We are looking for participants for a workshop on The post-socialist street: rising car mobility in comparative perspective
taking place from 6 to 8 October 2016 in Regensburg, Germany. Please
see the call below and if you are interested in attending, please send
us a paper abstract of no more than 250 words and a short bio by 24
March. The workshop is planned as relatively small (with no more than 20
participants) to allow enough time for each participant to present a paper and to discuss it. We aim to make our selection by the beginning of
April. We can also cover travel and accommodation for selected
participants. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.
With kind regards,
Tauri
Call for papers for a three-day workshop taking place in Regensburg (Germany), Thursday 6 to Saturday 8 October 2016 The post-socialist street: rising car mobility in comparative perspective
International
workshop organized by Prof. Dr. Ger Duijzings (Graduate School for East
and Southeast European Studies, University of Regensburg) and Dr. Tauri
Tuvikene (Centre for Landscape and Culture, Tallinn University;
visiting researcher at Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography).
Life
on city streets has always enjoyed great interest amongst scholars,
philosophers, and artists. Rightly so, as the urban street triggers
unexpected and unpredictable encounters: the urban social fabric is, as
it were, woven by people moving around, accompanied by others or
transporting stuff from A to B, on foot, using animal power or public
transport, or vehicles such as bicycles, cars, trucks, and buses. Yet,
where these various forms and modes of mobility meet, there is
inevitably ‘friction’, resulting from differences in speed, weight,
maneuverability and symbolic value of the vehicles used (see for example
Henderson 2013; Katz 1999; Truitt 2008). Hence the street does not only
facilitate movement (Blomley 2011), it is also a site of multiple
colliding mobilities that need to be negotiated and regulated. Despite
the global spread of street signs, traffic regulations, and engineered
devices, traffic often ‘looks’ and ‘feels’ very different in cities
around the world (Edensor, 2004; Miller, 2001). These differences are
due to the variety of conditions: the cultural environment and the
geographic terrain or climate, the quality of roads and the composition
and density of the built environment, the vehicles used and the
regulations imposed by authorities, the urban demography in terms of
ethnicity and class, and the social and cultural perceptions towards
various modes of mobility.
For this workshop we propose to
reflect on traffic interaction and street life in post-socialist central
and eastern Europe, as ‘friction’ has been particularly intense here
due to the sudden and explosive rise of car ownership and car mobility
after 1989. Here, but also in other (still) socialist countries such as
China, political changes have led to radical transformations in the way
people move around, as former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility such as
public transport and bicycles have been marginalized and replaced by a
culture of privately owned cars. The sudden rise in car mobility in
these (former) socialist countries is still an underexplored topic,
especially when it comes to understanding the social and cultural
aspects of these transformations in the everyday life of post-socialist
cities (Burrell and Hörschelmann, 2014; Siegelbaum, 2011). This workshop
therefore seeks to advance our empirical and conceptual understanding
of the post-socialist street.
The discussion is framed around two
related phenomena: how the post-socialist street is the site of an
unrivalled growth in car mobility but is also becoming the venue of
renewed political engagements, where claims to shared public spaces and
visions for urban futures are again articulated and contested against
the background of the recent socialist past. Seen the large Critical
Mass cycle protests in Budapest, Bucharest and other east European
cities, the demand for alternative and more sustainable forms of
mobility is on the rise, as it has been for some time already in
traditional car dominated countries such as the USA, Germany, and Japan.
The analysis and comparison of these transformations, interactions,
intersections, and political engagements with regard to (car) mobility
in post-socialist contexts, is what this workshop tries to achieve.
Three
keynote speakers with strong expertise in the rise of car mobility in
the ‘traditional’ car (and car producing) countries USA, Germany, and
Japan will offer the historical and comparative framework needed: these
countries had their own specific trajectories in terms of introducing,
accommodating and domesticating cars in society and in public spaces. Keynote speakers are
Kurt Möser (Karsruhe Institute of Technology) discussing Germany,
Peter Norton (University of Virginia) the US and
Joshua H. Roth
(Mount Holyoke College, US) Japan.
Following the keynote lectures we
will extend the discussion around these specific historical cases to the
post-socialist context.
The workshop seeks to address the
following issues but is not limited to these: interaction in public
spaces and on streets and conflicts between road users; the negotiation
and regulation of differential speeds and flows; official and informal
approaches to mobility and immobility, mooring and fixity; cultural
perceptions of ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ in traffic; social identity and
inequality in traffic; socialist and national path-dependencies of
current traffic conditions; political and media discourses and their
role in changing the parameters of public space and traffic interaction;
the promotion and regulation of car ownership and mobility through
legal provisions and forms of law enforcement; etc.
The workshop
is open to scholars at all stages of career and we would encourage
junior researchers to apply. We still have some places available in the
workshop. If you are interested in participating, please send us an abstract of 250 words outlining your proposed paper and a short biography of maximum 150 words. Please send it to both Ger Duijzings ([log in to unmask]) and Tauri Tuvikene ([log in to unmask]) and also include your contact details and affiliation. The deadline for abstract submission is Thursday, 24 March 2016. We are happy to cover economy travel and accommodation costs for the selected workshop participants.
References
Blomley, N. (2011) Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow (Abingdon: Routledge).
Burrell,
K. & Hörschelmann, K. (Eds.) (2014) Mobilities in Socialist and
Post-Socialist States: Societies on the Move (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan).
Edensor, T. (2004) Automobility and National
Identity. Representation, Geography and Driving Practice. Theory,
Culture & Society, 21(4–5), 101–120.
Henderson, J. (2013) Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst.
Katz, J. (1999) How Emotions Work (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press).
Miller, D. (Ed.) (2001) Car Cultures (Oxford, New York: Berg).
Siegelbaum,
L. H. (Ed.) (2011) The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc
(Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press).
Truitt, A.
(2008) On the back of a motorbike: Middle-class mobility in Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam. American Ethnologist, 35(1), 3–19.
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Tauri Tuvikene, PhD
Tallinna Ülikool, teadur / Tallinn University, Researcher
Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Visiting Researcher