4-6 pm, PSA Building, Room 114, Drexel University (33rd & Powelton)
21 January 2010: Dr. Jennie Germann Molz
Using Audissey in Boston Public Park
Smart Tourism: Locative Media, Mobile Technologies and Tourist Epistemologies in the City
There has long been a special relationship between urban tourism and walking. Today, that relationship is increasingly shaped by the use of mobile and locative technologies. Electronic guided walking tours delivered on MP3 players and GPS-enabled smartphones allow tourists to move through the physical city and the digital world simultaneously, opening up new ways of navigating, interacting with and learning about the city. Drawing on an analysis of four mobile walking tour projects in Boston and Cambridge, I consider the social, spatial and epistemological implications of moving through such blended urban geographies. In particular, I identify an emerging ethos of ‘smart tourism’ that aims to use mobile digital connectivity to create more intelligent, meaningful and sustainable connections between tourists and the city. As part of a larger research project that seeks to understand how mobile technologies and tourism mobilities overlap, this analysis relates to larger questions about mobile connectivity and its consequences. In addition to mobile walking tours, I also explore the way tourism and technology intersect in an online hospitality networking community and in practices of travel blogging. In this context, ‘smart tourism’ represents what I see as a broader contested terrain, shaped by competing civic and commercial imperatives, where alternative mobility futures are fervently debated. In this sense, I suggest that ‘smart tourism’ represents wider efforts to imagine tourism as a form of deep civic engagement, and not just a form of consumption.
Dr. Germann Molz is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. She teaches in the areas of globalization, culture, citizenship, mobilities, technology and tourism. She held an ESRC postdoc in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University (UK) and will speak on her current research project, ‘Travel Connections’, which investigates the social implications of the emerging trend of interactive travel.
See coverage of this event by JoAnn Greco at PlanPhilly: http://planphilly.com/walking-smart
U.S-Mexico Border Wall
18 February 2010: Miguel Diaz-Barriga and Margaret Dorsey
Border Walls and Necro-Citizenship: The Normalization of Exclusion and Death on the U.S. Mexico Border
The anthropology of circulation calls for both a critical reexamination of anthropological conceptions of flows and mobilities and a wider consideration of the walls and barriers (including technological) that constrain the movement of specific types of people, goods, and information. This paper–based on an National Science Foundation-funded ethnographic study of the wall being built on the US-Mexico border–provides an overall framework for understanding the construction of border walls and the concomitant militarization of borders, as demarcating zones for the practice of necro-power and necro-citizenship. Scholars developed the concept of necro-power to describe structures of governance and governmentality through which state actors and structures exercise power primarily through exclusion, violence, and death. Border walls in the United States demarcate such zones where exclusion and death are normalized. We expand this analysis by looking at how these zones of necro-power transform border residents into necro-citizens. This paper, through an analysis of the construction of the border wall in South Texas, explores the usefulness of the concept of necro-citizenship to understand both the production of citizenship in South Texas and local resistance to the border wall. We conclude by asking if anthropologists can use this model to explore wider possibilities for understanding border walls throughout the world as zones of necro-power and necro-citizenship.
Miguel Diaz-Barriga is Professor of Anthropology at Swarthmore College. He received his PhD and MA in Anthropology from Stanford University and his B.A. in Anthropology from University of Chicago. He has teaching and research interests in Latin America, Mexican and Chicano/a Culture, Symbolic Anthropology, Culture and Power, Border Studies, Social Theory, Social Movements, Visual Anthropology.
Margaret Dorsey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Anthropology and Curator of the Rio Grande Valley Folklore Archive at the University of Texas – PanAmerican. She received her PhD and MA in Anthropology and Communication and Culture from Indiana University, and her B.A. in Sociology and Political Science from Southwestern University. She is the author of Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics, and Transnational Marketing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). She has teaching and research interests in Border Studies, Musicology, Latino/a Studies, and Media.
This is a blog about their NSF project: “A Nation Divided: The Border Wall, Immigration and Citizenship on the U.S.-Mexico Border“
3 March 2010: Dr. Laura Forlano
WiFi Geographies: Designing Interfaces and Interventions for Collaboration in Place
Abstract: How can we reformat our cities and public spaces – and the architectures and technologies within them — as sites of collaboration and innovation? This presentation examines the ways in which WiFi enables the formation of networks of socio-technical spaces that reconfigure people, work and forms of organizing based on a year- long empirical research project. Theoretical debates about the social construction of technology, the importance of and attachment to place and the formation of ad-hoc “communities” are central to understanding the ways in which the use of wireless networks is allowing people to reorganize urban public space. These
reconfigurations are reframed conceptually as codescapes in order to integrate digital information and physical space. This presentation
will also report on an ongoing collaborative design project, Breakout! Escape from the Office, which is being presented by The Architectural League of New York as part of the Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City exhibition.
Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Human Interaction Lab at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University in 2008. Her dissertation, “When Code Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at WiFi Hotspots,” explores the intersection between organizations, technology (in particular, mobile and wireless technology) and the role of place in communication, collaboration and innovation. Most recently, she was Kauffman Fellow in Law at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Forlano is an Adjunct Faculty member in the Design and Management department at Parsons and the Graduate Programs in International Affairs and Media Studies at The New School where she teaches courses on Innovation, New Media and Global Affairs and Technology and the City. Forlano received a Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University, a Diploma in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor’s in Asian Studies from Skidmore College.
