Call for Papers: AAG 2016 San
Francisco, CA
*Usual apologies for cross-posting*
Due to an unforeseen withdrawal, we have one spot for the session on Seniors' Mobilities sponsored by the SGs on Cultural Geography and Transportation Geography. Interested applicants should email abstracts of no more than 250 words to Weiqiang Lin ([log in to unmask]) and Jean-Baptiste Fretigny ([log in to unmask]) by the AAG submission deadline. Decisions will be rendered soon once a number of abstracts have been solicited. Thanks.
Seniors’ Mobilities (1 more spot)
Weiqiang Lin (National University of Singapore)
Jean-Baptiste Fretigny (Université de Cergy-Pontoise)
Over the last decade, the mobility turn has illuminated how moving is a
ubiquitous (f)act that suffuses through all aspects of life—whether it be walking,
commuting or travelling. Rather than treating these mobilities as inert displacements
between points, scholars have unpacked them for their diverse meanings, practices,
and politics. Yet, as attentive as these theorisations are to the very
phenomenon of movement, they have tended to implicitly base their
understandings on the mobile projects of particular ‘active’ age groups. One
population segment that this body of work has consequently omitted is that of
seniors or old people. While many societies are increasingly ageing, mobilities
research has yet to sufficiently address how seniors go about participating in these
everyday movements; or how they may be (infra)structurally enrolled within, or
excluded from, regular circuits of transport and travel. This session aims to open
up a conversation about these missing mobilities, in an effort to plug this knowledge
gap.
An analysis on seniors’ mobilities goes beyond a mere focus on accessibility
and quality of life issues, which are often (pre)defined for old people as their
top policy concerns in existing transport geographical research. Rather, it should
open up seniors’ mobilities as active endeavours in their own right, which practitioners
vigorously perform and negotiate, amid equally potent interventions from planners,
service providers, and nonhuman actors. This session intends to explore these
dynamics, in hopes of expanding the horizons of mobilities research, and to
contribute to policy shaping. Additionally, it seeks to draw out new relationships
between streams of movement attributed to the ‘aged’, and those that are not. It
interrogates how seniors’ mobilities are, in fact, part and parcel of wider mobile
regimes, which not only nurture certain assumptions about moving, but also work
to relativise the (im)mobilities of different social (age) groups. In this CFP
we invite submissions whose intention is to move towards these open-ended conceptualisations
of seniors’ mobilities. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• theorisations of seniors’ (im)mobilities
• cultural logics and assumptions about seniors’ mobilities
• practices, experiences, and
encounters
• bodies, affects and (dis)comforts
• politics, conflicts and social
exclusions
• gendering ageing and mobilities
• infrastructures, design and their implications
• aeromobilities and retirement
travel
• old-age migration and
transnational mobilities
