Mobilities, Disruptions and Reconnections: joint T2M & MoHu hybrid conference

Govind Gopakumar, Concordia University, Montreal

In recent days, since the mobility pause from enforced COVID-19 lockdowns, there has been interest and speculation in an urban transition to low-carbon mobilities (Sheller 2020; Cresswell 2021; Adey, Hannam, et al. 2021). This renewed scholarly interest has built upon an upwelling of scholarship that, riding the mobilities turn, inquires into theories and logics embedded within interventions for a low-carbon world (Temenos et al. 2017; Nikolaeva et al. 2019; Adey, Cresswell, et al. 2021).

Such an approach, though, sits uneasily with the preeminent multi-level perspective in sustainability transitions to mobility (Geels et al. 2012). From a critical mobility perspective, such a formulation naively posits a static world of macro-level landscapes extraneous to mobility regimes and niche innovations. A key differentiator of a critical mobilities approach to transition, at least in the Global North, has been a justice orientation that attends to histories and politics of systemic inequalities (Sheller 2015; Sheller 2018). How can the critical mobilities approach re-imagine mobility transitions in global Southern contexts?

Two directions within critical mobility studies are relevant. First, the long attention to politics and systemic effects of mobility (Sheller and Urry 2000; Urry 2004; Cresswell 2010) allows us to appreciate the widespread embedding of automobility politics at the street-level in Southern contexts (Gopakumar 2020; 2021). Second, the consideration for historical frictions in the constitution of mobility constellations (Cresswell 2010; 2016; see also Schipper, Emanuel, and Oldenziel 2020), emphasize how urban mobilities are outcomes of multiple pre/post/colonial displacements (Gopakumar 2022).

Against this growing interest in a mobilities approach to mobility transition, we seek abstracts exploring a range of topics related to the practices, meanings, and politics of low-carbon moving in the Southern street. Please send abstracts of 250 words with a short biosketch of 100 words to Govind Gopakumar (govind.gopakumar@concordia.ca) by April 1, 2022. More details in the attached proposal.

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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