Mobility Futures Conference

Call for Participation

Global Conference On Mobility Futures

Centre for Mobilities Research

Lancaster UNIVERSITY, UK

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/mobility-futures/

As part of the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University, we are pleased to announce and invite contributions for the ‘Global Conference on Mobility Futures’, September 4-6th, 2013, at Lancaster University, UK.

Over the past ten years, the work of CeMoRe and others have helped to ‘mobilise’ the social and human sciences and developed innovative analyses of economic, social, technological, political, policy and design transformations. The ‘Global Conference on Mobility Futures’ will reflect this work and provide a forum for the presentation of cutting edge research from across the social sciences/humanities that reflects back on, explores the present and looks towards future mobilities.

The conference theme

The conference will address all aspects of Mobilities research.
Mobilities research addresses not only the movement of people, objects, information, messages, risks and images through intersecting mobility-systems. It also explores the motivations, pleasures, pains and practices of stillness, of coordinating movement, blocking it, holding things in place, creating and maintaining social and material infrastructures. Some likely past, present and future mobilities to be debated at the Conference include: disasters; electric bikes; social networking; emergencies; military mobilities; experiences of being on the move; 4G; space tourism; climate change refugees; oil wars; gendered, aged and ethnic mobilities; ‘future mobile imaginaries’; citizen innovation; mobile art; mobile methods; food vs fuel; 3D printing; Arctic mobilities; slow travel; Chinese and Indian mobilities; high speed rail; and alternatives to corporeal travel.
A key priority theme, reflecting current and urgent societal concerns, will be questions about limits to the expansion and sophistication of future mobilities. Such questions mean considering if there are limits to mobility, what the limits are, and what consequences limits may have for people’s lives. It also means considering whether different mobilities might substitute for each other, whether this is likely or desirable, and how to design and bring about ‘good mobilities’ in a period of continued austerity.

Conference format

This event will bring together leading theorists and practitioners, transport professionals, computer experts, artists, policy-makers, established academics and junior researchers who are contributing in some way to this paradigm. Confirmed keynote and invited speakers include: Peter Adey, Bianca Freire Medeiros, Ole B. Jensen, Caren Kaplan,  Sven Kesselring, James Marriott, Leysia Palen, Kim Sawchuk, Mimi Sheller, Elizabeth Shove, Adriana da Souza e Silva, John Urry, Susan Zielinski.

Based at Lancaster University, the conference will be multi-sited with events, lectures, seminars, exhibitions, video streams, and short talks linked together around the world. It will be curated by Lancaster staff but with participation from other mobility centres and networks.

Call for Contributions

We invite a range of different kinds of contributions on the themes outlined above. Please note that there is a no-fly attendance option, where you have the opportunity to present and discuss your work without physically travelling to Lancaster.

Abstracts

Academic papers exploring the theory, practice, and implications of mobile living. Participants will be expected to deliver a (ca 20min) talk. Please submit a 500 word abstract by 12th April 2013. Notification of acceptance: 10th May. For further information please contact Monika Buscher m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk.

Posters

Accepted posters will be presented in short ‘Pecha-Kucha’ sessions (a series of slides delivered in 6 minutes) in addition to being exhibited in the social spaces of the conference. Authors will also be expected to be available for discussion during specified poster sessions during breaks. Please submit a poster by 19th April 2013. Notification of acceptance: 18th May. For further information please contact Lisa Wood l.a.wood@lancaster.ac.uk.

Artworks

There will be a physical and virtual exhibition of art relating to the conference themes (in the widest sense). Artists may be asked to deliver a short talk. Please submit a 500 word abstract by 19th April 2013. Notification of acceptance: 18th May. The Lancaster-based Catalyst project is offering a bursary of £2000 for new mobilities art work related to ‘citizen-led digital innovation for social change’. (www.catalystproject.org.uk) For further details please contact Jen Southern j.a.southern@lancaster.ac.uk.

Open

If you have ideas for unusual conference contributions that do not fit any of the above formats, please contact Jen Southern mailto:j.a.southern@lancaster.ac.uk.

Important Dates

Full Paper Abstract Submission by 12th April 2013
Notification of acceptance: 10th May
Poster and Artwork Submissions by 19th April 2013
Notification of acceptance: 18th May
Registration opens 15th February 2013
Early Bird Registration ends 12th July 2013

The organizing committee

Monika Buscher, Javier Caletrio, Pennie Drinkall, James Faulconbridge, Jen Southern, David Tyfield, John Urry,and Lisa Wood.
The event is being sponsored by the Mobile Lives Forum and Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

Royal Geographical Society – IBG Call for Papers

New paradigms in conceptualizing shared mobility – Call for papers

We invite submissions to the following Call for Papers for the 2013 RGS-IBG (Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers) annual conference. This will take place in London from Wednesday 28 to Friday 30 August 2013. Please note the opportunity for a postgraduate paper prize.

Personal Rapid Transit – John Hersey for the Boston Globe

New paradigms in conceptualizing shared mobility

Session Convenors: Dr Juliet Jain & Professor Graham Parkhurst, University of the West of England, Bristol

Technology is offering a potential new dynamic in how transport is delivered and used. There is a move from what were once ‘private’ ways of being mobile towards ‘shared’ modes. Traditionally, shared modes have been buses, coaches, trams, trains and air. Now there are shared cars through car clubs, personal rapid transport (PRT), and taxi services, and shared bicycles such as the London Barclays bike scheme. Mobile technologies and the rise of the ‘app’ have become particularly useful in facilitating shared transport opportunities (e.g. Barclays bike hire scheme in London).

Speculating on urban futures, Sheller and Urry (2003) considered the notion of public/private and the potential reconfiguration of the city with shared automated ‘pods’. Feasibility studies and trials of personal rapid transport systems are now underway. Yet as Latour (1996) explores in his tale of Aramis, future visions of re-scripting mobility practices demand complex enrollments between politics, technical developers, communities, etc. Do such sociological interpretations and theoretical ideas assist in the implementation of shared schemes and the social diffusion of new collective mobility mechanisms?

Sharing transport presents challenges to the notion of individual ownership, and opens new debates around:-

• how shared transport is theoretically conceptualized;
• how it is conceived, designed, delivered and managed;
• the spatial impacts that might emerge from new networks;
• how it is modeled and evaluated; and
• how it is experienced and perceived by the public.

This session seeks abstracts that present evidence from new ‘shared’ schemes, theoretical concepts of sharing and social practices, and new methodological approaches for modelling use and networks, and understanding of the user experience of shared transport.

Please email your abstract of 250 words (max) to Juliet Jain Juliet.Jain@uwe.ac.uk and Graham Parkhurst Graham.Parkhurst@uwe.ac.uk by the 30th January 2013.

References see:

Sheller, M. and Urry, J., ‘Mobile Transformations of “Public” and “Private” Life’, Theory, Culture and Society, 20: 3 (2003), pp. 107-125

Sheller, M. and Urry, J., ‘The City and the Car’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 24, No. 4, (2000) pp. 737-57

Postgraduate Prize

Eligible author presenters are encouraged to submit a paper for the Postgraduate Paper Prize, which is will be sponsored by Emerald Publishing in 2013. There is a first prize of £100, and a runner-up prize of a book chosen from the Emerald transport titles.

To enter for the prize, a full paper of not more than 6000 words should be submitted to the Secretary of the TGRG (Kate Pangbourne, k.pangbourne@abdn.ac.uk) no later than 5pm on the Friday of the week prior to the conference.

Eligibility:

Eligibility is restricted to post-graduate students (or those who have had their viva within six months of the date of the conference) presenting their own work. There is a presumption that the papers ought to be sole authored.

AAG 2013 Call for Papers

Call for Papers for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers

AAG, Los Angeles, April 9-13, 2013

Contesting and Constructing Spaces of Mobility and Transport

Transportation geography is positioned to make important contributions to emerging debates in spatial theory and planning practice, including a significant ‘mobilities’ turn in the social sciences and the challenge of sustainable transport in transport/urban planning. But if the subfield has helped advance understanding of spatial processes in the past, ranging from quantitative modeling to the explicit inclusion of different in social analyses, some argue it must move beyond these decades-old advances (Hanson 2006).  For example, processes of political-economic change like neoliberalism — at a variety of scales — are largely structured through transportation; the new field of mobilities has underlined the importance of the social meanings of transportation and mobility across all modes (Sheller and Urry 2006); and planners confront the challenge of greening transport and improving quality of life. But there remains to be seen how a critical engagement with institutions, practices, and discourses of transportation modes and infrastructures might contribute to understanding and engaging contemporary social, political, and economic challenges.

For this session, we are looking for papers that critically engage the spatialities of transportation, including mobile bodies and material (human/non-human, vehicular and non-vehicular), transport nodes and places, territories and scales, networks/infrastructure, and the spatial practices and relations that connect them. By “critical,” we mean an approach that highlights the power geometries (Massey, 1994) of transport systems, critiquing mobile actors and infrastructures, analyzing discourses of transportation and policy, or exploring the contested nature of spaces and places of transportation and mobility. But we also seek papers that explore the ways people, including planners, contest and construct transportation spaces in pursuit of more just and sustainable alternatives. Much as the mobilities literature has brought together multiple disciplines and upset the notion that sedentarism is the default state of affairs, we seek to contribute to geographical and planning debates by considering the political economy of transportation and infrastructure as it is and has been, and the possibilities for positive change.

If you are interested in participating in this session, please submit your abstract to the AAG and then contact us with your PIN: Julie Cidell, University of Illinois, jcidell@illinois.edu; or David Prytherch, Miami University of Ohio, prythedl@muohio.edu. This session is co-sponsored by the Energy and Environment, Transportation Geography, and Urban Geography Specialty Groups.

AND ANOTHER ONE!

Call for Papers: Urban Mobilities
2013 Annual Meeting of the AAG- Los Angeles

Session organizers:
Donald Anderson (Anthropology, Univ. of Arizona)
Asha Best (American Studies, Rutgers University)

Given that the upcoming meeting of the AAG is convening in the
hyper-car-cultured city of Los Angeles, it seems opportune to open up a
broader discussion about mobilities, immobilities and  moorings.
(Hannam, et al 2006) As Tim Cresswell (2010) has argued, mobility
involves movement, representation and practice—all three of which are
entangled with and permeated by political relations. That is to say, how
certain bodies move through space, the means with which they move, and
the types of spaces to which those bodies have access has political
meaning. This panel invites presentations that consider how the politics
of mobility shape contemporary cities. How are mobilities and
immobilities in urban settings produced, channeled, and contested? And
how are these im/mobilities transformed by new technologies (e.g. GPS
tracking, transit television, mobile apps, Intelligent Transportation
Systems, driverless cars)?

Potential topics include but are certainly not limited to:

• car cultures and the future of driving
• affect and mobile interactions
• “just in time” mobility
• the politics of waiting
• public transit as a racialized/gendered mode of travel
• mobile tracking as a marketing tool
• the production of mobile subjects as consumers
• built environment and the shape of urban flows
• splintering urbanism, stratified transportation
• cities as receptacles and generators of flows
• technology as psychogeographic mediator

Interested presenters should send a title and abstract of up to 250
words to dna@email.arizona.edu and asbest@scarletmail.rutgers.edu by
October 20th. Please include your PIN if you have already registered; if
you have not yet registered, please note that registration for the AAG
should be completed by October 24th, 2012.

Transfers – Call for papers

Call for Papers
Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies

Transfers, now entering its third year of publication, is emerging as a key
peer-reviewed platform for new research into the practices, experiences and
representations of disparate mobilities. Our newly expanded Editorial Team
invite submissions that address our central concern – to “rethink mobility” in
the widest possible terms and from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.
Intellectually rigorous, wide ranging, and conceptually innovative, Transfers
combines the empiricism of traditional mobility history with more recent theoretical approaches in the social sciences and the humanities. We interpret ‘transfers’ in its many senses: to move, shift, transmit, transform, change, and convey.

The journal’s scholarly essays, film, book and exhibition reviews, artwork, photography and special features are devoted to the ways in which
mobilities have been enabled, shaped and mediated across time and through
technological changes. We are interested in analyses of past and present
experiences of vehicle drivers, passengers, pedestrians, migrants and
refugees; accounts of the arrival and transformation of mobilities in different
nations and locales; and investigations into the kinetic processes of global
capital, technology, chemical and biological substances, images, narratives,
sounds, and ideas.

We especially encourage contributions that ‘rethink mobility’ through a
transnational, multimodal, or transdisciplinary perspective, and those dealing
with subversive (non-hegemonic) and subaltern (non-Eurocentric) mobilities,
including a focus on the infrastructures and practices of mobility that
contribute to uneven forms of access.

See http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/trans/

Editor:

Gijs Mom, Eindhoven University of Technology

Associate Editors:

Georgine Clarsen, The University of Wollongong
Nanny Kim, University of Heidelberg
Peter Merriman, University of Aberystwyth
Mimi Sheller, Drexel University, Philadelphia
Heike Weber, Technical University of Berlin

Editorial Advisor:

Cotten Seiler, Dickinson College, Carlisle

Call For Papers Differential Mobilities

Differential Mobilities: Movement and Mediation in Networked Societies

4th Pan-American Mobilities Network conference, May 8-13, 2013

Differential Mobilities: Movement and Mediation in Networked Societies

Pan-American Mobilities Network May 8-13, 2013

Conference website and abstract submission (deadline November 21st):

http://mobilities.ca/pamnet-4/

 

From May 8-11, 2013 the Mobile Media Lab in the Communication Studies department of Concordia University in Montreal will be hosting an international conference sponsored by the Pan-American Mobilities Network in collaboration with the European Cosmobilities Network.

Confirmed keynote and plenary speakers:

Darin Barney (McGill University, Montreal, Quebec)

Gisele Beiguelman (University of São Paulo, Brazil)

Micha Cárdenas (University of San Diego, California)

Vera Chouinard (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario)

Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney, Australia)

Ole B.  Jensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Jason Lewis and Skawennati Fragnito (Concordia University,Montreal, Quebec)

Danielle Peers and Lindsay Eales (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta)

 

Mobilities has become an important framework for understanding and analyzing contemporary social, spatial, economic and political practices. Mobilities research is interdisciplinary, focusing on the systematic movement of people, goods and information that “travel” around the world at speeds that are greater than before, creating distinct patterns, flows– and blockages. Mobilities research contributes to the study of these technological, social and cultural developments from a critical perspective. The theme of this year’s conference is “Differential Mobilities: Movement and Mediation in Networked Societies”. The term ‘differential mobilities’ has been deployed to describe dynamics of power within networked societies. When we conceptualize movement, mobility, or flows within spaces and places, we need to account for the systemic differences within infrastructures and terrains that create uneven forms of access. ‘Differential mobilities’, conceptually, highlights how exclusions occur, creating striations of power. It draws attention to differences in how these inequalities are experienced, the strategies for resistance, and the processes of mediation that have been implemented to instigate change.

We invite scholars, artists, and activists to submit creative presentations or papers that address all aspects of this theme, or related topics in mobilities research, such as:

• Alternative mobilities and slow movements;
• Borders, surveillance, and securitization with ubiquitous and mobile technologies;
• Class, culture and the mediation of mobilities;
• Civic engagement and political participation through mobile social media, new mapping practices and location-aware technologies;
• Creativity and the mobilization of resistance;
• Discrimination and the built environment;
• Embodiment, performance and mobile mediations;
• Environmentalism, mediation and mobilities;
• Immigration, migration and mobilities;
• Indigenous culture and the mobilities paradigm;
• Media theory and differential mobilities;
• Mobile communications, differential mobilities and everyday life practices;
• New methodologies for mobilities research;
• Planning, policy and design for present and future mobilities;
• Privacy and surveillance issues  and location-based social networks;
• Race, gender and the politics of mobilities;
• Regulating networks;
• Social movements and mediated mobilities;
• Urban and rural spatialities and the geographies of place;
• Tourism, imaginary travel, and virtual travel;
• Transitions toward sustainable mobilities;
• Transportation and differential movements
  

Disciplines represented at the conference may include (but are not exclusive to): Anthropology, Architecture and Design, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Communication, Criminology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Media, Sound and Visual Arts, Politics and International Relations, Public Policy, Sociology, Theatre and Performance Studies, Tourism Research, Transport Research, and Urban Studies.

 

Conference location:

Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec

Conference hotel:

Discounted rates will be available to registered participants.

Important dates:

Deadline for abstracts: 21 November, 2012

(maximum 300 words, including references)

Notification of acceptance:  15 January, 2013

Conference registration opens:  15 January, 2013

Early Registration deadline:  2 March 1, 2013

Conference Dates:  8-11 May, 2013

Please submit your abstracts through the form hosted by the conference website by no later than November 21st:

http://mobilities.ca/pamnet-4/

Organizing Committee:

Kim Sawchuk (Concordia University, Québec)

Jim Conley (Trent University, Canada)

Owen Chapman (Concordia University, Québec)

Adriana de Souza e Silva (NC State University, USA)

Paola Jirón Martinez (University of Chile, Chile)

Mary Gray (Microsoft/Indiana Univerisity, USA)

Ole B. Jensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)

André Lemos (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil)

Mimi Sheller (Drexel University, USA)

Jen Southern (Lancaster University, UK)

Phillip Vannini (Royal Roads University, Canada)

 

For further information, contact:

Ben Spencer, Administrative Coordinator, Mobile Media Lab

mmcconcordia@gmail.com

Concordia University, Montréal, Québec

 Image credit: Antoni Abad, 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ISA Mid-term Conference

International Sociological Association
Call for Papers

The mobile interface and social change. Embodied spaces and locative technologies

Mid term conference 2010–2014
ISA RC54 The Body in the Social Sciences
“Sapienza”, University of Rome, Italy
December 5-6, 2012
Abstracts submission: October 15, 2012

Throughout history, when a medium that was once understood as geographically fixed becomes mobile, a cultural shift accompanies this transformation. A similar cultural shift has been taking place as computing technologies are continually moving from their static location at the home or office computer and becoming mobile. The embodied nature of mobile devices renders old binaries of real/virtual obsolete. Since embodiment and space are indelibly linked together, it is important to develop a strong understanding of our usage of the term “mobile media space–time”. Such an understanding is undoubtedly linked to the various ways space is built up by mobile devices, and to the community that comes into existence by virtue of interacting within the all-pervasive computing space.

One can never “inhabit” space because such an ontological condition would imply entering a preexisting field that our bodies simply fill. Rather, space is always “constructed simultaneously with our sense of embodiment”. Part of this is cultural, but part is also biological because space arises from the interplay between our conscious mind and its surrounding structures. Second, embodiment is relational. We construct our sense of space by tuning-in and tuning-out different parts of the world, similar to how we perceive our body by focusing on select sensations or areas instead of “taking everything in” at once. As such, the way we read our bodies and the world is always selective and never complete: “full, embodied presence is always being deferred”. Third, the mobile technologies reconfigure the ways their users can embody space, specifically in how they allow the Internet to dislodge itself from the PC and move into everyday environments. In this new embodied environment, social actors locate themselves in digital space and material space simultaneously, with each shaping perceptions of the other.

[As Mimi Sheller argues in her Sociopedia article "Mobility"]: The new transdisciplinary field of mobilities research encompasses research on the spatial mobility of humans, nonhumans and objects; the circulation of information, images and capital; as well as the study of the physical means for movement such as infrastructures, vehicles and software systems that enable travel and communication to take place. Thus it brings together some of the more purely ‘social’ concerns of sociology (inequality, power, hierarchies, social memory) with the ‘spatial’ concerns of geography (territory, borders, scale) and the ‘cultural’ concerns of anthropology and media studies. Furthermore, mobilities theory also builds on a range of philosophical perspectives that enable more radical rethinking of the relation between bodies, movement and space. It draws on phenomenology to reconsider embodied practices and the production of being–in–motion as a relational affordance between the senses, objects and kinesthetic accomplishments. Sociologists are only just beginning to explore what the notion of “mobility” might mean when mediated through computing and communications technologies, and so far, the sociological treatment has been largely theoretical.

In order to define the various ways time/space is produced in our mobile media era, the aim of this 2–days Conference is to highlight, by the body, the emerging methodologies and applications in the study of mobile media time–space and with particular attention to: [1] understand locative media in terms of embodied experience; [2] draw the context in which methods are used as well as the tacit assumptions that shape research questions; [3] focus on case studies illustrating how individuals, groups, and institutions have used mobile media to toy with or alter their physical surroundings. We want to explore how, in everyday life, a number of dimensions of time and space are being newly reconstructed through the use of mobile communications technologies. The conference should be a starting point of long-term grounded research on the Socio-Technical Shaping of Mobile Multimedia Communications. This research should involve ethnographic field-work conducted in a variety of locales and with a number of groups and institutions. Therefore, it should constitute a resource to explore how mobile communications technologies mediate time in relation to mobile spaces. The conference will offer a review and critique of some of the major sociological approaches to understanding time and space. This review entails a discussion of how social practices and institutions are maintained and/or transformed via mobile technologies. Ethnographic data will be used to explore emerging mobile temporalities. Three inter-connected domains in mobile time are proposed: 1. rhythms of mobile use; 2. rhythms of mobile use in everyday life; 3.rhythms of mobility and institutional change (discourses, representations, schemas). Each entails a relational ontology of the constitution of social actors, spaces and meanings.

Theoretical as well as empirical presentations are welcome, especially work relating to micro-interactional research on the sociology of embodiment. Specifically, papers. power point presentations, and work in progress are invited on the following topics:

1. Embodied Spaces and Locative Technologies;

2. The Sensory Inscribed Body;

3. Mobility Capital and Performed Movement-Space;

4. Synchronous and Asynchronous Maps of the Mobile Interface;

5. The Rhythms of Mobile Use;

6. The Rhythms of Mobile Use in Everyday Life;

7. The Rhythms of Mobility and Institutional Change;

8. The Contours of Contemporary Media and Culture.

Abstract–Paper Format and Language: The organizers invite papers on the above topics.

Please send them to:
biancamaria.pirani@uniroma1.it
roberto.cipriani@tlc.uniroma3.it

A special consideration will be given to empirically grounded papers, either comparative or area–based. The language of the Conference will be English, French, and Italian. Abstracts should be about 250 words, specifying the name(s) of the Author(s), his/her/their affiliation(s) and e-mail.

Governing Mobilities

Call for papers – Cosmobilities Network Conference 2012

GOVERNING MOBILITIES

Lausanne, October 31 ^st – November 1^st, 2012

New deadline for abstract submission: April 23

Aspirations of seamless and universal mobilities are a hallmark of social and economic life at the beginning of the 21st century. As systems of governance relying upon particular forms of governmentality developed in western societies to more effectively and productively propagate and sustain the emerging capitalist system and manage its socioeconomic disjunctures, mobility, has become a matter of special concern. A set of interlocking rationales, apparatus, institutions, roles and procedures of governance have come to sustain powerful “mobility regimes” justifying, stabilizing, naturalizing, controlling and disciplining particular forms of mobilities characterizing contemporary social, economic and political life in the north Atlantic rim.

Nowadays the modern society is more than ever a “society on the move” (Lash, Urry 1994). The development of transnational mobility systems across the world involving huge networks of transport and communication infrastructures such as airports, roads, trains, shipping and mobile communication have enabled the flow of people, money, objects, and information at an unprecedented scale. In this process massive social, economic, political and environmental processes, connecting specific social groups, places and regions and disconnecting others, are activated. Thus Motility, referring to entities’ capacity to be mobile in social and geographic spaces, is becoming increasingly important.

But the logic, form and versatility of these new, emerging mobility regimes still need to be thoroughly described and understood. Hegemonic mobility regimes such as global transport, urban and regional, corporate mobility regimes are being intensely contested and challenged by the realities of global risks, economic crises, demographic changes and alternative utopias pursued by various social actors. Controversies around climate change, for example, evidence that the cosmopolitization of societies, the potential for mobility afforded by multiple, interlocking and networked transport and communication infrastructures and the idea of a global market, critically rely upon unsustainable use of resources and increasingly fragile mobility systems.

This conference focuses on the question of which systems of governance are involved in these processes, how they are evolving as a result of these trends at a time when the future looks less and less like the past? Also scientific literature and studies on transport and mobility are dominated by works on travel and commuting and public policies are largely based on such works. For this conference, we propose to examine the governance of individual and collective actors’ mobility projects. In modern societies, where discourses lauding spatial and social mobility seem prevalent, this conference aims to understand critically how public policies consider the coexistence of different types of mobility projects, and inequalities linked to this diversity.

The conference is co-organized with the MSFS (Mobilités spatiales, fluidités sociales) francophone conference. Joint session(s) will take place October 31^st.  The call for papers for the MSFS conference is available at http://lasur.epfl.ch/

Abstracts of no more than 350 words should be submitted electronically to Dr Hanja Maksim (hanja.maksim@epfl.ch) and Dr Emmanuel Ravalet (emmanuel.ravalet@epfl.ch) by April 23rd, 2012.

Cosmobilities Conference Sardinia July 2012

Moving boundaries in mobilities research

Organised by the University of Cagliari in collaboration with the Cosmobilities Network

Venue: University of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy)

Dates: 5-7 July 2012

Keynote speakers

Malene Freudendal-Pedersen (Roskilde, Cosmobilities Network)

Sven Kesselring (MoRE, Munich, Cosmobilities Network)

Mimi Sheller (mCenter, Drexel, Philadelphia, Pan American Mobilities Network)

Background

Mobilities is a distinct strand of theory and research in social science, an evolving approach that synthesises in an original way existing and new writings on the combined movements of people, objects and information. The mobilities turn addresses conceptual and methodological challenges posed by old and new transformations in transport and communication systems and their implications for contemporary lives and natures.

Over the last decade the mobilities turn has generated enthusiasm across different fields and informed studies in a wide range of topics and problematics, from tourism, migration, transport, urban planning and mobile communication to logistics, climate change, consumption and inequality. In the Anglophone world interest is particularly evident in sociology and human geography. One among many anecdotal examples is Tim Cresswell’s article ‘Towards a politics of mobility’ which currently figures as the most downloaded paper in the last twelve months in Environment and Planning D: Space and Society.

While research has, up to date, tended to focus on the daily micro-mobilities of people and objects, attention is also being directed towards histories of mobility, the mobility of ideas, large scale circulation systems, building materials and resource consumption and circulation.  As an approach with moving boundaries, mobilities research is also developing methodologies and methods that respond to both conceptual innovations and the empirical realities of a world on the move. Innovations in ‘mobile methods’ are opening up promising prospects and still unfulfilled possibilities some of which are related to the way new ICTs routinely generate, collect and disseminate data. The mobilities turn, like most social science, still has to come to terms with these trends and create synergies with streams of research that are successfully exploiting these opportunities. At the moment, major advances in network theory, one of the backbones of complexity theory, are coming not so much from the physical sciences but from research on the social, drawing on vast amounts of data generated by intelligent networked infrastructures and mobile telephony.

Aim

This conference, funded by the University of Cagliari and organized in collaboration with the Cosmobilities Network, aims at discussing new directions in mobilities research, showcasing the state of the art in the field, and providing a unique opportunity to create lasting links among researchers, especially in the north and the south of Europe.

The language of this event will be English but the range of papers presented will be a reflection of the diversity of concerns, approaches and methodologies informing mobilities research in Europe and beyond.

Young and experienced researchers are invited to submit abstracts for paper presentations. High quality abstracts on any aspect of mobilities are welcomed although submissions addressing the following themes are particularly encouraged:

• histories of mobilities
• cultures of mobilities
•  mobilities outside the north Atlantic rim
• the spaces and politics of mobility (and immobility) in the Mediterranean city
•  forms of mobility other than car, train and airplane
• research conducted in collaboration with artists and public and private actors outside academia illustrating the way  new knowledge collectives are formed around the use of new ICTs
• transnational research involving different institutional settings

Format

In order to maximize opportunities to present a wide range of research and learn about what is happening in the field of mobilities, this event is organized as a ‘festival of ideas’ consisting of short presentations followed by plenty of time for questions and collective discussion.

Introducing the Cosmobilities Network

This conference is part of a series of regular events jointly organized between European universities and Cosmobilities to promote mobilities research in southern and eastern Europe and strengthen links between researchers in and outside academia. On Thursday 5 July, following the inaugural presentation, Malene Freudendal-Pedersen and Sven Kesselring will introduce the Cosmobilities Network, and talk about its origins in 2004, its activities, future plans and how to become involved.

Deadline for abstract submissions

Deadline: April  25, 2012

Contact for abstract submissions:

Javier Caletrío jcaletrio@gmail.com

Ugo Rossi urossi@hotmail.com

Organizers

Event organized and funded by the University of Cagliari (Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali e delle Istituzioni) in collaboration with the Cosmobilities Network.

Professor Giuliana Mandich (University of Cagliari)

Dr Javier Caletrío (CeMoRe, Cosmobilities, Visiting Fellow University of Cagliari)

Dr Ugo Rossi (University of Cagliari)

Registration and accomodation

No registration fees are required. A modest contribution may be required for the participation in the conference dinner. Further information can be found at spol.unica.it/cosmobilities.

Cagliari, Sardinia

Location

Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, is the perfect location for a Cosmobilities event. A crossroad between cultures throughout the centuries - among which Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Aragons, Catalans- it offers one of the most beautiful and longest beaches in the Mediterranean and a crystal-clear sea around, besides an unspoiled natural environment consisting of lagoons, bird sanctuaries and wildlife reserves, as well as museums and archaeological sites, which altogether make it a unique scene in Europe.

Mobile Publics Workshop

Call For Papers

New interaction orders, New mobile publics?

13-14 April 2012

Lancaster University, UK

Equipped with mobile technologies, people connect in ways that were unthinkable when Goffman wrote Behaviour in public spaces (1963) and William Whyte explored The social life of small urban spaces (1980). The momentous Arab Spring events, London riots and ‘2011 Occupy’ demonstrations are extreme examples that pose old questions about the ‘interaction order’ and its relation to social order and the public sphere in new ways.

On the one hand, mobile connectivity enables micro-coordination of increasingly mobile everyday lives, new modulations of co-presence, absent presence and present absence, and transformations of socio-material practices of availability, obligation, intimacy and strangerhood in public. Some of the social innovations involved also shape emergent new practices of mobilising people in protests and crises. Arguably new, agile, local and globally networked communities and ‘mobile publics’ are forming. On the other, worries over a loss of civility, community, privacy, and new forms of surveillance enabled by the ever closer intermeshing of digital technology and everyday ‘movement-spaces’ fuel fears over an erosion of civil liberties and ‘capital P’ politics.

Goffman’s insistence that ‘the interaction order’ is the performative locus of such utopian and dystopian transformations and his and Whyte’s attention to detail are the motivation for this two-day interdisciplinary workshop. We would like to bring micro and macro, theory and empirical research, everyday lived practice, design, policy and politics together through collaborative analysis of multi-sited, mobile, ethnographic or otherwise qualitative studies of behaviour in today’s public spaces, zeitdiagnostic theory and avantgarde design. We invite researchers, designers, technology developers, architects, urban planners, artists and urban communities to submit contributions that explore aspects of new and old ‘behaviour in public spaces’, including (but not limited to):

• the ‘osmotic’ relationship between physical and virtual spaces, connectivity and mobility
• the social life of such spaces
• emergent principles and practices of the 21st Century interaction order
• augmented embodied and sensory phenomenology and material agency
• links between the interaction order, public engagement, and public space
• tensions between mobile informationalized everyday lives and movement-spaces and principles of privacy and civil liberty, security, splintering and sorting of ‘access’
• examples, practices and impacts of improvised communities and mobile publics, and collective intelligence
• examples and methods of collaborative, experimental, radically careful and carefully radical design of new practices, technologies, forms of public engagement and spaces
• reflections on the links between theory, empirical studies, design and politics in the broadest sense

Please send a 300 word abstract to Pauline Feron: p.feron@lancaster.ac.uk by 24th February 2012. Notification of Acceptance 9th March 2012.

There is a small amount of financial support available for travel. If funds are an obstruction, please contact p.feron@lancaster.ac.uk

Dr Monika Buscher

Senior Lecturer / Director mobilities.lab

Part I Director

Centre for Mobilities Research

Department of Sociology

Lancaster University

LA1 4YD

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/cemore/

email: m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk

 

T2M 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS
T2M Conference – Madrid, 2012

The International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M) announces the call for papers to be presented at its tenth annual conference, which will take place at the Museo del Ferrocarril de Madrid (Madrid Railway Museum) on 15-18 November 2012.

Delicias station, Madrid Railway Museum

Physical mobility in societies and the economic growth of societies have been linked to the availability of means of transport and to their combination and coordination, particularly as a result of modernization and urbanization processes.The future of public transport in the last 100 years depended on good and easy intermodal mobility. While walking and driving may have allowed monomodal point-to- point travel, public transport by definition includes a transition between transport modes. Thus, transport planning in favour of public transport systems did face public expectation to provide intelligent intermobilites in order to support public transport modes.

The Madrid Conference seeks to analyse the processes of interconnection and integration among the different modes of transport from a historical perspective, and will therefore deal with the various aspects that converge therein: economic, social, institutional, political, technological, territorial and patrimonial. Consequently, the suggested research topics related to the concept of intermodality are the following:

• International and transnational intermodality and its technical, economic and political-administrative aspects.
• Intermodality and migratory processes.
• Intermodality in metropolitan cities and its effects on urban development and on transport demands and everyday travel habits.
• The planning of intermodal complexes throughout history: projects, successes and failures.
• Spaces for modal interchange: stations, airports, sea and river ports.
• Technological consequences for modal interchange in the sea and river transport sphere: from stowage to container traffic.
• Intermodality in the air traffic sphere. The airport within reach of the city and major intermodal hubs: from metropolitan connections to the emergence of highspeed lines.
• Light intermodality in large cities: the different ways in which users access the transport system (walking, cycling and driving to major intermodal hubs).
• Intermodality and environment.

Papers must be sent to: submissions@t2m.org. The deadline for sending abstracts and an abbreviated CV (maximum of one page per paper: Word or Rich Text Format only) will be May 15, 2012. Further information can be found at http://www.t2m.org