Problems of climate change present new challenges for social theory. In this article we focus on the task of understanding and analyzing car dependence, using this as a case through which to introduce and explore what we take to be central but underdeveloped questions about how infrastructures and complexes of social practice connect across space and time. In taking this approach we work with the proposition that forms of energy consumption, including those associated with automobility, are usefully understood as outcomes (...) of interconnected patterns of social practices, including working, shopping, visiting friends and family, going to school, and so forth. We also acknowledge that social practices are partly constituted by, and always embedded in material arrangements. Linking these two features together, we suggest that forms of car dependence emerge through the intersection of infrastructural arrangements that are integral to the conduct of many practices at once. We consequently explore the significance of professional – and not only ‘ordinary’ – practices, especially those of planners and designers who are involved in reconfiguring infrastructures of different scales, and in the practice dynamics that follow. (shrink)

Car cultures have social, material and, above all, affective dimensions that are overlooked in current strategies to influence car-driving decisions. Car consumption is never simply about rational economic choices, but is as much about aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses to driving, as well as patterns of kinship, sociability, habitation and work. Through a close examination of the aesthetic and especially kinaesthetic dimensions of automobility, this article locates car cultures (and their associated feelings) within a broader physical/material relational setting that includes (...) both human bodies and car bodies, and the relations between them and the spaces through which they move (or fail to move). Drawing on both the phenomenology of car use and new approaches in the sociology of emotions, it is argued that everyday car cultures are implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling in which emotions and the senses play a key part – the emotional geographies of car use. Feelings for, of and within cars (‘automotive emotions’) come to be socially and culturally generated across three scales involved in the circulations and displacements performed by cars, roads and drivers: embodied sensibilities and kinaesthetic performances; familial and sociable practices of ‘caring’ through car use; and regional and national car cultures that form around particular systems of automobility. By showing how people feel about and in cars, and how the feel of different car cultures generates habitual forms of automobilized life and different dispositions towards driving, it is argued that we will be in a better position to re-evaluate the ethical dimensions of car consumption and the moral economies of car use. (shrink)

The material interrelations between bodies and objects are a wide, worthwhile and absorbing field, which has not been sufficiently examined yet. Focusing on such interrelations within air travel, this article contributes to the exploration of this field. It delineates that such interrelations do not simply happen, but that they have to be accomplished continuously by different participants with a certain risk to fail at many points. Within mobilities, such processes of interrelating occur under the specific circumstances of a moving vehicle. (...) Based on empirical data from an ethnographic study on air travel, the paper is concerned with the ongoing dynamics of body-object-interrelations. Based on this analysis, it suggests emphasizing the continuous modification that material assemblages built of people and objects undergo even when “only” staying immobile during a flight. Passengers do not simply enter and exit a vehicle staying identical with themselves. Rather, they are continuously adapting to a material infrastructure that shapes and adjusts their corporeal needs and capacities, including their senses. (shrink)

Much of the debate on sustainability is predicated on the belief that environmental demands lead to the production of sustainable technologies that induce environmental benefits. This fails to account for the influential ways technologies are used in practice, and the interactions between users and technologies that shape their environmental effects. This article uses the example of how cars and their drivers together accomplish the practice of driving through their interactions with each other, and explores the implications this has for generating (...) environmental outcomes. We draw on a body of literature that argues how together, users and technologies participate in carrying out practices that actively shape outcomes, and we show how and why this applies to sustainability. The article presents the case of the Toyota Prius, analyzing Toyota's intent in designing a sustainable car and contrasting it with the perspectives of thirty-eight of its drivers. We find that the possibility for fuel and carbon reduction is coproduced and is a result of complex interactions between technology, drivers, and driving practice. (shrink)

In this article I provide a critical account of the ‘placing’ of England’s M1 motorway. I start by critiquing Marc Augé’s anthropological writings on ‘non-places’ which have provided a common point of reference for academics discussing spaces of travel, consumption and exchange in the contemporary world. I argue that Augé’s ethnology of supermodernity results in a rather partial account of these sites, that he overstates the novelty of contemporary experiences of these spaces, and that he fails to acknowledge the heterogeneity (...) and materiality of the social networks bound up with the production of non-places/places. I suggest that, rather than focusing on the presences and absences associated with the polarities of place and non-place, academics should examine the multiple, partial, dynamic and relational ‘placings’ which arise through the diverse performances and movements associated with travel, consumption and exchange. I then trace the topologies of England’s M1 motorway, examining some of the different ways in which the motorway has been assembled, performed and placed over the past 45 years. (shrink)

Focused on city-scale automation, and using self-driving cars (SDCs) as a case study, this article reflects on the role of AI—and in particular, computer vision systems used for mapping and navigation—as a catalyst for urban transformation. Urban research commonly presents AI and cities as having a one-way cause-and-effect relationship, giving undue weight to AI’s impact on cities and overlooking the role of cities in shaping AI. Working at the intersection of data science and social research, this paper aims to counter (...) this trend by exploring the reverse perspective: how do cities affect the development, and expose the present limits, of SDCs? The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, by comparing urban and nonurban environments and thoroughly examining the relationship between computer vision and city-specific sociality and form, it defines machine autonomy/automation as a function of the sociotechnical milieu in which an AI system operates. Second, and related, the paper problematizes the notion of SDCs as autonomous technologies and the role it plays in envisioning contending policy arrangements and technical solutions for achieving full driving automation. Finally, the article offers insight into a materialist and spatialized understanding of AI—namely, not as an abstract quality susceptible to replication within discrete machines, but rather as a distributed property emerging through embodied interactions among a multiplicity of agents (human, non-human, and technological) within/with their environments. (shrink)

Material culture, strictly speaking, is substance culture. Nevertheless, studies on material culture are almost exclusively concerned with things. The specificities in the perception of substances and the related everyday practices are rarely taken into consideration. Although this can be explained by the history of anthropology, the bias towards associating material culture with “formed matter” is a foundational shortcoming. In consequence, particular perspectives on the material remain understudied, and the cultural relevance of substances as such is rarely taken into consideration. Taking (...) a perspective grounded in anthropology and phenomenology, this article intends to provide new approaches to substances that elucidate the particular modes of their perception, reveal their characteristics and reflect on particular notions implicit to substances. The final section of this contribution discusses two exemplary studies on substances and proposes transformation and incorporation as new fields of research that would contribute to a more explicit engagement with substances in material culture studies. (shrink)

This wide-ranging introduction to the special issue on Automobilities examines various dimensions of the automobile system and car cultures. In its broadest sense we can think of many automobilities - modes of autonomous, self-directed movement. It can be argued that there are many different car cultures and autoscapes which operate around the world, which cannot be seen as making driving a uniform experience of movement in a controlled 'no-place' space. Yet, there clearly is an increasingly globalizing car system, conceptualized as (...) a powerful socio-economic and technological complex which sustains the car as a key object of mass production and mass consumption, which has impacted on spatial organization through roads, city layout, suburban housing and shopping malls and demands new forms of social life, sociability and time-space flexibility. This automobile system currently accounts for some 1.2 million deaths through traffic accidents a year world-wide, with the reversal of the long normalization of this form of 'mass murder,' now seen as a key topic for public health authorities. At the same time while it is potentially possible to subject cars to greater surveillance and systemic control through information technology, this in itself may not automatically lead to a reduction of accidents. In recent years the car has become a complex communicative platform for multi-tasking, a command centre for telephone, television, Internet etc., a place of work and instrumental tasking; but also a place of dwelling and refuge, a comfort zone for emotional decontrol via the sound system. Something which requires a more flexible driving habitus in which the senses are reconfigured and extended through the technology, as driving increasingly depends on the software as we move to intelligent cars and roads. Yet this is also something which generates an expanding set of new risks. The logic is for the driver to become the auto pilot and the automobile to become a sort of datasuit wrap. Yet it is not surprising that this view of the controlled safe car should also summon up its opposite: the car as dangerous and powerful, as a vehicle for excitement and speed. Especially so given that car racing practically originated alongside the birth of the automobile and is now itself a massive global industry whose imagery is central to the marketing of many types of cars. (shrink)

Face-to-face interaction is a primordial site for human activity and intersubjectivity. Empirical studies have shown how people reflexively exhibit a face orientation and work to establish a formation in which everyone is facing each other in local participation frameworks. The Face has also been described by, e.g., Levinas as the basis for a first ethical philosophy. Humans have established these Face-formations when interacting since time immemorial, but what happens when one of the participants is present through a telepresence robot? Based (...) on ethnomethodology, Peircean/goodwinian semiotics, multimodal conversation analysis and video data from a Danish residential rehabilitation center, the article shows the ways in which participants manage to interactively, cooperatively, and moment by moment achieve an F-formation in situ. The article contributes a detailed analysis and discussion of the kind of participant a telepresence robot is, in and through situated interactions: I propose that we term this participant the RoboDoc, given that it is an assemblage of a doctor who controls a robot. By focusing on the affordances of mobility, the article contributes to a renewed understanding of the importance and relevance of establishing Face-orientations in an increasingly technofied telepresence world. (shrink)