MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-03-04DOI: 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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-03-04DOI: 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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-03-04DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2348652
Emma Quilty
{"title":"The problem with Pod Man","authors":"Emma Quilty","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2348652","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2348652","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Pod Man is the rational, individual and hyper-masculine transport consumer entrenched in industry narratives focused on automated vehicle technologies and infrastructures. This article interrogates how these narratives are constituted, the futures they imagine, predict and promote, and how people and households are presented within these futures. The discussions in this article are based on a content analysis of sixty industry reports. While there is an emerging body of research engaging with the gendered and racialised dimensions of future automated mobilities, previous studies have for the most part focused on conceptual and promotional visualisations of automated vehicles. Building on this existing work, I argue that equal attention needs to be paid to the ideologies and agendas embedded in industry reports. Taken together, the visual representations and industry reports contribute to large scale anticipatory narratives about possible futures. To better understand and critique the values and logics of these narratives, I discuss how the Pod Man persona underlies visions of automated vehicles and its potential consequences for shaping potential future trajectories.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 2","pages":"Pages 243-254"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140985881","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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-03-04DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2414785
Oliver Bock-Brown , Adam Badger , Peter Adey
{"title":"Winging it: visions, automation, and narrating alternative mobility futures","authors":"Oliver Bock-Brown , Adam Badger , Peter Adey","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2414785","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2414785","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper is concerned with the way that futures for autonomous mobility are envisioned, specifically in industry representations. We begin by analysing a pair of representative commercial narratives around future autonomous mobility, from Wing and Audi, finding them to be simplistic, exclusionary, and focused on individual freedoms. Building on this analysis, we draw on ideas around mobility justice and creative mobilities methods to craft an alternative science fiction vignette, one that augments a future from a gig worker’s perspective. In doing so, we foreground multiple injustices and insecurities, and aim to highlight the potential within creative and narrative methods to complicate dominant stories about technological futures, to articulate alternative futures, explore them, research with them, and make other futures more tangible. The paper concludes by discussing the need for such approaches given the dominant framings around autonomous mobility futures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 2","pages":"Pages 255-270"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143698009","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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-03-04DOI: 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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-03-04DOI: 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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-01-02DOI: 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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-01-02DOI: 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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2395415
Sylvia Ang , Leng Leng Thang , Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
{"title":"Ethnic proximity, mobility and (non)-belonging: middle-class Singaporean migrants in China","authors":"Sylvia Ang , Leng Leng Thang , Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2395415","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2395415","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>New global multi-directional migration flows are decentering extant analyses of White expatriate migration. As migration becomes more diversified, new lines of intellectual inquiry are surfacing about the experiences of middle-class non-white expatriates. This paper uses the case study of China, which with the rise in immigration, has an increasingly diverse ‘expatriate’ population. While the visibility of White expatriates in non-white-majority host countries may compel them to adopt lifestyles segregated from the local population, expatriates of Chinese heritage in China have the (dis)advantage of blending in with the local population. This paper examines the experiences of Singaporean-Chinese migrants in China where their ethnic proximity to the Chinese can be both a boon and a bane. We present our findings in three sections addressing: first, how ethnic proximity can enable mobilities including motility and a mobile sense of belonging; second, how mobilities can condition ethnic proximity as experiences of privilege but also reminders of non-belonging; and third, how participants’ change in life phases i.e. temporalities shift meanings of proximity, mobility and mobile belonging. Through highlighting the multidimensional nature of mobilities – proximity, motility, temporalities – this paper contributes to studies of middling migration, (ethnic) proximity and mobilities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 1","pages":"Pages 207-221"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143133718","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}
MobilitiesPub Date : 2025-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2393333
Adélia Verônica da Silva
{"title":"Beyond the American dream: unveiling the complexity of young people’s (im)mobility in Governador Valadares, Brazil","authors":"Adélia Verônica da Silva","doi":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2393333","DOIUrl":"10.1080/17450101.2024.2393333","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study explores the often-overlooked phenomenon of immobility within migration studies, focusing on the Governador Valadares Region of Brazil. Despite the region’s history of significant outmigration to the United States, there needs to be more investigation into why some young people remain in their communities instead of pursuing the American Dream. Using ethnographic methods, the study search surpasses simplistic dichotomies of mobility-immobility, recognizing that decisions to leave or stay are complex and influenced by various interconnected factors. By employing the perspectives of ‘linked lives’ and ‘life-course situatedness’, the study provides nuanced insights into how individual choices are affected by familial, social, and economic contexts over time. The findings shed light on the diverse experiences of young people while revealing the carry of involuntary immobility. Furthermore, it contests assumptions that remaining in a particular location signifies immobility or a lack of ambition. It contributes to a more nuanced comprehension of migration agency and well-being, underscoring the multifaceted nature of aspirations and capabilities. The results illuminate the intricate interplay between personal aspirations and the environment in shaping migration decisions, emphasizing the significance of viewing (im)mobility as a relational and temporally situated phenomenon.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51457,"journal":{"name":"Mobilities","volume":"20 1","pages":"Pages 175-192"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143133661","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}