Stream 1: Managing Mobility
Technologies of globalization are dealing with an increase in the mobility of people, artifacts and symbols. This mobility needs to be managed, both on the large-scale dimension of transport and traffic and on the micro-scale dimension of local everyday human mobility. Future engineering challenges include the optimization of operational capacities as well as the development of sustainable solutions, while social science perspectives are engaged in grasping and theorizing various meanings and practices of mobility, and discuss concepts such as deterritorialization, locality, or mobile connectivity. Encouraging the flow of insights and ideas beyond existing disciplinary boundaries the managing mobility panel ties up with these new approaches. It wants to reveal state-of-the-art technologies as well as technological prospects that meet the growing demand for transport. These include conceivable visionary approaches which balance ecological awareness and economic interests under consideration of the need for hub capacity expansion. A historical and sociological perspective then might specify the – often implicit – assumptions and paradigms that govern current technologies as well as our ideas of future mobility. Research in the field of technology studies has shown that mobility is embedded in a “seamless” socio-technical web composed of diverse agents, infrastructures, technologies and everyday practices. Such insights are needed to thoroughly understand how mobility has restructured space and time and how it has re-worked the prevailing kinds of (im)mobility as well as practices of moving and communicating. On the individual level, managing mobility translates into managing practices of physical and more communicational related mobility. Individuals have developed strategies to compensate for the demands of „being mobile“ that have transformed culture and identity. Each movement implies cultural adjustment that has left traces in the lives of the individuals. But what social, cultural and technological circumstances mobilize some individuals and immobilize others? How does this change concepts of boundary, locality and community and what does it mean for cultural studies?
Topics
The panel thus wants to bring together the following themes and aims:
- Theorizing and conceptualizing mobility
- Designing transport and mobile communication technologies
- Approaches on optimizing and managing operational capacities in global hubs
- Material streams as well as streams of capital and information
- Mobility of work, working for mobility
- Migration, Identity and Culture
Papers from engineering as well as from social and human sciences are welcome. We also encourage researchers engaged in interdisciplinary studies to participate.
Download: cfp stream1 (PDF)
Contact: stream1@tog08.org
