Cars define the modern age, and there are few more powerful signifiers of contemporary consumer capitalism than private automobility. The presumption for vehicle ownership is writ through twenty-first century life to the extent that there are
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Media Ecologies of Autonomous Automobility
Gendered and Racial Dimensions of Future Concept Cars
Julia M. Hildebrand and Mimi Sheller
,” potentially distributing and organizing mobilities in new ways, or as dystopias of malfunctioning technology. 4 The suggested “new automobile paradigm” significantly affects not only the act of driving but also our “aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses
Automobility and Oil Vulnerability
Unfairness as Critical to Energy Transitions
Ana Horta
societies, and some, such as automobility, correspond to complex sociotechnical systems and practices with countless implications. It is unclear how these can be changed, and the uncertainties involved in such processes of transitioning require attention to
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 134–145 (12 total)
Diverse Driving Emotions
Exploring Chinese Migrants’ Mobilities in a Car-Dependent City
Sophie-May Kerr, Natascha Klocker, and Gordon Waitt
of ethnic minority migrants, unsettle pervasive narratives of automobility. Dominant academic and public discourses that frame an “appropriate citizenship of mobility” or “good life” 3 around automobility sustain a car dependence that is
Keep Moving, Stay Tuned
The Construction of Flow in and through Radio Traffic Reports
Marith Dieker
congested traffic up ahead. In the second half of the twentieth century, this became one of the functions of radio traffic reports. During that period, however, the context in which these reports were aired changed considerably, as the automobile became the
From the Auto-mobile to the Driven Subject?
Discursive Assertions of Mobility Futures
Katharina Manderscheid
Automobility has been identified as a fundamental element of modern Western socialities and corresponding identities, deeply interwoven with power relations and social inequalities. 1 By this token, social science literature has repeatedly
‘Excesses’ of modernity
Mundane mobilities, politics and the remaking of the urban
Alice Stefanelli
Cars are celebrated as the technical and symbolic epitome of modernity but are also heavily implicated in the making of climate change, imbricated within a seemingly all‐powerful global capitalist system. What can an anthropological analysis of traffic in urban areas tell us about the enduring strength of this system? While cars in Beirut are both desired and necessary to move about, strong feelings of frustration are taking shape among residents and commuters who face the ever‐congested roads of the capital city daily. This mounting frustration indexes an emerging ‘structure of feeling’ towards everyday automobility that has created explicit and concrete desire for alternative mobilities, particularly public transport, which scholars of automobility had pronounced dead. In this light, while cars remain objects of desire, in Beirut as elsewhere, an ‘excess’ of automobility – of modernity, we might say – is in fact weakening the dominance of cars, exposing a potential brittleness previously undetected. Acknowledging this process forces us to reconsider our modernist assumptions about the inevitable predominance of cars and offers hope for alternative mobility futures.
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 Nov 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1049–1063 (14 total)
Taking the Road for Play
Cyclist Appropriations of Automobile Infrastructures in Vietnam
Ashley Carruthers
After declining in status and mode share sharply with the popularization of the motorcycle, cycling in Vietnam is on the rise. Urban elites who pursue sport and leisure cycling are the most visible of Vietnam’s new cyclists, and they bring their sense of social mastery out onto the road with them by appropriating the nation’s new, automobile-focused infrastructures as places for play and display. While motivated by self-interest, their informal activism around securing bicycle access to new bridges and highways potentially benefits all and contributes to making livable cities. These socially elite cyclists transcend the status associated with their means of mobility as they enact their mastery over automobile infrastructures meant to usher in a new Vietnamese automobility.
Ruined beings
Ontology in post‐socialist driving
Andrew Dawson
In this article I consider what sense it makes to speak of a hybrid automobile ontology in contexts where its constitutive elements – driver, car and traffic system – are ruins. Then, on the basis of passenger‐seat ethnography conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I explore the consequences of the oxymoronic quality of these ruins, which as ‘remains’ both endure and decay, for experiences and senses of being among drivers living under conditions of post‐socialist transition.
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 Nov 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1034–1048 (14 total)
Discipline and Publish?
Transfers as Interdisciplinary Site
Cotten Seiler
spirit” across the Atlantic and the North American continent. Not surprisingly, this scholarship tended to celebrate the regimes of loco- and automobility emplaced on the contemporary landscape by drawing a direct line of descent from nineteenth