Between dark scenarios and a bright future
Conference for a sustainable and competitive European transport industry by 2050
When: 29th January 2015 – 10:00-17:00
Where: The European Economic and Social Committee – EESC, Brussels
For registration and information: www.race2050.org
In November the Cosmobilities Network celebrated its 10th anniversary with a conference on Networked Urban Mobilities. 165 people from all over the world attended this event with an art exhibition in Copenhagen. They were part of making it an intriguing, interesting and special scientific and artistic meeting. Thank you!
Here is a first short video recapturing it. During the next months we will publish some blog posts from the conference and video-recordings of the keynotes at www.cosmobilities.net.
We wish you all a happy new year and look forward to connect further in 2015!
We are deeply concerned to hear that German sociologist and author of the Risk Society, Ulrich Beck passed away on January 1st. The global sociology community in general and the Cosmobilities Network has lost a public intellectual, a singular free mind, constant inspiration, a challenging voice and unique political figure in science and society.
Photo by Regina Schmeken, published in Süddeutsche Zeitung
Read Ulrich Becks 2008 text on Cosmopolitanism and Mobility:
The International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T²M) and the Cosmobilities Network invite proposals for panels and papers to be presented at their first joint conference. The conference will be hosted by the “Dipartimento di Lettere e Beni Culturali” of the Second University of Naples, Italy on 14-17 September, 2015.
Papers may address the conference theme, or any social, cultural, economic, technological, ecological and political perspectives on the history, present, and especially future of transport, traffic and mobility. The conference openly aims to bridge research approaches, welcoming proposals from different disciplines dealing with mobility studies (history, sociology, anthropology, geography, economy, planning studies, business history, architecture, design, communication, etc.) While the organizing association are rooted in history and sociology, we particularly encourage the submission of interdisciplinary panels.
The conference language is English (only).
The conference theme offers several lines of investigation:
• The future of mobilities in terms of both the future of mobilities studies as well as the
future of mobilities itself.
• The question of time-frames, e.g. how research concerning the past and the present
of mobility can be linked to the future.
• Mobility in the broader horizon of flows and emergent connections between transport, communication and movements.
• Trans-disciplinary research paths, and related theoretical and methodological issues.
Mobility studies have developed out of different disciplinary trajectories, with some studying mainly the past (e.g., transport history, travel writing), others concerned especially with the present (e.g., geography of mobility, mobile media), and still others looking towards the future (e.g., the new mobilities paradigm, transition studies). Yet these historical, contemporary, and future-oriented perspectives may all be diachronic in character, interested in processes and projects, rhythms and articulations, transitions and transformations, evolutions and revolutions. This conference proposes to investigate how we might bring these three streams together into an over-arching project of mobility studies.
Established in the 1950s and 1960s, future studies have been taken more seriously within economic fields, which have had the greatest influence on public policy. Although the action of forecasting often relies on the elaboration of historical and current trends, too often social scientists and humanities scholars have played a marginal role in futurology. Additionally, planning and policy in the mobilities field is still largely dominated by the “technological fix” approach, in which social sciences and humanities remain peripheral. Yet the emerging interdisciplinary mobilities studies suggest that learning lessons from the past and paying attention to the path dependency of developments provides a deeper understanding. In practice, a richer perspective on past and present mobilities could help inform visions of the future and enable more sustainable, equitable, and holistic future oriented solutions.
The conference aims, however, is not only to debate the future of mobilities per se and the risks and chances of the mobilization of modern worlds. It also considers – in a self-reflexive way –the future of mobility studies as well as the opportunities and limits of a wider trans- disciplinary cooperation among the different research “tribes”.
The 2015 conference theme also openly challenges the traditional division of study among transport, communication and flows (e.g., of water and sewage, of knowledge and money, of rubbish and debris etc.). The entangled relation among those elements calls on scholars to extend our investigations in multiple directions, while also being cognizant of the greater interdependency we expect they will have in the future. As we breach traditional disciplinary boundaries and tread on others’ territory, we raise new theoretical and methodological questions, presenting opportunities and challenges.
The questions linked to the conference theme include (but are not limited to):
• How do we envision and perceive the future of mobilities?
• What economic, technological, and policy perspectives should we adopt?
• What role will be played by environmental issues?
• How will gender and other social disparities shape mobility futures and inform
mobility studies in the future?
• What is the role of social science and humanities research scholarships and education in relation to policy makers, industries, governments and civil society?
• How relevant can an inquiry into retrospective futures be, e.g. an historical study of the future envisioned in the past, including fiction and science fictions?
• How can – or even should – comprehensive mobility studies shape future mobility landscapes and lives and in what directions?
• What methods would improve our study of the intertwined connections of flows, transport and communication?
Participants are encouraged, though not required, to organize panels on these or any other related themes. A panel consists of a chair and normally up to three speakers (see below for further information on papers and panels).
The Conference will be hosted by the Dipartimento di Lettere e Beni Culturali (Department of Arts and Cultural Heritage) of the Seconda Università di Napoli (the Second University of Naples).
The Seconda Università di Napoli is a comprehensive global research university that is ranked the top among the universities of South Italy. The Department promotes the development of competences allowing deeper knowledge of the complexity of world’s cultural heritage and all forms of interaction with disciplinary areas linked to similar research frameworks. It thus promotes scientific, technological and IT competences for the study, protection, conservation, restoration, and enhancement of the cultural heritage.
The Department hosts an Environmental Policies Watch that aims at encouraging the creation of a network among scholars (not only Italian) who concern themselves with environmental issues.
Santa Maria Capua Vetere is the town hosting the meeting, and it is located approximately 200 km from Rome International Airport, and about 40 km from Naples International Airport.
Field Trips will include the near The Royal Palace of Caserta, and they will be detailed soon.
The submission of a paper includes one-page resume regarding the presenter and one-page abstract regarding the paper itself. Individual presentations at the Conference are therefore to be limited to a fifteen-minute summary to allow for debate and discussion within the session. The full paper (usually 6,000-8,000 words) has to be submitted in a later stage of the process, and only after the selection outcomes.
Panel: A panel consists of a chair and normally up to three speakers; no discussant is required. We especially encourage transnational, comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, and welcome proposals exploring theoretical or methodological issues as well as those of a more empirical nature. We invite recent entrants to the profession and graduate students to submit proposals. A panel submission should include an abstract of 3 one-page, and one-page presentation regarding the papers included. A short biography of the presenters is also required.
Other: Any other innovative way of presenting research outcomes are welcome. In this case, the submitter(s) are invited to contact the local committee via federico.paolini@unina2.it
The deadline for the submission (max. 1 page each; Word or rich text format only) is 16th of March 2015. Send proposals to: submissions@t2m.org.
A notification of acceptance will be sent by April 15 2015. The full text of papers accepted must be submitted by 1 August 2015. The conference will be held on September 14-17, 2015
All participants are required to register.
Travel grants and Awards
T2M offers a number of travel grants for young scholars, who are heartily welcome to apply. T2M has also a long tradition of “best-paper” awards. Further information will be posted on www.t2m.org
For enquiries about the program, please contact Sven Kesselring or Massimo Moraglio. For information about local arrangements, please contact Federico Paolini. Further details of the 2015 conference will be posted in due course by T2M and Cosmobilties.
Valentina Fava (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Malene Freudendal-Pedersen (Roskilde University, Denmark)
Andrea Giuntini (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy)
Kevin Hannam (Leeds Beckett University, UK)
Sven Kesselring (Aalborg University, Denmark)
Anna Lipphardt (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany)
Mimi Sheller (Drexel University, USA)
Massimo Moraglio (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)
Federico Paolini (Second University of Naples, Italy)
Gerardo Marletto (Università di Sassari, Italy)
Calls for papers to special sessions at the Networked Urban Mobilities Conference 2014 are open.
We are very happy to invite abstracts for the following 8 special sessions before the 28th of may.
In recent years, it has been argued that new research methods are needed to study current mobility practices, discourses and materialities. Next to more traditional social science methods, mobile methods have included participatory observation, virtual and autoethnographies, and various kinds of mapping. Building on these methodological innovations, this session theme explores art as mobile research. Since the early 1990s, artistic research has developed as a distinct field of study. Making art is taken to be a form of doing research and the works of art that result from that research are presented as a form of knowledge. Practical testing is frequently an essential part of this ‘journey of making’ process, enabling ideas and techniques to be resolved before making finished work as part of the whole creative process. Art is not only relevant from the perspective of the aesthetic experience, it is argued, but also as knowledge claim. For artistic practice, this development undermines the modern dichotomy of autonomy and instrumentalism, thus breaking away from the alleged ‘otherness’ of art as a societal domain that has clear boundaries and can be separated from science.
In this session, we investigate how art practices might contribute to mobilities research, as well as how artists reflect on mobile worlds in their work. How can artistic research practices and discourses be drawn upon to develop new ways of understanding and researching the performative ontologies of travel? How can artistic production be seen as a meaningful context to explore mobilities? How can the creative process of the ‘journey of making’ inform mobilities? We invite papers and art works examining these questions.
The session will be organizaed by Kevin Hannam from Leeds Metropolitan University and Peter Peters from Maastricht University.
Please, submit your abstract of no more than 300 words no later than May 28th to Kevin Hannam at k.m.hannam@leedsmet.ac.uk or Peter Peters at p.peters@maastrichtuniversity.nl.
Since its inception, urban theory has been grounded in the basic assumption that urban phenomena are produced in cities. Cities, meanwhile, are constructed as qualitatively distinct, nodal and bounded sociospatial settlement spaces, discursively constructed in opposition to the “non-urban” spaces of the suburbs, rural communities, “remote” regions (i.e. the Arctic) and so on. In his recent work, Neil Brenner (2013) questions such accepted understandings and argues instead for new urban epistemology that embodies “urban theory without an outside”. Mobilities research has much to contribute to this pivotal new framing of urbanization by drawing our attention to the ways in which broad constellations of urban relationships are produced through diverse relationships between people and places across time and space. In particular, attention to role of mobilities allows for the examination of diverse forms of linkage—economic, cultural, social, institutional, colonial, and so on—in the (re)production of these expansive urban meshes.
In this session, papers are invited that broadly explore the dynamics of mobility and urbanization in ways that aim to conceptually supersede the persistent non-urban/urban divide in urban studies. In particular, these papers will seek to contribute to a conceptualization of urban forms and processes as multiscalar, diffuse, and enmeshed in complex and context-dependent (economic, social, cultural, infrastructural, institution) entanglements that extend well beyond cities as sites of agglomeration and accumulation. Papers that empirically examine the role of mobilities in urban forms, processes and transformations outside commonly accepted urban locales—i.e. the Arctic, the Amazon, the Oceans—are especially welcome. Moreover, papers that draw from diverse methodologies (social science, literary, audio, visual) are also most welcome.
The session will be organized by Julia Christensen from Roskilde University.
Please send your abstracts of no more than 300 (and/or any questions, comments, or concerns) no later than May 28th to Julia Christensen at juliac@ruc.dk.
Based on innovation theory the case of electric mobility in networked urban environments leads to the hypothesis of converging and intertwining two sociotechnical transitions: the transition towards renewable energy systems and the transition from combustion engine based transportation to elec- tric vehicle systems. In this innovation context a question arises: what is the impact of regime con- vergence in the innovation process?
Comparative international case studies can help to deepen this aspect. Both chances and obstacles should come into focus of the session.
The e-mobility hype seems to be over. But the energy transition from fossil resources to renewable energies got a huge momentum. Established structures in energy production and consumption erode and boundaries blur. The so called “prosumer” came into the game as a new actor.
The more renewable energies will be installed the more storage capacities and demand side man- agement are requested. The question is, whether the mobility sector can develop from an energy consumer to an energy storage component and potentially even become an energy provider. A promising way can be running cars under control of fleet managers as rental cars – especially as car- sharing cars as elements of intermodal services. This would have a technical dimension: norms and standardization of technical interfaces and protocols will become more relevant in a networked and decentralized energy world. Access and loading procedures must be user-friendly. This also has a strong social and economic dimension: what are potential businesses cases of “renewable e- mobility” and their acceptance? In the consequence of growing fleet based e-mobility the dominance of private car model starts to crumble.
The session will be held by Weert Canzler and Andreas Knie from Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB).
Please send your abstract of no more than 300 words no later than May 28th to weert.canzler@wzb.eu.
During the past decades, the complex interconnection between mobility and the arts has evolved as a prominent topic within the arts, but also within diverse academic fields and within cultural policy. So far there has however been little interdisciplinary and intersectoral exchange on this issue. The aim of this thematic session is to bring together practitioners from the cultural policy sector with scholars from mobility studies and various art-related disciplines (such as theater and dance studies, art history, sociology and anthropology of the arts, cultural economics or cultural policy studies) to discuss the interrelations between mobility, the arts, and cultural policy. The session invites to engage in a dialogue on a) mobility as a critical category within the context of current artistic production, b) mobilities role in cultural policy initiatives, and c) the art world as a field of particular epistemic value for Mobility Studies. Possible topics for the proposed session include:
The session focuses on structural, policy-related and conceptual issues related to artists’ mobility rather than on mobility as a theme of art works, art criticism and cultural theory. The session is intended to serve as a meeting place for cultural policy practitioners and scholars who want to discuss past and present projects on the above mentioned issues and/or seek possible future collaborations across disciplines and sectors. As Cosmobilities is a voluntary research network with limited funds, please note that we cannot subsidize travel and accommodation costs.
Convener: Anna Lipphardt from RG Cultures of Mobility in Europe at Universität Freiburg.
Please send your abstract (300-400 words) and a short CV no later than May 28th to Anna Lipphardt at anna.lipphardt@eu-ethno.uni-freiburg.de.
Today, cities and regions are increasingly struggling with risks and uncertainties. Simple certainties and securities for planning the future of the urban and regional settlements have been lost and the reflexive modernization of planning and policy making is progressing fast (Beck 1992, Hajer 2009, Healey 2001). Urban stakeholders and planners are facing risks and challenges endangering the fundaments of urban systems and the living conditions of urban societies and economies. At the same time, the rate of urbanisation is accelerating, particular in growing economies.
How to influence the sustainability and liveability of urban regions for future generations is the overarching question of the 21st century, not at least against the background of growing relevance of megacities and splintering urbanism. On-going economic crises, the side effects of perpetual growth, ecological problems, splintering urbanism, infrastructure capacity, global competition, social disintegration and criminality push economic, social, health and infrastructural systems to the limits. To complicate matters further, urban systems and society at large are growing increasingly complex, and conventional planning tools are often ill- equiped at handling the resulting uncertainty that this introduces in predictive analyses (Taleb, 2007).
This produces a situation where urban planning and innovative ways of policy and decision- making become vital for the future of the urban condition. The mobilities of people, artifacts, goods, knowledge, data and information, waste and resources are fundamental for the future of the urban. Cities are living bodies where multiple flows stream in and out (Ritzer 2010). In a general sense, sustainable urban ‘mobility management’ is an elementary and constitutive need and a strategy for the future of urban regions and living conditions.
The session will be organized by Morten Skou Nicolaisen and Sven Kesselring, from Aalborg University.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words no later than May 28th to Sven Kesselring at sven@plan.aau.dk.
The Cycling and Society Research Group celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2014. Linking with the 10th Anniversary Conference of the Cosmobilities Network, Networked Urban Mobilities, a special session is being organised on bicycling. Networked Urban Mobilities is a joint conference between Aalborg University (AAU) and Roskilde University (RUC) at Aalborg University Campus in Copenhagen (South Harbor district), DK
The session theme, Cycling Futures reflects a core question posed in the Cycling and Society volume that was a product of the very first CSRG meeting, and the session is intended to link cycling studies more closely with other elements of current mobilities research. While there is a rapidly growing literature on current practices and behaviours, this session invites analyses that go beyond the reporting of findings and explore the potentials and problems that accompany the diverse practices that constitute the many forms of cycle mobility. We seek to present a range of studies that consider not just what is, but what might be? How do the various cultures and subcultures presented in recent studies interconnect and interact with each other and with wider mobility practices. To what extent does cycling today still reflect cycling a century ago, and what might cycling practices 50 years hence look like as part of broader sustainability practices. What can change, what may need to change if cycling is to become the default urban mobility choice?
We invite papers on practices of cycling, examining intersections of meanings, technologies and competencies and their place both in changing current urban milieux and in anticipating low-carbon futures. While looking ahead is core to the vision of the session, we also recognise the need to look back at prior historical cases of mobility transitions to understand better the forces and effects involved. We would particularly welcome contributions that engage with some of the questions posed in Cycling and Society. What role for cycling in the ‘post-car’ future? What will future cyclings look like? To what kind of societies will those cyclings contribute? How prominent a part can it play in an increasingly global, increasingly mobile world?
Please submit your abstract of no more than 300 words no later than May 28th to Peter Cox at peter.cox@chester.ac.uk.
Today, corporate mobility, business travel, and mobile work are in a process of fundamental transformation. The normalization and rationalization of corporate mobilities and the time- space-compression of everyday business practice shape the relations of mobility and power. Social science has largely neglected the topic of spatial mobility. Dealings with distance and travel, however, are driving forces for the modernization of modern societies and urban environemnts. They indicate the networked character of economic activities of companies, business travellers and industries at large. Economic activity is based on mobility and companies deploy sophisticated mobility regimes to be present in markets. The increase in mobile work brings new issues centre stage such as the control of mobile workers, social cohesion, and the spatial complexity of corporate activities. Mobile work and business travel are signifiers for social change in the organization of work.
The session will be organized by James Wickham from Trinity College Dublin and Sven Kesselring from Aalborg University.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words no later than 28th of May to Sven Kesselring at sven@plan.aau.dk.
This special session investigates research on physical and virtual mobilities’ influence on everyday life, generating descriptive accounts and novel theoretical concepts about practices, cultures, communities etc. within understandings of mobilities and urban life.
Mobilities are experienced through bodies interacting with mobile technologies weaving themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. These embodied mobilities are often practiced non-reflected but yet with fully felled and realized sensations, moods and affects.
Everyday life should not be understood as isolated units when it is constantly challenged and influenced by the multi-scale character of social praxis, identity formation and social processes. The basis in everyday lives reveals that which creates meaning and significance – why things matter to people – and thus also how, through their praxis, they shape societal institutions.
Form: The intend of the special session is to integrate all papers in an open discussion conceptualizing embodied mobility practices in everyday life through common-developed metaphors. Contributors are therefore asked to participate in the informal debate generating fruitful ways of describing the interconnectedness between mobility practices and everyday life.
The session will be organized by Katrine Hartmann-Petersen and Malene Freudendal-Pedersen from Roskilde University.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words no later than 28th of May to Katrine Hartmann-Petersen at katrineh@ruc.dk or Malene Freudendal-Petersen at malenef@ruc.dk.