[Air-l] CFP: Alternative Mobility Futures

[Charlie Breindahl]

CALL FOR PAPERS
Lancaster University Mobilities Group and the Department of Sociology

Alternative Mobility Futures
Conference to be held at Lancaster University, 9-11 January 2004

Technological, social and cultural developments in transportation, border control, mobile communication, 'intelligent' infrastructure, surveillance and global positioning are rapidly changing the conditions of possibility for all forms of mobility. New ways of dwelling, communicating, and moving (as well as policing, searching, and excluding) are emerging at the interface between corporeal, imaginative, communicative, and virtual forms of travel and habitation.  

This international Conference seeks to explore the new possibilities for 'dwelling in mobility' and for 'mobilising dwelling' that are the focus of recent work in sociology, geography, science studies, women's studies, and transport, tourism, and travel studies. As mobile connectivity begins to occur in new ways, what hybridisations of the mover and the moved, the dweller and the dwelling, the human and the digital are occurring and what are some of their likely consequences? What effects will these emerging alternative mobility futures have on the constitution of the bodily, the local, the regional, the national, the diasporic and the global? 

We seek papers addressing one or more of the following questions:

?	How are new technologies of information and mobile communication replacing, converging with, or in other ways re-shaping 'older technologies' and patterns of corporeal travel?
?	How are new technologies of surveillance and information retrieval affecting the constitution of borders, belonging, and 'out of place' bodies?
?	What kinds of new 'risk society', what new 'disasters', are these mobilities generating?
?	In what ways does life 'on screen' replace, redirect, or re-scale life 'on the move'?
?	Do 'cybercities' and 'intelligent' transport systems offer a new connectivity that can solve the impasse of transportation failure and social exclusion?
?	How are the new possibilities for mobile communication changing the boundaries between the private and the public, with what impact on forms of citizenship, participation and democracy?
?	How do the contemporary materialities of the 'mobile life' either reproduce or challenge existing forms of difference and inequality?

The Conference will be organized by Dr Mimi Sheller (m.sheller at lancaster.ac.uk) and Prof John Urry (j.urry at lancaster.ac.uk), Sociology Dept, Lancaster University, LA1 4YL, UK. It is expected that there will be no more than 100 delegates. Costs will be kept to a minimum. Abstracts up to 100 words should be sent by email to one of the organizers by March 10th, 2003.