IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2325372

Weiqiang Lin

{"title":"Automation and aesthetic labour: the micro-mobilities of work in airport self-service","authors":"Weiqiang Lin","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2325372","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2325372","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recently, the concept of mobile labour has garnered increasing attention among mobilities scholars. Yet, the preponderance of research has emphasised workers’ movements that are fairly large-scale and routes-based. This paper proposes another kind of mobility that is of equal significance—that of micro-mobilities <em>by</em> labour, or more accurately by their bodies. Using original research conducted through semi-structured interviews with 40 customer service agents working in an international airport in Asia, the paper examines three kinds of aesthetic labour that these workers perform alongside passengers. Enacted through various bodily motions intended to speed up aeromobile processes and augment productivity, I argue that these performances produce a (tenuous) aesthetics of assuring presence, orderly movement, and passing time. As more and more work tasks are redistributed across the airport between staff and passengers, ‘new’ automation presents an opportunity to reflect on the mobile practices being invented as self-service technologies infiltrate customer service and other work where human relations and decision-making skills are required. More broadly, it also uncovers the gendered politics of bodily comport, gaits, gestures and other micro-movements in labour (re)production in a wider age of technological change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 2","pages":"Pages 329-344"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140382256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Public anticipations of self-driving vehicles in the UK and US 英国和美国公众对自动驾驶汽车的预期

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2325386

Chris Tennant , Jack Stilgoe , Sandra Vucevic , Sally Stares

{"title":"Public anticipations of self-driving vehicles in the UK and US","authors":"Chris Tennant , Jack Stilgoe , Sandra Vucevic , Sally Stares","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2325386","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2325386","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Developers of self-driving vehicles (SDVs) work with a particular idea of a possible and desirable future. Members of the public may not share the assumptions on which this is based. In this paper we analyse free-text responses from surveys of UK (<em>n</em> = 4,860) and US (<em>n</em> = 1,890) publics, which ask respondents what springs to mind when they think of SDVs, and why they should or should not be developed. Responses (averaging a total 27 words per participant) tend to foreground safety hopes and, more regularly, concerns. Many respondents present alternative representations of relationships between the technology, other road users and the future. Rather than accepting a dominant approach to public engagement, which seeks to educate members of the public away from these views, we instead propose that these views should be seen as a source of social intelligence, with potential constructive contributions to building better transport systems. Anticipatory governance, if it is to be inclusive, should seek to understand and integrate public views rather than reject them as irrational or mutable.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 2","pages":"Pages 292-309"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140358791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Do automated vehicle trials test society? Testing mobility futures in the West Midlands 自动驾驶汽车试验是在测试社会吗？测试中西部地区的未来交通状况

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2356566

Noortje Marres

{"title":"Do automated vehicle trials test society? Testing mobility futures in the West Midlands","authors":"Noortje Marres","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2356566","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2356566","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Do automated vehicle (AV) trials in everyday environments like urban streets constitute social tests? This article answers this question with a firm no and yes, based on field study of automated mobility testbeds in the United Kingdom, with a focus on the West Midlands. Engaging with the social studies of testing and automobility futures research, this article examines how AV tests in real-world settings do double duty as tests of society, even as they are marked by social deficits. I develop this analysis by juxtaposing two very different perspectives on automated mobility testing, those of 1) UK AV experts, and 2) residents, artists and researchers who live or work in the West Midlands Future Mobility testbed. I develop two claims. First, I show how real-world testing of automated vehicles remains vehicle-centric, to the point that testing for social aspects for some experts is only conceivable in a simulator. Second, through participatory listening walks I show how AV testing in society raises significant challenges for local communities in the absence of demonstrable benefits in the present. I conclude that the testbed in question does not currently enable the exploration of societal mobility futures, but fieldwork in this environment can help us understand what this would take.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 2","pages":"Pages 271-291"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141388131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Automation in electric vehicle futures 电动汽车未来的自动化

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2325385

Sarah Pink , Hannah Korsmeyer , Kari Dahlgren , Yolande Strengers

{"title":"Automation in electric vehicle futures","authors":"Sarah Pink , Hannah Korsmeyer , Kari Dahlgren , Yolande Strengers","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2325385","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2325385","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this article we consider how people will live with the automated features of electric vehicles (EVs) in possible futures. We complicate dominant industry and government narratives which: envisage EVs as part of future fully automated systems - involving remote or wireless EV charging, vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home electricity systems; and see these moves as driving a transition to decarbonisation, renewable energy and environmental sustainability and planetary health. We argue instead that the roles of automation in people’s everyday lives with EVs in the present and possible futures are shaped by the particularities of life itself, and the places and localities in which it is experienced. Our research shows that how people live with automation is likely to pivot on everyday values of care and safety, and implies a future life where people remain in control of automated features, rather than signing up for fully automated systems. To understand the future of EV automation therefore, we must look to how people navigate such values and how they apply everyday creativity and innovation in possible, future contingent circumstances. To develop this we draw on our analysis of industry materials, online ethnography, documentary filmmaking and futures workshops.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 2","pages":"Pages 310-328"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140245541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The problem with Pod Man 花苞人的问题

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2348652

Emma Quilty

引用次数: 0

Winging it: visions, automation, and narrating alternative mobility futures

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2414785

Oliver Bock-Brown , Adam Badger , Peter Adey

引用次数: 0

Chasing scale: the pasts and futures of mobility in electricity and logistics 追逐规模：电力和物流业流动性的过去与未来

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2023.2292606

Canay Özden-Schilling

{"title":"Chasing scale: the pasts and futures of mobility in electricity and logistics","authors":"Canay Özden-Schilling","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2023.2292606","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2023.2292606","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this article, I theorize the long arc of scaling as an enduring business logic in capitalism. I suggest that scaling concerns the creation of new distances in economic operations and the management of mobility for goods, services, and people. I further argue that automation indexes a continuation of scaling as the management of mobility—a practice that industrialists have inherited from the 20<sup>th</sup> century. While the scholarship on scalability has recently focused on Big Tech, I center my analysis on two older and less public-facing industries—electricity service and maritime logistics—both of which have been scalability’s pioneers and innovators from the 20<sup>th</sup> century onwards. Today, like many others, both industries look to automation to take scale to greater heights, as can be noted in the examples of energy aggregator technologies and automated guided vehicles used in unloading containers. For contemporary scaling industries, automation appears as a suitable ‘scalar device’ (Ribes <span><span>2014</span></span>) especially where obstacles to the smooth mobility of goods, services, and people are perceived to occur due to human limitations in cognition and action. However, automated technologies, despite the sense of novelty they may impart, perpetuate old corporate ambitions of action-at-a-distance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 2","pages":"Pages 230-242"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139159041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Anticipatory automated mobilities

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-03-04 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2025.2462557

Thao Phan , Sarah Pink

{"title":"Anticipatory automated mobilities","authors":"Thao Phan , Sarah Pink","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2462557","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2025.2462557","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This introduction to the Mobilities Special Issue on Anticipatory Automated Mobilities explores the interplay between automated decision-making (ADM), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) systems in shaping our mobility futures. It argues that “views from the future” are increasingly seen from the perspective of these technologies of automation, shaping how we understand and govern life in the present as if these futures have already arrived. In addressing the persistence of automation as a primary technical apparatus through which the future of mobility is anticipated, this editorial advocates instead for alternatives methods and approaches that can move beyond the often narrow and predetermined understanding of futures. It brings attention to the scale at which automation is being integrated into domains that have traditionally been the central concern of mobilities scholars, and in doing so, contends that the study of mobilities is now the study of computational infrastructure and logics as much as it is the study of bodies and flows. This contemporary moment is characterised not just by a change in scale and intensification of movement but also by its mediation via systems like automation and via concepts like anticipation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 2","pages":"Pages 223-229"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143697936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

International students’ cultural engagement through constructing distance or proximity 留学生通过构建距离或接近度进行文化参与

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2350533

Anne-Cécile Delaisse , Gaoheng Zhang

{"title":"International students’ cultural engagement through constructing distance or proximity","authors":"Anne-Cécile Delaisse , Gaoheng Zhang","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2350533","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2350533","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>International students’ contact and engagement with various cultures has received increased scholarly attention. This scholarship tends to either celebrate students’ cosmopolitanism or highlight their difficulties ‘adapting’ in their receiving countries. In this paper, we examine students’ own perceptions of and engagement with their sending and receiving countries’ cultures through the dialectic of distance and proximity, gleaned from mobilities studies. Based on 20 in-depth online interviews with Vietnamese nationals studying in Vancouver and Paris, our analysis highlights how these students construct or deconstruct notions of distance and proximity between Vietnam and their receiving countries (i.e. France and Canada), as well as between themselves and each of these countries. First, we examine how, before their departure, students cultivate a sense of cultural proximity to their geographically distant countries of destination, through studying and consuming media in French or English. Second, we address students’ rapport with French and Canadian societies as well as their sense of proximity to or distance from Vietnamese culture while studying in France and Canada. We examine how these (de-)constructions of distance can be related to students’ cosmopolitanism. We argue that notions of distance and proximity help foster a nuanced understanding of international students’ mobilities and cosmopolitanism.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 1","pages":"Pages 143-158"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140985163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Placing futures in regimes of im/mobilities

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Mobilities Pub Date : 2025-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2394525

Oliver Clifford Pedersen

{"title":"Placing futures in regimes of im/mobilities","authors":"Oliver Clifford Pedersen","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2394525","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2394525","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Concepts related to the future are abundant in research on im/mobilities. However, studies rarely explain the forces that impinge on who can imagine what future, and how these futures are funnelled to govern im/mobilities. Using a sociocultural psychological model of the imagination, I propose that regimes of im/mobilities, detailing how some movements are engendered while others are prohibited, also operate through imaginations of the future. I argue that when different technologies make some futures visible while making others invisible, this process represents a mode of governing and differentiating im/mobilities by disciplining people’s imagination. I incorporate existing research on indefinite detention in the British, Danish, and Swedish asylum systems, as well as my own fieldwork in the Faroe Islands. These examples show two opposing ways by which the future is fashioned to impact im/mobilities. I detail how various technologies of the imagination guide people’s imagination differently and serve as a crucial component of regimes of im/mobilities. These shifting forces correspond to the constantly changing nature of the regime of im/mobilities. Furthermore, the varying imaginations also emphasise the need to pay more attention to how people experience and navigate the imaginative arm of regimes of im/mobilities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 1","pages":"Pages 18-33"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143133658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

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