Differential Mobilities Begins Today

May 8-11, 2013 at Concordia University, Montreal

More info at
http://mobilities.ca/pamnet-4/about/

From May 8-11, 2013 the Mobile Media Lab in the Communication Studies department of Concordia University in Montreal will be hosting Differential Mobilities: Movement and Mediation in Networked Societies. This international conference is sponsored by the Pan-American Mobilities Network, in association with the European Cosmobilities Network. The conference will be held in collaboration with the 4th annual meeting of the Pan-American Mobilities Network.  Previous conferences have been held at:  Royal Roads University, Victoria B.C (2010);  Drexel University, Philadelphia PA (2011) ; and North Carolina State University, Raleigh-Durham NC (2012).

The conference is an opportunity for scholars, artists, activists, and policy makers to engage in a lively exchange of  ideas in an interdisciplinary context, taking the term “mobilities” as a fulcrum. 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.

Follow Us On Social Media

You can follow the conference on social media at these locations:
o   Twitter: 
http://www.twitter.com/mmlMTL

o   Facebook: 
https://www.facebook.com/mmlMTL

o   Instagram: 
http://www.instagram.com/mmlMTL

Hashtag #mobilities13 in all your related posts.

We invite you to download our Guidebook Mobile Device App in order to view and manage the schedule remotely. You’ll be able to plan your day with a personalized schedule and browse exhibitors, maps and general show info. The app is compatible with iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches and Android devices. Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry users can access the same information via our mobile site at m.guidebook.com. 

To get the guide, choose one of the methods below:

• Download ‘Guidebook’ from the Apple App Store or the Android Marketplace
• Visit 
  http://guidebook.com/getit
   from your phone’s browser

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)
• Mimi Sheller (Drexel University, USA)
• Phillip Vannini (Royal Roads University, Canada)

The Pan-American Mobilities Network is a scholarly and professional network dedicated to the study of mobilities in South, Central, and North America. The Pan-American Mobilities Network gathers individuals and groups interested in developing more knowledge about mobilities on–or intersecting with–these continents and keen on building collegial relationships. Membership is free and a web-site for the organization is in process.

The Cosmobilities Network connects European scientists working in the field of mobility research. As an interdisciplinary network it represents state of the art research on different aspects of social, physical, cultural and virtual mobilities. It fosters mobility research as a key discipline investigating the modernization of European societies under the conditions of globalization and global complexity.

Conference Chair:  Kim Sawchuk (Concordia University, Québec)

For further information, contact: Ben Spencer, Administrative Coordinator, Mobile Media Labmmcconcordia@gmail.com

 

Ecoarttech visiting Urban Vitality & the Arts

Urban Vitality and the Arts

Thursday, 2 May 2013, 6:30 – 9:20 pm
URBN 141, 3501 Market Street

The artist team Ecoarttech (Leila Nadir and Cary Pepperment) will be presenting a Philadelphia premier of their work Indeterminate Hikes+ as part of the class Urban Vitality & the Arts, taught by Mimi Sheller and Hana Iverson. Ecoarttech work on the overlapping terrain between “nature”, built environments, mobility and electronic spaces and technologies. They will be in conversation with Dr. Christian Hunold, Associate Professor of Political Science in Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, whose research interests revolve around sustainability and the politics of renewable energy; and writer Bernard Brown, who writes the Urban Naturalist column for GRID Magazine.

You can find more information on ecoarttech and their other work at http://www.ecoarttech.net/

This event is free and open to the public, but is part of an instructional course so please to attend please contact: Mimi Sheller, director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, mimi.sheller@drexel.edu.

Mobile World Capital

Mobile World Capital – Barcelona

mCenter Director Mimi Sheller will be featured in a video installed in the new Mobile World Center, in the heart of Barcelona.

What is the Mobile World Centre?

The Centre is Mobile World Capital’s permanent exhibition & venue, to spread and demonstrate the latest mobile technologies and solutions to citizens.

Content

Permanent Exhibition

The Centre permanent exhibition is an open platform to all citizens to understand, learn & experience the mWorld.  At the first floor you will find:

1. Data Cloud: Dynamic screens with key metrics showing the evolution of mobile telephony, including penetration and social usage all around the world
2. Interactive Forest: An attractive walk through the different visions and components of mWorld and its capacity to transform the way we live.
3. mWorld Experience – Central element of the exhibition, showing the transformation capability and the constant evolution of the mobile industry and its impact in people’s life
4. mWorld Experience – Video Library
5. mHistory - Timeline with multimedia information covering mobile development, since the beginning of commercial mobile telephony to nowadays.

The Centre exhibition will always be in constant evolution showing latest trends, events and facts from the mWorld.

We welcome all companies, citizens and mLovers to participate, so if you would like to present or suggest some potential content for the centre, please do contact us at: centre@mobileworldcapital.com

Events

At the 2nd floor of the Centre you will find a highly versatile space dedicated to Mobile events (mEvents).

A unique, contemporary and innovative space of 440m2 that hosts approximately 150pax for event.  The centre also offers catering and AV Services.

For the latest agenda of mEvents at the centre please visit mobileworldcentre.com

If you would like to find out more about how to use this space or can you collaborate with the Mobile World Centre please email:  centre@mobileworldcapital.com

Location

Barcelona, Spain, placed in Fontanella 2, in the corner of Plaça Catalunya with streets Portal de l’Angel and Fontanella, in a flagship building of Telefónica Movistar.

History

In the summer of 2011, GSMA selected Barcelona as the world’s first Mobile World Capital from 2012 to 2018. The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide. Spanning more than 220 countries, the GSMA unites nearly 800 of the world’s mobile operators with more than 230 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem.

The Mobile World Capital will radically accelerate the global growth of mobile and Barcelona will be the global showcase for innovation.

The Mobile World Capital Foundation & Telefonica have worked hand in hand to create a unique, open platform called Mobile World Centre; a state of the art exhibition showroom where citizens are able to understand and experience how mobile is enhancing our lives.

The Mobile World Centre, located in the heart of Barcelona, brings mobile technology closer to all citizens, share a global vision of the mobile future and be a source of information for the other Mobile World Capital channels; Mobile World Hub, Mobile Word Festival and Mobile World Congress.

For further information please visit:

http://mobileworldcapital.com/mobile-world-centre/

Differential Mobilities

Registration Open for Differential Mobilities Conference

 

 

May 8-11, 2013 at Concordia University, Montreal

More info at http://mobilities.ca/pamnet-4/about/

From May 8-11, 2013 the Mobile Media Lab in the Communication Studies department of Concordia University in Montreal will be hosting Differential Mobilities: Movement and Mediation in Networked Societies. This international conference is sponsored by the Pan-American Mobilities Network, in association with the European Cosmobilities Network. The conference will be held in collaboration with the 4th annual meeting of the Pan-American Mobilities Network.  Previous conferences have been held at:  Royal Roads University, Victoria B.C (2010);  Drexel University, Philadelphia PA (2011) ; and North Carolina State University, Raleigh-Durham NC (2012).

The conference is an opportunity for scholars, artists, activists, and policy makers to engage in a lively exchange of  ideas in an interdisciplinary context, taking the term “mobilities” as a fulcrum. 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.

Each year the conference has a different thematic focus, reflecting the interests and expertise of the local organizing committee. Previous themes have included: Cultures of Movement: Mobile Subjects, Communities, and Technologies in the Americas (2010); Mobilities in Motion: New Approaches to Emergent and Future Mobilities (2011); Local and Mobile: linking mobilities, mobile communication and locative media (2012)

This year’s theme 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.

The Pan-American Mobilities Network is a scholarly and professional network dedicated to the study of mobilities in South, Central, and North America. The Pan-American Mobilities Network gathers individuals and groups interested in developing more knowledge about mobilities on–or intersecting with–these continents and keen on building collegial relationships. Membership is free and a web-site for the organization is in process.

The Cosmobilities Network connects European scientists working in the field of mobility research. As an interdisciplinary network it represents state of the art research on different aspects of social, physical, cultural and virtual mobilities. It fosters mobility research as a key discipline investigating the modernization of European societies under the conditions of globalization and global complexity.

Conference Chair: Kim Sawchuk (Concordia University, Québec)

Organizing Committee: 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), and Phillip Vannini (Royal Roads University, Canada).

Register at: http://mobilities.ca/pamnet-4/conference-registration/

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.

Art in Your Pocket

Art In Your Pocket – Panel Discussion

Rhizome’s New Silent Series

Friday September 21 7PM

New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY

The computer we carry in our pockets is also an emerging platform for interactive screen-based art. Art In Your Pocket takes its name from a series of texts Jonah Brucker-Cohen wrote for Rhizome on art made for smartphones. This panel will assemble leading media artists working with mobile devices and discuss current trends relating to this practice.

Moderated by Jason Eppink, Assistant Curator of Digital Media at the Museum of the Moving Image. Panelists include artist, programmer, and founder of iPhone app company SOFTOFT TECHECH, Paul Slocum; Mimi Sheller, leading theorist on mobilities research and Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University; LoVid, 2011 Rhizome commissioned artists for their location-specific art app project iParade #2: Unchanged When Exhumed; and Jonathan Vingiano, Co-founder of OKFocus.

Organized by Rhizome, the New Silent Series receives major support from The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

To purchase tickets please visit:

http://rhizome.org/events/art-in-your-pocket/

Cycling in Philly

National Bike to Work Day

18 May 2012

Typical bike space in Philadelphia. Credit: Jacob Bjerre Mikkelson

Bike to Work Day is an important way to demonstrate the demand for better cycling infrastructure in Philadelphia. Washington D.C.’s September 2010 launch of Capital Bikeshare, has put more than 1,000 red rental bikes on the streets, accounting for nearly 2 million trips to date, and contributing to a 169% increase in the number of people commuting to work by bike (now at 3.1%).  New York and Los Angeles have begun to implement even larger bike-sharing systems, along with new bike lane infrastructure, and it is crucial that Philadelphia also do so in order to support a better urban environment and the kind of innovation economy that Drexel University hopes to develop here.

Philadelphia’s Greenworks 2035 plan specifically calls for efforts to be made to increase trips made by bicycles, and that this should be done by expanding infrastructure. It also explicitly calls for better bicycle connections to 30th St. Station, where Drexel University can be crucial to bringing this plan to life through its Strategic Plan. On average, 5 of every 100 commuters in Center City, West Philly and South Philly is on a bicycle (5.4%, 4.15% & 4.73% commuting by bike, respectively). 2 out of every 5 cyclists, is a woman.

The Spruce Street and Pine Street buffered bicycle lanes are the first the City has installed at the cost of a travel lane. As reported in the “Crosstown Connection | Pilot Project Findings” from MOTU by Andrew Stober (December, 2009), the Spruce and Pine street bike lane implementations of 2009/2010 have slowed the fastest driving cars, while simultaneously creating a safe cycling environment, and increasing order and smoothness of automobile vehicle flow. Ridership increased, and both serious vehicular crashes and fender benders saw significant decreases, while enabling the same average motor vehicle speed. Yet, two years later, in 2011, when the City tried to parlay those successes into support for two more buffered bike lanes (cutting through the East side of Center City on 10th and 13th Street), the plan was met with great resistance. It is time for Philadelphia to catch up with other major cities in the USA in implementing a modern bicycle infrastructure that will have beneficial economic and quality of life impacts across the city.

Dr. Sheller, Director of the mCenter, supervised two University of Arts students, Nicolas Coia and Dominic Prestifillipo, in their thesis for the Masters in Industrial Design on bike infrastructure in Philly, who will be hosting a panel discussion at Next American City’s Storefront for Urban Innovation (2816 W. Girard Ave) on May 31st, 6:30-8pm. The event on “The State of Cycling in Philadelphia” will have a short presentation on the challenges and opportunities of implementing bike infrastructure in Philadelphia. For more info:

http://americancity.org/events/detail/bringing-bike-share-to-philly

Grassroots Game Conference

The Grassroots Game Conference

Panel on Geo-Gaming

Saturday April 28th, 1-3PM

At the Gershwin Y, Broad & Pine St

A conversation about making games that rely on being in physical locations to advance gameplay.

Thanks to the presence of an active civic-hacking community and Azavea, a leader in applications employing geographic data, Philadelphia is a center for geo-data applications.  Opportunities for games in this area are enhanced by the Apps and Maps initiative in North Philadelphia.

Panelists:

• Mark Head, Developer Evangelist at Voxeo Labs, and an active advocate for open government data and civic hacking events.
• Tamara Manik-Perlman, GIS Analyst and Project Manager at Azavea, extensive experience in user experience design and geospatial analysis and project manager on a citizen science and education game being developed with support from the National Science Foundation.
• Michelle Masucci, Chair of Temple University’s Department of Geography and Urban Studies and co-principal investigator of Apps and Maps.
• Mimi Sheller, Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy and Professor of Sociology at Drexel University, who works on mobile technologies, mobile gaming and mobile art in relation to urban public space.

Neighborhood Roundtable

The Neighborhood Roundtable

photo © Andrew Leiser 2011 Neighborhood Narratives, Drexel, summer 2011

Friday, April 20th, 11am to 2pm

Macalister Hall, Rm. 2019-2020 (33rd & Chestnut St.), Drexel University

Working in partnership with a range of West Philadelphia community organizations, Drexel University recently initiated a set of community revitalization strategies along historic Lancaster Avenue. On April 20th (11am – 2pm), Drexel’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy is sponsoring a community conversation about the role artists might play in these Powelton, Mantua and Belmont neighborhood enrichment efforts. Can artists be catalysts for change? How and under what conditions? What does ideal collaboration between artists, institutions and the Lancaster community look like?

Co-hosted by Mimi Sheller (Director, mCenter: The Center for Mobilities Research and Policy) and Hana Iverson (Director, the Neighborhood Narratives Project) with support from the Center for Creative Research at NYU, The Neighborhood Roundtable will provide an opportunity for neighborhood and community representatives to engage in creative conversation about these issues with renowned artist/activists, Drexel students and faculty.

Please RSVP to mimi.sheller@drexel.edu 

Co-Moderators:

Mimi Sheller (Professor of Sociology; Director, mCenter@Drexel)

Hana Iverson (Drexel faculty; Director, Neighborhood Narratives; CCR Fellow)

Participants:

Lucy Kerman (Vice Provost for Community and Education)

Liz Lerman (Artist, Founding Artistic Director Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, CCR Founding Fellow)

Jawole Willa Jo  Zollar (Artist, Founder and Artistic Director Urban Bushwomen, CCR Founding Fellow)

Mark Christman (Representative from University City District: 38th Street/South)

George Stevens (President of the Lancaster 21st Century Business Organization)

James Wright (Representative Peoples’ Emergency Center: 38th Street/North)

 

Center for Creative Research and the Neighborhood Narratives Project

Artists and universities in the United States have long enjoyed the benefits of proximity to one another and are participants in a powerful, historically embedded and endlessly re-invented relationship with one another.  As major non-profit actors in American life, both are builders, makers and shapers of society’s values. In 2005, a group of mature choreographers came together to form the Center for Creative Research, in order to investigate and redefine how independent artists and institutions of higher learning could engage with one another. Key questions included, how can reciprocal relationships evolve between artists, institutions and communities, and how might these relationships facilitate mutually-beneficial exchanges between participants while increasing the depth of students’ experiential learning? As a nexus of this investigation, a collaboration was developed with the Neighborhood Narratives Project, a mobile locative media curriculum that engages students in a practice of situated story-telling incorporatingaspects of cultural and visual anthropology, ethnography, geography and, with the recent addition of CCR artists, the role of embodied practice in interdisciplinary investigation.  The Neighborhood Narratives Project is a vehicle to engage interactively and interconnect community, requiring students and artists to invite public participation, enabling organic growth of a community’s collective narrative and empowering citizens to embed social knowledge in the wired/wireless landscape of the urban environment.

 

Contact for Further Information: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

New Interaction Orders

New Interaction Orders, New Mobile Publics?

13-14 April 2012

Imagination Lab, Lancaster University, UK

This workshop explores the emergence of ‘mobile publics’, inspired by Goffman’s studies of  public places as the performative locus of social orders and William Holly Whyte’s investigations of the social life of small urban spaces. We bring 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 behavior in today’s public spaces.

Guest Speakers: Christian Licoppe — Keith Hampton — Mimi Sheller

mCenter Director Mimi Sheller will be speaking at 10am (ET) Friday

Watch Live Webcast here
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/new_interaction_order/webcast.htm

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):

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

Organisers: Chris Boyko, Monika Büscher, Tim Dant, Jill Ebrey, Pauline Feron, Karenza Moore, Jen Southern, Katherine Willis

Contact: p.feron@lancaster.ac.uk
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/new_interaction_order/index.htm