‘Car Talk’: automobility and Chinese international students in Michigan

The apparent conspicuous consumption of luxury vehicles by Chinese international students attending a public Michigan University provides an opportunity to examine the convergence of different ideas about automobility. Upwardly mobile Chinese families send their children to Michigan, a state with a tradition of auto-production, for educational opportunities not available in China. The resulting ‘car talk’ of local residents about Chinese students and their cars speaks to broader anxieties about Michigan’s shifting relationship to the global economy. However, the paper focuses on the meanings of auto-owning created by Chinese students who make decisions about the purchase and use of their autos within a social world oriented primarily to other Chinese students and societal ideas about auto-owning circulating among friends, family and society in China. For Chinese students, car owning encompasses meanings of status, safety and sociability that are created within the context of study abroad.     

Socialities in Motion: Automobility and Car Cruising in Iceland☆

Abstract

Car cruising is a common phenomenon around the globe. In Iceland, the activity is a major assimilative sociocultural phenomenon for young people and especially for novice drivers. This article documents car cruising in Iceland and contextualizes it within discussions of automobility. It is based on semi-structured, ‘on the move’ interviews taken with people during cruising. Participants were also asked to take pictures of their cruising activities. It seems that car cruising is an opportunity for young people to integrate themselves into the systemic regime of automobility. This shows the importance of socialities when it comes to individual practices and expressions of automobility, but also the structuring role of those socialities. The paper also elucidates how that activity impacts upon spaces. It demonstrates that it is intimately connected with human territoriality, or how young drivers appropriate and influence the spaces and places of automobility and ultimately contribute to their production and reproduction, thus sustaining the systemic regime of automobility.     

Environmental affects: NASCAR,place and white American cultural citizenship

Attempts to grapple with the complicated tangle of race and memory are more prominent than ever in the public discourse of the United States. In 2006, public intellectual Henry Louis Gates sought to popularize the search for roots and meaning with his project African American Lives, and in 2007 the black and white descendants of the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case met in New Orleans to discuss the past and present significance of their ancestors’ lives. As the crafting of identities around increasingly fluid notions of ‘race’ proceeds apace, the activities of family historians provide a useful entrée into struggles over race, identity, and collective memory in the United States. The research reported here illustrates how the shared history of the multi-racial descendants of eighteenth and nineteenth century St Domingue/Haiti in Louisiana is encountered in racially distinct ways. Participant observation is used to examine how race is dealt with in the activities of two groups: 1) a mainly European American genealogical society, called the St Domingue Special Interest Group; and 2) the LA Creole cultural and genealogy group, made up primarily of Louisiana creoles of color. Preliminary findings indicate that while the process of engaging in family history research provides an opening for some participants to better understand others across racial and ethnic divides, this kind of cross-racial dialogue was limited by the organization of family history activities into racially distinct social networks. As the popularity of genealogy increases, the findings here point to the need to recognize the public significance of these private histories.     

Practising Highland Heterotopias: Automobility in the Interior of Iceland

The paper describes the history and current enactments of automobility in the highland interior of Iceland and interprets this phenomenon through the notion of spatial history. We elucidate how the currently widespread practices of automotive travel in the highlands are mediated through the technological assemblage of the ‘jeep’ and its user. We argue that the travelling is done in a double sense; through an ‘inner’ space of the vehicle and an ‘outer’ space of the highland terrain. A heterotopic spatial history emerges, which offers detailed insights into this specific form of automobility. In the final part of the paper, implications of these travel practices for the politics of nature are discussed.     

Post-reform India’s automotive-iconic-cement assemblages: uneven globality,territorial spectacle and iconic exhibition value

India’s post-liberalisation landscape has unexpectedly been populated by monumental iconic statues. These statues, co-emergent with an automobile and construction boom and an attendant resignification and revaluing of land, are a productive site for rethinking the role of spectacle in neoliberal globalisation from the locus of post-liberalisation India. Against theories that characterise spectacle as primarily virtual and deterritorialised, they illuminate how spectacle is enmeshed in the imaginaries, spatial politics, material processes and heterogeneous temporalities of uneven development. Their religious aspect also calls for a re-examination of Benjamin’s distinction between cult value and exhibition value.     

Cars,capital and disorder in Ivan Vladislavic’s The Exploded View and Portrait with Keys

There is a substantial corpus of criticism on the epistemology of walking in recent writing by Ivan Vladislavic. This article expands upon the literature through a focus on the ways in which The Exploded View and Portrait with Keys engage with and pressurise the socio-spatial dominance of car driving in Johannesburg. It maintains that while car-use radically organises space and place in the city, this hegemony is tested by alternate forms of mobility. As Vladislavic’s work suggests, disorderly and apparently liminal urban modalities and movements disrupt orderly expressions of urban capital aligned with car-driving.     

Moralities in mobility: negotiating moral subjectivities in Istanbul’s traffic

ABSTRACT

Traffic congestion profoundly marks Istanbul’s everyday, in part, by casting drivers as competitors for time and space. Navigating traffic entails many driver maneuvers that are seemingly ‘unfair’ or ‘wrong’ such as line cutting, driving in the emergency lane, parking in prohibited areas, running lights, etc. As such, drivers carefully detail contingencies and circumstances within which some of their ostensibly problematic actions can be deemed acceptable. Within these narratives are also buried processes of emerging as moral subjects albeit filled with ambiguities and contradictions. This paper brings together mobility studies, the anthropology of traffic and the anthropology of ethics/morality to provide ethnographic detail into the everyday of experiencing automobility in Istanbul as a morally complex and formative arena. It is based on a year’s fieldwork with 45 drivers of diverse vehicles recounting their struggles as they try to maintain a sense of ‘conscience’ while they reach their destination, sometimes at the expense of others.     

Parent–child mobility practices: revealing ‘cracks’ in the automobility system

ABSTRACT

Many commentators are concerned about automobility’s ill-effects and seek a shift away from auto dependence towards more sustainable transport. Little research, however, considers the ways that parent–child mobilities are linked to such a transition. Through the lens of social practice theory, this paper explores how parents travelling with young children preserve and challenge automobility as they enact auto dependency, multimodality and altermobility. The paper argues that it is vital to understand these practices for identifying ‘cracks’ in automobility and the possibility of more sustainable and equitable daily mobilities. The research is based on qualitative parent interviews undertaken in Vancouver (British Columbia).     

Automobility and site ontological analysis

Many scholars of mobility employ the concepts of assemblage, practice and intensive force. This paper argues that site ontological analysis is a productive way to understand the ways these phenomenon work together. The importance of practice organization to such a differential ontology is emphasized. A case study of an automobile journey on the Pennsylvania Turnpike illustrates how a momentary stranding in the driving event modified the site’s practices, temporalities, subjectivities and intensivities.     

Co-existence or displacement: Do street trials of intelligent vehicles test society?

This paper examines recent street tests of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the UK and makes the case for an experimental approach in the sociology of intelligent technology. In recent years intelligent vehicle testing has moved from the laboratory to the street, raising the question of whether technology trials equally constitute tests of society. To adequately address this question, I argue, we need to move beyond analytic frameworks developed in 1990s Science and Technology Studies, which stipulated “a social deficit” of both intelligent technology and technology testing. This diagnosis no longer provides an effective starting point for sociological analysis, as real-world tests of intelligent technology explicitly seek to bring social phenomena within the remit of technology testing. I propose that we examine instead whether and how the introduction of intelligent vehicles into the street involves the qualification and re-qualification of relations and dynamics between social actors. I develop this proposal through a discussion of a field study of AV street trials in three cities in the UK—London, Milton Keynes, and Coventry. These urban trials were accompanied by the claim that automotive testing on the open road will enable cars to operate in tune with the social environment, and I show how iterations of street testing undo this proposition and compel its reformulation. Current test designs are limited by their narrow conception of sociality in terms of interaction between cars and other road users. They exclude from consideration the relational capacities of vehicles and human road users alike—their ability to co-exist on the open road. I conclude by making the case for methodological innovation in social studies of intelligent technology: by combining social research and design methods, we can re-purpose real-world test environments in order to elucidate social issues and dynamics raised by intelligent vehicles in society by experimental means, and, possibly, test society.