‘In the name, she lives on’: responsibilities and rehumanization in survivor narratives of vehicular violence

Abstract

Motor vehicle crashes form a global, though unequally distributed, violence that has killed more people than World War II. Yet, dominant discourses in politics, industry, and media render invisible this violence itself and its political roots in the social and material reconstruction of space in favor of speed, efficiency, and, predominantly, automobility. The narratives of people impacted by vehicular violence remain unstudied, however. Crash survivors regularly participate in public debate, and survivor narratives more widely can have a strong influence on public perception. Drawing on mobilities literature as well as trauma and memory studies, this paper analyzes how survivors and deceased victims’ relatives in the Dutch context narrate three different themes of responsibility, and a fourth theme of rehumanization, in in-depth interviews. On the one hand, we find that the need to make sense of an impactful experience while surrounded by dominant discourses in society, leads survivors to adopt some of those discourses in their narratives. On the other hand, we identify their rehumanization of survivors and deceased victims and their absolution of individual drivers from culpability as hopeful starting points for resisting the automobility system’s dehumanization and for rethinking a-spatial perspectives on ‘safety’ that place responsibility solely on individuals.