Call for papers – 2 sessions convened by the Transport Geography
Research Group at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference, 26-28 August 2009
Session 1: Transport and City Region Regeneration
Conveners: Iain Docherty (University of Glasgow) and Richard Knowles
(University of Salford)
The Eddington Independent Review for HM Treasury reaffirmed that
transport plays a critical role in facilitating city region
competitiveness. Most successful cities have delivered successful
transport infrastructure investment. In recent decades the transport
systems in Britain's major cities outside London have fallen behind
those of their international competitors, with many recent proposals
to implement new charging regimes and other strategies to deliver
significantly improved transport infrastructure failing to come to
fruition. If improved urban and regional transport systems are to be
put in place, new mechanisms are needed to construct and maintain
transport infrastructure and support the revenue streams required to
finance them. For this session, papers are invited from both academic
researchers and those practitioners working in the field of urban
transport. Papers on aspects of innovative finance, governance and/
or international comparative work are particularly welcomed.
Please send abstracts to:
Dr Iain Docherty
Department of Management
University of Glasgow
[log in to unmask]
no later than 16 February 2009.
Session 2: Geographies of the Passenger
Sponsored by the Social & Cultural Geography Research Group and the
Transport Geography Research Group
Convenors: Peter Adey (Keele University); David Bissell (University of
Brighton); Eric Laurier (University of Edinburgh); Jon Shaw
(University of Plymouth)
Research that has contributed to the new mobilities paradigm has
helped to illuminate some of the various intersecting virtual,
corporeal and incarcereal mobilities that constitute contemporary
spaces of flows (Cresswell; Urry). However significantly less has been
said about the particular experience of passengers who are caught up
within these flows, networks and systems (although see Adey; Laurier;
Bissell). Even less has been expressed about how the passenger and
their experiences have been conceived, imagined, manipulated,
regulated and engineered.
And whilst some detail has been given to the various modalities of
mobility the passenger may take, far less engagement has looked at how
the experiences and imaginations of the passenger cut across multiple
of modes of mobility in different historical, economic, political and
geographical contexts (Shaw). In a world increasingly on the move,
these issues seem particularly pertinent.
First, this session seeks to attend to the sociality of the passenger
experience by considering the types of relationship that cohere,
condense or evaporate between passengers and the various socialities
and forms of belonging that emerge and disappear. It will consider the
moral and ethical topographies and the rights and responsibilities
that come with being a passenger.
Second, papers may consider the various processes and practices that
allow individuals or groups to become passengers (and to exit these
roles). Considering the multiple tensions between activity and
passivity the session will probe the qualitative differences between
'passengering' and its apposite counter-forms (be it piloting,
driving, steering, directing etc.). It will look at the rites of
passage, routines, strategies and tactics associated with becoming a
passenger and how they impact on the body.
Third, this session examines how some of the various objects,
prostheses and affordances both help and hinder passengers'
experiences of travel (Lury). It will look at the complex tensions and
juxtapositions that emerge between experiences of comfort and
discomfort (Virilio). In so doing it seeks to get to grips with the
affective and emotional topographies that are immanent to becoming a
passenger. This might involve various experiences of uplift or anxiety
(McCormack; Sheller), or the affective dimension of travelling spaces
that are engineered to make passengers feel and respond in particular
ways.
Fourth, papers may explore the cultural-politico-economy of the
passenger and its imbrications into various political, economic and
technological orderings (Dodge and Kitchin). It will consider the
extent to which the passenger has been controlled through various
institutions and governance regimes, or the role of passenger
testimony and historical renderings.
Fifth, the session will address how passengers and their practices
have been transformed through time and space. It will explore how
shifting social, political, cultural and economic contexts have
brought about substantial alterations in the passengers' style,
conduct, meaning, significance and embodied (tele)mediated experience.
This session aims to explore the figure of the passenger as both an
empirical actuality and an existential problematic by inviting
contributors from across a range of disciplines to consider the
significance of the passenger in its myriad forms.
Titles and abstracts (200 words) should be emailed to David Bissell
([log in to unmask]) and Peter Adey ([log in to unmask])
by Friday 23 January 2009. We would welcome initial expressions of
interest and ideas.
The Transport Geography Research Group is launching a new annual prize
of £100 for the best postgraduate conference paper on transport
geography. Papers presented at any conference in 2009 up to and
including the RGS-ING Annual Conference in Manchester are eligible. If
you wish to enter for this prize, please provide a full written copy
of your paper to Iain Docherty by August 31 2009. Papers will be
judged by the TGRG Committee and the winner announced in autumn 2009.
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Dr Iain Docherty
Senior Lecturer / Director of MBA Programmes
Department of Management
University of Glasgow
Glasgow
G12 8QQ
t 0141 330 3668
f 0141 330 5669
e [log in to unmask]
w http://www.gla.ac.uk/management/
The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401
Co-owners of European Management Journal
Copyright © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02632373
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