AAG 2023: Detour Mobilities and Alternate Perspectives on Time-Spaces

Conference session

Detours are an integral part of social life, abundant in a wide variety of situations and registers: disruptions of traffic; avoidance of interactions, places, or specific travel modes; migrations; sightseeing tours, etc. Conceived as mobilities involving longer travel (spatially or temporally) than initially expected, they entail complex and heterogeneous experiences. If detours are nothing new, they have so far received limited attention in the field of mobilities studies and beyond.

Two major processes provide a major impetus and a particular timeliness for re-examining the role of detours in mobilities. First, the quest of more sustainable mobilities and the climate crisis can lead to replacing car rides or flights with more sinuous, intermodal, shared or disrupted routes, and to reinventing the temporalities of itineraries through slow travel, ‘staycations’ or the combination of different trips into one. Second, the Covid-19 pandemic has complicated travel, still requiring some navigation across different border regimes and restrictions, as well as new digital means of proving eligibility. How are such (and other) detours negotiated? What are their relationships to sustainability, temporalities or the productivist assumptions of mobility? Multiscale, corporeal, ambivalent, habits- or crisis-permeated, oscillating between travel and destination, as well as between path and trajectory, detours allow us to question the open-ended nature of mobilities and their spatio-temporalities.

We welcome papers that make empirical and/or theoretical contributions.

Possible questions/topics include but are not limited to:

· Detours and temporality · Sustainability-induced detours/The sustainability of detours · Modal shifts and detours · The theorization of detours and mobilities · The creativity of detours · Forced detours · Geopolitics, mobility regimes and detours · Climate change and detours · Detours and agency · Detours and frictions · Detours and migrations · Detours and tourism · Detours and crisis · Detours and commuting · Habits and detours · Detours and transgressions · Methods to study detours · When detours disappear

Please send your PIN and your abstract (max. 250 words) to jean-baptiste.fretigny@cyu.fr and weiqiang@nus.edu.sg by November 8, 2022. We plan to attend the conference in person, and to hold an in-person session.