Books by Katharina Manderscheid
Die Corona-Gesellschaft, 2020
An introduction to R for sociologists, focusing on typical issues of data analysis like importing... more An introduction to R for sociologists, focusing on typical issues of data analysis like importing data from other statistical programmes, recoding data, producing combined tables, graphing options, exporting tables and graphs into Office documents etc.
The book can serve as a ressource for teaching statistics in social sciences and is written in German.
In 2016, the book will be published in a revised second edition.
Against the background of processes of socio-spatial polarisation in European cities, in my PhD t... more Against the background of processes of socio-spatial polarisation in European cities, in my PhD thesis which I carried out at Freiburg University, Germany, I analysed a newly built urban neighbourhood, located in the small university town of Tübingen in the south west of Germany. Its underlying urban plan aimed at attracting a broad socio-economic spectrum of households. Drawing on approaches of the spatial turn and Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, subtle mechanisms of exclusion inherent within the urban concept were theorised, thus explaining the large over-representation of certain socio-cultural groups that was discovered empirically.
Edited Volumes by Katharina Manderscheid
Over the last two decades, the conceptualisation and empirical analysis of mobilities of people, ... more Over the last two decades, the conceptualisation and empirical analysis of mobilities of people, objects and symbols has become an important strand of social science. Yet, the increasing importance of mobilities in all parts of the social does not only happen as observable practices in the material world but also takes place against the background of changing discourses, scientific theories and conceptualisations and knowledge. Within the formation of these mobilities discourses, the social sciences constitute a relevant actor. Focussing on mobility as an object of knowledge from a Foucauldian perspective rather than a given entity within the historical contingency of movement, this book asks: How do discourses and ideologies structure the normative substance, social meanings, and the lived reality of mobilities? What are the real world effects of/on the will and the ability to be mobile? And, how do these lived realities, in turn, invigorate or interfere with certain discourses and ideologies of mobility?
"[W]ith both mobilities and Foucault being such diverse bodies of thought, there are evidently mu... more "[W]ith both mobilities and Foucault being such diverse bodies of thought, there are evidently multiple ways that the two may be brought into dialogue. Analytically, one can work in either of two directions, studying Foucault’s writings for discussion of mobilities or working on issues of mobility with the assistance of Foucauldian themes and concepts. Similarly, in either case, the goal of such research may be primarily aimed to be a contribution to either tradition – that is, developing Foucauldian thought or elucidating mobilities. This suggests a continuum of approaches, which is evident, for instance, in the papers of this Special Issue.
This variety of approaches leads to a similar diversity of insights, which is a significant strength – not weakness – of a programme of concerted dialogue between the two traditions. For this leads not only to insights from a hugely rich set of issues and perspectives, but also to work that is mutually informing and that displays significant convergence and resonances. Consider first the diversity, proceeding across this rough ‘spectrum’.
In the opening paper, Philo shows how even the seemingly least promising of Foucault’s texts on institutions of immobility helps substantially to illuminate mobility as a social phenomenon – imperative, condition, form of politics – by showing that certain (anatomo-political) interventions brought about immobility precisely for the purpose of training and managing ‘positive’ mobility. Here, then, is an archetype of the insights available to mobilities research from a programme of Foucauldian exegesis and scholarship.
Shifting from the socially immobilized to what society demands should be maximally mobile, O’Grady then sets out the importance of the Foucauldian concept of ‘milieu’ in illuminating a political geography of emergency services. He thereby brings attention to this understudied concept, while also showing how it needs development from its original Foucauldian formulation to accommodate an explanation of contemporary empirical changes in the technology-assisted decisions on where to site fire stations in the UK.
Mincke and Lemonne take us back to the prison, but not to conduct a Foucauldian exegesis. Instead, they demonstrate how contemporary Western governments (specifically Belgium) are grappling with the abstract impossibility of constructing a water-tight normative case for prison as an institution alongside the exhaustion of the current patchwork discourses of legitimation in terms of punishment and/or rehabilitation. Instead, the prisoner is being reconstructed as deficient precisely in their capacity for responsible mobility, yielding insights both into a ‘mobilitarian’ regime of contemporary social policy and the necessary development of Foucauldian concepts in order to be able to understand this process.
Usher takes a further step away from a Foucauldian starting point, instead deploying Foucauldian concepts and arguments to reveal the importance of material flows and the ‘government of nature’, specifically of water, in characterising the ‘nature of government’. A connection is thus drawn, mediated by Foucault’s description of the centrality of urban circulation to modern government, between mobilities and political ecology, invoking a material turn in the former that attends to government of, by and through materialities, including energy (cf. Urry 2013; Tyfield and Urry 2014).
Again working from a mobilities starting point, Paterson tackles an even more unfamiliar form of mobility, namely of a bizarrely non-material material, fetishised carbon. Noting that ‘climate change politics has been precisely organised around the generation of newly mobile objects – specifically of rights to generate carbon emissions’ (p. 570), he shows how ‘this reinforces the importance of [a Foucauldian-inspired] cultural political economy to mobilities research’ while simultaneously highlighting the centrality of mobilities to contemporary global political economy. As a central precondition of ever-expanding accumulation, mobility is fundamental to the ongoing formation of carbon markets that attempt to square continuation of this political economic order with the energic and environmental costs that accelerating mobility of people and freight entails. Here, then, bringing mobilities and Foucault together shows starkly how responses to the ecological emergency must be understood in terms of how ‘capital needs to find other ways of realising its mobility-related accumulation imperative’ (p. 580).
Staying with climate change, Tyfield focuses on ongoing attempts to decarbonize automobility itself in the geographical site of arguably greatest significance in this project – a ‘rising’ China. Again part of a cultural political economy perspective, Foucault is used specifically to broach two key challenges for theorizing transitions in socio-technical systems. These pertain to the concept of power and the capacity to think through qualitative socio-technical system change.
Finally, Manderscheid again uses Foucault in conjunction with culture-attentive post-structural political economy, specifically the regulation approach, to illustrate the value of the concept of dispositif for thinking through the system of automobility and the increasingly deep inequalities it systematically (re)produces. This key Foucauldian concept thus ‘allows for a multidimensional view on […] different manifestations of mobile socialities, bringing patterns of power structuration to the fore which otherwise remain hidden’ (p. 605).
Here, then, we have substantive issues ranging from the paradigmatically mobile to the archetypically immobile, regarding key contemporary issues including inequality, climate change, urbanisation, emergency/disaster services and carceral security, and tackled from perspectives that use mobilities to read Foucault and Foucault to disclose mobilities. There is no reason to expect, therefore, much in the way of dialogue emergent across the papers. Yet there are indeed such resonances and even emerging themes. We note only four.
First, several of the papers speak to an emerging securitisation and complexification of power/knowledge technologies in regimes of anticipation or preparedness of the specific (possibly ‘black swan’) instance, not just generalized management of aggregate risk probabilities (cf. Lentzos and Rose 2009; Adey and Anderson 2010; Oels 2014). This marks a shift in political logic, from neoliberal governmentality and its emphasis on the individual entrepreneurial self to a seemingly paradoxical conjunction between emergent imperatives of system-level responsibility and a revived moral discourse of inviolate personal autonomy (see also the papers in this issue by O’Grady, Mincke and Lemonne, Usher, Paterson, and Tyfield).
Secondly, circulation (conceived in individualist liberal terms) is confirmed as a key aspect of contemporary politics with respect to global political economy (papers by Paterson, Tyfield, and Manderscheid), the environment (Usher, Paterson, and Tyfield), and social policy and ‘law and order’ (Philo, O’Grady, and Mincke and Lemonne).
Thirdly, that this heterogeneous collection of issues and perspectives does indeed speak to each other hinges on the clear sense – both in the papers themselves and, we anticipate, in the minds of their readers, as discussed above – of the profound conceptual transformation at play today, which thereby reaches across supposed conceptual ‘boundaries’. In short, it is precisely the breadth of issues brought together by a generalized interest in issues of mobility and the power involved in, and itself constituted through, their construction that makes the ongoing engagement of these two schools of thought so promising in this moment of profound social restructuring. Only a project that can encompass the car, the border and the hotel; the prison, the canal and the carbon market; the atmosphere and the fire station can hope to witness, and intervene in, systemic social transformation and thereby make good on the mobilities paradigm’s promise of remodelling the social sciences.
Fourthly, by working with the concept of the dispositif, several contributions foreground the links between different elements of mobilities – knowledge/discourses, materialisations/objectifications, practices of movement, governmentalities and subjectifications (O’Grady, Mincke and Lemmone, and Manderscheid). Thus, rather than understanding mobility as a monolithic entity, this focus highlights, against a background of wider socio-political processes, the continuities, contradictions, autopoietic forces and ambivalences that collectively reinforce existing mobility regimes and constitute the seeds of their transformation." (Manderscheid, Schwanen, Tyfield 2014)
Papers by Katharina Manderscheid
Mobilities, Oct 2, 2014
ABSTRACT Within the mobilities literature, there is a growing body of research on the decline of ... more ABSTRACT Within the mobilities literature, there is a growing body of research on the decline of automobility and the emergence of new mobility regimes. In this context, I will outline an understanding of ‘mobility as dispositif’ which facilitates tracing interweavings of discursive knowledge, material structures, social practices and subjectifications around mobilities. Specific value of the dispositif concept consists in analysing multifaceted, but decentral power relations effecting inequalities in relation to mobilities at different scales, shown by way of existing studies of automobility. Thereby, the co-constitution of social order, space and hegemonic mobilities regimes moves to the fore. Yet, what is missing in this Foucauldian genealogy of mobility dispositifs is a broader conceptualisation of stabilising material conditions. Accordingly, I use elements of regulation theory as a complementary and framing social theory to understand the dispositifs of mobility as embedded in and stabilised through (but not as a simple function of) specific modes of regulation and regimes of accumulation. Finally, I consider the current automobility dispositif and conclude by sketching some signs of its decline.
VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften eBooks, Feb 2, 2008
Seit mehreren Jahrzehnten dient „Urbanität“ als Zauberformel der Stadtplanung und der sozialwisse... more Seit mehreren Jahrzehnten dient „Urbanität“ als Zauberformel der Stadtplanung und der sozialwissenschaftlichen Stadtforschung. Urbanität soll Städte wieder „wirtlich“ machen, soziale Desintegration und Fragmentierung verhindern oder bearbeiten, der Kriminalitätsprävention dienen, die Integration von Zuwanderinnen befördern, pulsierendes Leben erzeugen und nicht zuletzt den Verkauf von Immobilien in Stadtlage befördern. Bei näherem Hinsehen wird deutlich, dass der Begriff der Urbanität sich als hervorragende
VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften eBooks, Dec 16, 2008
... Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp Löw, Martina (Hg.) (2002): Differenzierungen des Städtischen. Opladen:... more ... Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp Löw, Martina (Hg.) (2002): Differenzierungen des Städtischen. Opladen: Leske und Bud-rich Manderscheid, Katharina (2004a): Milieu, Urbanität und Raum. SozialePrägung und Wirkung städtebaulicher Leitbilder und gebauter Räume. ...
Der Band führt in die soziologische Mobilitätsforschung ein und schließt dabei an das „Mobilities... more Der Band führt in die soziologische Mobilitätsforschung ein und schließt dabei an das „Mobilities Paradigm“ an. Im Anschluss an die Darstellung soziologischer Traditionslinien werden verschiedene Gegenstände dieser Forschungsrichtung wie Formen räumlich flexibilisierter Arbeitsverhältnisse, Pendel- und Reisepraktiken, Freizeitverkehr, multilokale Lebensformen und Migration vorgestellt.
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 2016
ZusammenfassungDie Kernthese des Mobilities Paradigm, dass Soziales aus Bewegungen besteht, impli... more ZusammenfassungDie Kernthese des Mobilities Paradigm, dass Soziales aus Bewegungen besteht, impliziert, dass Mobilität innerhalb sozial und räumlich strukturierter Konstellationen entsteht und daher nicht vollständig aus Individualmerkmalen abgeleitet werden kann. Um die damit verbundene Ungleichheitsrelevanz methodisch adäquat zu analysieren, stellt der Beitrag eine ländervergleichende Korrespondenzanalyse vor, die für residentielle Migration und Pendelwege in Paarhaushalten nach spezifischen Konstellationen sucht.AbstractThe core claim of the Mobilities Paradigm which understands the social as constituted through movement also implies, that mobility emerges from socially and spatially structured situations and therefore, mobility cannot be derived from individual properties alone. With the aim of translating the stratifying dimension adequately into methods, the contribution presents an international comparative correspondence analysis searching for specific patterns of residential migration and commuting distances of couple households.
Antipode, 2011
Abstract: Subsequent to the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 19... more Abstract: Subsequent to the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Our Common Future), sustainability has been set up in many countries as a mission statement of cross-sectoral policies. Sustainable development carries the normative notions of ...
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
Das Automobil gehört zu den zentralen Kennzeichen moderner industrialisierter Gesellschaften und ... more Das Automobil gehört zu den zentralen Kennzeichen moderner industrialisierter Gesellschaften und symbolisiert Fortschritt und Wohlstand. In den Ländern des Globalen Nordens nehmen die Anzahl privater Autos bezogen auf die Einwohner*innen sowie die täglich mit dem Auto zurückgelegten Distanzen immer noch zu. Im Jahr 2018 gab es in Deutschland 568 Personenkraftfahrzeuge 1 pro 1000 Einwohner*innen (UBA 2019). Im Durchschnitt legt jede Person 29 von täglich 39 km mit dem Auto als Fahrer*in oder Beifahrer*in zurück (Nobis/Kuhnimhof 2018: 46). Auf verschiedenen Ebenen kann ein grundsätzlicher, enger Zusammenhang zwischen wirtschaftlichem Wachstum und dem Wachstum von Güter-und Personenverkehr festgestellt werden (Altvater 2007: 787; Verron et al. 2005: 7). Die Verbrennungsmotor-Automobilität, wie wir sie kennen, ist dabei eng verwoben mit dem Zeitalter des Öls und den daraus resultierenden CO2-Emissionen (Urry 2013). Inzwischen gilt der motorisierte Individualverkehr, insbesondere der Autoverkehr, auch als Sinnbild der ökologischen Nicht-Nachhaltigkeit der modernen Lebensweise und stößt vor allem in den Städten immer sichtbarer an Grenzen. Nicht erst seit im Juli 2017 in Deutschland das Verwaltungsgericht Stuttgart entschieden hat, dass Gesundheitsschutz höher zu bewerten ist als die Interessen von Diesel-Autofahrenden und Fahrverbote in belasteten Städten nicht nur möglich, sondern geradezu erforderlich sind (z.B. Verwaltungsgericht Stuttgart, 2017), beziehungsweise seit den Pariser Klimaschutzzielen 1 Das Kraftfahrzeugbundesamt gibt die Fahrzeugdichte mit 692 Kraftfahrzeugen pro 1000 Einwohner*innen an, in diese Kategorie fallen jedoch neben den Personenkraftfahrzeugen alle maschinell angetriebenen Straßenfahrzeuge.
Applied mobilities, Jan 2, 2016
Abstract As part of the establishing of mobilities research as a new paradigm, systematic reflect... more Abstract As part of the establishing of mobilities research as a new paradigm, systematic reflections on methodological implications of centre staged mobility have gathered momentum. Currently, the consensus in the debate seems to suggest that a social understanding of mobilities is best analysed through qualitative research methods, which capture the subjective sense, experienced constraints and freedoms and incorporated legitimisation of mobilities and immobilities. However, it is a whole range of numbers and quantified developments which serves as obvious legitimisation of the paradigm change. For its critics, quantitative research is associated with empiricist and positivist assumptions. Yet, in human geography, the last decades have witnessed a vivid debate on the epistemological and theoretical foundation of statistics and quantifications highlighting that equalising quantitative research with positivism is too simplistic. Drawing on this discussion, I will critically reflect on the current focus on qualitative and the ignoring of quantitative methods in mobilities research and outline a post-positivist understanding of quantifications, arguing in favour of also-quantitative methods for mobilities which can help tackling some shortcomings identified in parts of current mobilities research practice. Also from a political point of view, I propose that “numeracy” as the speaking of the language of numbers and statistics increases the chance for critique to be heard in policy-making. In addition, it is data literacy and computing skills which form the preconditions for understanding, criticising and conducting research with Big Data which may significantly shape new views on the – data-mediated – mobile social world beyond narrated textual or survey-based observations.
Springer eBooks, 2019
For most social scientists outside France, multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) is familiar fro... more For most social scientists outside France, multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) is familiar from, and was made popular by, the works of Pierre Bourdieu, especially the analysis and presentation of the social space of lifestyles in Distinction (Bourdieu 2000). Whereas in French sociology l–analyse des donnees represents a well-established procedure in statistics, this is still not the case in German sociology. Consequently, the topic of our contribution consists of an analysis of the partial establishment of MCA in German language sociology curricula.
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Books by Katharina Manderscheid
The book can serve as a ressource for teaching statistics in social sciences and is written in German.
In 2016, the book will be published in a revised second edition.
Edited Volumes by Katharina Manderscheid
This variety of approaches leads to a similar diversity of insights, which is a significant strength – not weakness – of a programme of concerted dialogue between the two traditions. For this leads not only to insights from a hugely rich set of issues and perspectives, but also to work that is mutually informing and that displays significant convergence and resonances. Consider first the diversity, proceeding across this rough ‘spectrum’.
In the opening paper, Philo shows how even the seemingly least promising of Foucault’s texts on institutions of immobility helps substantially to illuminate mobility as a social phenomenon – imperative, condition, form of politics – by showing that certain (anatomo-political) interventions brought about immobility precisely for the purpose of training and managing ‘positive’ mobility. Here, then, is an archetype of the insights available to mobilities research from a programme of Foucauldian exegesis and scholarship.
Shifting from the socially immobilized to what society demands should be maximally mobile, O’Grady then sets out the importance of the Foucauldian concept of ‘milieu’ in illuminating a political geography of emergency services. He thereby brings attention to this understudied concept, while also showing how it needs development from its original Foucauldian formulation to accommodate an explanation of contemporary empirical changes in the technology-assisted decisions on where to site fire stations in the UK.
Mincke and Lemonne take us back to the prison, but not to conduct a Foucauldian exegesis. Instead, they demonstrate how contemporary Western governments (specifically Belgium) are grappling with the abstract impossibility of constructing a water-tight normative case for prison as an institution alongside the exhaustion of the current patchwork discourses of legitimation in terms of punishment and/or rehabilitation. Instead, the prisoner is being reconstructed as deficient precisely in their capacity for responsible mobility, yielding insights both into a ‘mobilitarian’ regime of contemporary social policy and the necessary development of Foucauldian concepts in order to be able to understand this process.
Usher takes a further step away from a Foucauldian starting point, instead deploying Foucauldian concepts and arguments to reveal the importance of material flows and the ‘government of nature’, specifically of water, in characterising the ‘nature of government’. A connection is thus drawn, mediated by Foucault’s description of the centrality of urban circulation to modern government, between mobilities and political ecology, invoking a material turn in the former that attends to government of, by and through materialities, including energy (cf. Urry 2013; Tyfield and Urry 2014).
Again working from a mobilities starting point, Paterson tackles an even more unfamiliar form of mobility, namely of a bizarrely non-material material, fetishised carbon. Noting that ‘climate change politics has been precisely organised around the generation of newly mobile objects – specifically of rights to generate carbon emissions’ (p. 570), he shows how ‘this reinforces the importance of [a Foucauldian-inspired] cultural political economy to mobilities research’ while simultaneously highlighting the centrality of mobilities to contemporary global political economy. As a central precondition of ever-expanding accumulation, mobility is fundamental to the ongoing formation of carbon markets that attempt to square continuation of this political economic order with the energic and environmental costs that accelerating mobility of people and freight entails. Here, then, bringing mobilities and Foucault together shows starkly how responses to the ecological emergency must be understood in terms of how ‘capital needs to find other ways of realising its mobility-related accumulation imperative’ (p. 580).
Staying with climate change, Tyfield focuses on ongoing attempts to decarbonize automobility itself in the geographical site of arguably greatest significance in this project – a ‘rising’ China. Again part of a cultural political economy perspective, Foucault is used specifically to broach two key challenges for theorizing transitions in socio-technical systems. These pertain to the concept of power and the capacity to think through qualitative socio-technical system change.
Finally, Manderscheid again uses Foucault in conjunction with culture-attentive post-structural political economy, specifically the regulation approach, to illustrate the value of the concept of dispositif for thinking through the system of automobility and the increasingly deep inequalities it systematically (re)produces. This key Foucauldian concept thus ‘allows for a multidimensional view on […] different manifestations of mobile socialities, bringing patterns of power structuration to the fore which otherwise remain hidden’ (p. 605).
Here, then, we have substantive issues ranging from the paradigmatically mobile to the archetypically immobile, regarding key contemporary issues including inequality, climate change, urbanisation, emergency/disaster services and carceral security, and tackled from perspectives that use mobilities to read Foucault and Foucault to disclose mobilities. There is no reason to expect, therefore, much in the way of dialogue emergent across the papers. Yet there are indeed such resonances and even emerging themes. We note only four.
First, several of the papers speak to an emerging securitisation and complexification of power/knowledge technologies in regimes of anticipation or preparedness of the specific (possibly ‘black swan’) instance, not just generalized management of aggregate risk probabilities (cf. Lentzos and Rose 2009; Adey and Anderson 2010; Oels 2014). This marks a shift in political logic, from neoliberal governmentality and its emphasis on the individual entrepreneurial self to a seemingly paradoxical conjunction between emergent imperatives of system-level responsibility and a revived moral discourse of inviolate personal autonomy (see also the papers in this issue by O’Grady, Mincke and Lemonne, Usher, Paterson, and Tyfield).
Secondly, circulation (conceived in individualist liberal terms) is confirmed as a key aspect of contemporary politics with respect to global political economy (papers by Paterson, Tyfield, and Manderscheid), the environment (Usher, Paterson, and Tyfield), and social policy and ‘law and order’ (Philo, O’Grady, and Mincke and Lemonne).
Thirdly, that this heterogeneous collection of issues and perspectives does indeed speak to each other hinges on the clear sense – both in the papers themselves and, we anticipate, in the minds of their readers, as discussed above – of the profound conceptual transformation at play today, which thereby reaches across supposed conceptual ‘boundaries’. In short, it is precisely the breadth of issues brought together by a generalized interest in issues of mobility and the power involved in, and itself constituted through, their construction that makes the ongoing engagement of these two schools of thought so promising in this moment of profound social restructuring. Only a project that can encompass the car, the border and the hotel; the prison, the canal and the carbon market; the atmosphere and the fire station can hope to witness, and intervene in, systemic social transformation and thereby make good on the mobilities paradigm’s promise of remodelling the social sciences.
Fourthly, by working with the concept of the dispositif, several contributions foreground the links between different elements of mobilities – knowledge/discourses, materialisations/objectifications, practices of movement, governmentalities and subjectifications (O’Grady, Mincke and Lemmone, and Manderscheid). Thus, rather than understanding mobility as a monolithic entity, this focus highlights, against a background of wider socio-political processes, the continuities, contradictions, autopoietic forces and ambivalences that collectively reinforce existing mobility regimes and constitute the seeds of their transformation." (Manderscheid, Schwanen, Tyfield 2014)
Papers by Katharina Manderscheid
The book can serve as a ressource for teaching statistics in social sciences and is written in German.
In 2016, the book will be published in a revised second edition.
This variety of approaches leads to a similar diversity of insights, which is a significant strength – not weakness – of a programme of concerted dialogue between the two traditions. For this leads not only to insights from a hugely rich set of issues and perspectives, but also to work that is mutually informing and that displays significant convergence and resonances. Consider first the diversity, proceeding across this rough ‘spectrum’.
In the opening paper, Philo shows how even the seemingly least promising of Foucault’s texts on institutions of immobility helps substantially to illuminate mobility as a social phenomenon – imperative, condition, form of politics – by showing that certain (anatomo-political) interventions brought about immobility precisely for the purpose of training and managing ‘positive’ mobility. Here, then, is an archetype of the insights available to mobilities research from a programme of Foucauldian exegesis and scholarship.
Shifting from the socially immobilized to what society demands should be maximally mobile, O’Grady then sets out the importance of the Foucauldian concept of ‘milieu’ in illuminating a political geography of emergency services. He thereby brings attention to this understudied concept, while also showing how it needs development from its original Foucauldian formulation to accommodate an explanation of contemporary empirical changes in the technology-assisted decisions on where to site fire stations in the UK.
Mincke and Lemonne take us back to the prison, but not to conduct a Foucauldian exegesis. Instead, they demonstrate how contemporary Western governments (specifically Belgium) are grappling with the abstract impossibility of constructing a water-tight normative case for prison as an institution alongside the exhaustion of the current patchwork discourses of legitimation in terms of punishment and/or rehabilitation. Instead, the prisoner is being reconstructed as deficient precisely in their capacity for responsible mobility, yielding insights both into a ‘mobilitarian’ regime of contemporary social policy and the necessary development of Foucauldian concepts in order to be able to understand this process.
Usher takes a further step away from a Foucauldian starting point, instead deploying Foucauldian concepts and arguments to reveal the importance of material flows and the ‘government of nature’, specifically of water, in characterising the ‘nature of government’. A connection is thus drawn, mediated by Foucault’s description of the centrality of urban circulation to modern government, between mobilities and political ecology, invoking a material turn in the former that attends to government of, by and through materialities, including energy (cf. Urry 2013; Tyfield and Urry 2014).
Again working from a mobilities starting point, Paterson tackles an even more unfamiliar form of mobility, namely of a bizarrely non-material material, fetishised carbon. Noting that ‘climate change politics has been precisely organised around the generation of newly mobile objects – specifically of rights to generate carbon emissions’ (p. 570), he shows how ‘this reinforces the importance of [a Foucauldian-inspired] cultural political economy to mobilities research’ while simultaneously highlighting the centrality of mobilities to contemporary global political economy. As a central precondition of ever-expanding accumulation, mobility is fundamental to the ongoing formation of carbon markets that attempt to square continuation of this political economic order with the energic and environmental costs that accelerating mobility of people and freight entails. Here, then, bringing mobilities and Foucault together shows starkly how responses to the ecological emergency must be understood in terms of how ‘capital needs to find other ways of realising its mobility-related accumulation imperative’ (p. 580).
Staying with climate change, Tyfield focuses on ongoing attempts to decarbonize automobility itself in the geographical site of arguably greatest significance in this project – a ‘rising’ China. Again part of a cultural political economy perspective, Foucault is used specifically to broach two key challenges for theorizing transitions in socio-technical systems. These pertain to the concept of power and the capacity to think through qualitative socio-technical system change.
Finally, Manderscheid again uses Foucault in conjunction with culture-attentive post-structural political economy, specifically the regulation approach, to illustrate the value of the concept of dispositif for thinking through the system of automobility and the increasingly deep inequalities it systematically (re)produces. This key Foucauldian concept thus ‘allows for a multidimensional view on […] different manifestations of mobile socialities, bringing patterns of power structuration to the fore which otherwise remain hidden’ (p. 605).
Here, then, we have substantive issues ranging from the paradigmatically mobile to the archetypically immobile, regarding key contemporary issues including inequality, climate change, urbanisation, emergency/disaster services and carceral security, and tackled from perspectives that use mobilities to read Foucault and Foucault to disclose mobilities. There is no reason to expect, therefore, much in the way of dialogue emergent across the papers. Yet there are indeed such resonances and even emerging themes. We note only four.
First, several of the papers speak to an emerging securitisation and complexification of power/knowledge technologies in regimes of anticipation or preparedness of the specific (possibly ‘black swan’) instance, not just generalized management of aggregate risk probabilities (cf. Lentzos and Rose 2009; Adey and Anderson 2010; Oels 2014). This marks a shift in political logic, from neoliberal governmentality and its emphasis on the individual entrepreneurial self to a seemingly paradoxical conjunction between emergent imperatives of system-level responsibility and a revived moral discourse of inviolate personal autonomy (see also the papers in this issue by O’Grady, Mincke and Lemonne, Usher, Paterson, and Tyfield).
Secondly, circulation (conceived in individualist liberal terms) is confirmed as a key aspect of contemporary politics with respect to global political economy (papers by Paterson, Tyfield, and Manderscheid), the environment (Usher, Paterson, and Tyfield), and social policy and ‘law and order’ (Philo, O’Grady, and Mincke and Lemonne).
Thirdly, that this heterogeneous collection of issues and perspectives does indeed speak to each other hinges on the clear sense – both in the papers themselves and, we anticipate, in the minds of their readers, as discussed above – of the profound conceptual transformation at play today, which thereby reaches across supposed conceptual ‘boundaries’. In short, it is precisely the breadth of issues brought together by a generalized interest in issues of mobility and the power involved in, and itself constituted through, their construction that makes the ongoing engagement of these two schools of thought so promising in this moment of profound social restructuring. Only a project that can encompass the car, the border and the hotel; the prison, the canal and the carbon market; the atmosphere and the fire station can hope to witness, and intervene in, systemic social transformation and thereby make good on the mobilities paradigm’s promise of remodelling the social sciences.
Fourthly, by working with the concept of the dispositif, several contributions foreground the links between different elements of mobilities – knowledge/discourses, materialisations/objectifications, practices of movement, governmentalities and subjectifications (O’Grady, Mincke and Lemmone, and Manderscheid). Thus, rather than understanding mobility as a monolithic entity, this focus highlights, against a background of wider socio-political processes, the continuities, contradictions, autopoietic forces and ambivalences that collectively reinforce existing mobility regimes and constitute the seeds of their transformation." (Manderscheid, Schwanen, Tyfield 2014)
Shapes of socio-ecologically sustainable mobility regimes
The growth of transport and of the economy are inseparably linked. For personal transport, in present societies, the private car constitutes the hegemonic mode of movement. Yet, car-based personal transport constitutes a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite all socio-political attempts to reduce these emissions, the distances travelled by private car as well as the average size of car engines continuously grow and counteract technologically-induced improvement of efficiency or the increase of alternative modes of travel within cities. To tackle these problems, sustainable transport policy debates suggest environmental impacts have primarily technological solutions, such as electrification, automated driving or smart traffic control. Such ‘technical’ solutions ignore systemic issues, increasing compulsions to travel, social injustices and freedom constraints in the automobile-centred mobility system. Many contributions on this topic often unproblematically equate (auto)mobility with social inclusion or opportunity, replicating associations between moving, freedom and justice in the sense of access to social ‘goods’.
As social scientific mobilities research has outlined, it is the ‘system of automobility’ (Urry, 2004) that defines personal transport and the ordering of mobility, space and society in the modern age. This system comprises the steel-and-petroleum-car itself, its production, fuel and infrastructure industries, the policies that create automobile landscapes that separate work, residence and other activities in space, as well as the discursive and cultural association of cars with freedom and autonomy. Modern lifestyles that archetypally centre on one-family-houses in suburbia, shopping centres and leisure facilities on the edge of cities represent the ideal of the ‘good life’ under automobility. The perspective on automobility as a system (or as a regime or dispostif) underlines on the one hand its deep entanglement with the organisation of the social and everyday life, as well as its centrality in the current regime of economic accumulation and, on the other hand, its dynamics of self-perpetuation and continuous self-reinvention.
At present, the environmental crisis, ‘peak oil’, and potentially ‘peak car’ constitute sound reasons to think beyond this mobility system based on the privately-owned car. Critiques of automobility extend beyond environmentalism, touching on issues like liveable cities, social interaction, physical health, regional modes of production and consumption or wellbeing – many of which are part of post- and de-growth scenarios.
Our point of departure is thus the necessity to problematize compulsions to be mobile themselves in order to reconcile the connected environmental and justice dimensions of ‘sustainable’ mobility. Together with other scholars, we understand the current (auto)mobility system as unsustainable and unjust, curtailing freedoms. Yet, what is missing are alternative imaginaries of how an environmentally sustainable and socially just mobility regime could look like. We suggest calling such an alternative regime “autono-mobility”; intending to underline an altered understanding of (im)mobility, self-determined conduct of life and freedom. Rather than taking access to mobility or certain sites as an end (as proposed in a distributive model of mobility justice), autono-mobility entails both a right to move and a right not to (Cass and Manderscheid 2019).
The event intends to bring together social scientists and activists in the fields of sustainable mobility in order to think ‘out-of-the-box’ about radical concepts of autono-mobile futures in post-growth societies. This implies in particular focussing on movement, transport and mobility as an integral part of everyday lives, and to address the social and economic implications a sustainable transformation of travel may have. Making use of academic freedom, we want to place the emphasis on possible forms and shapes of autono-mobility regimes as such, and discuss potential problems and implications, rather than the question of their political, economic or technical feasibility.
We invite contributions discussing autono-mobility along the lines of, for example, the following issues:
• imaginaries, concepts and visions of autono-mobility systems in history, present or fiction;
• seeds of present mobility practices that prefigure possible ways ahead;
• experience in working with methods of researching mobility futures e.g. futures workshops, back-casting etc.;
• identification of major obstacles and counter-forces to socially and ecologically sustainable autono-mobility regimes;
• discussion of potential social conflicts in the transition from automobility to autono-mobility.
In order to account for the different perspectives and ways of thinking and backgrounds of potential participants, we explicitly do not want to limit contributions to the format of standard academic paper presentation.
Abstracts (500 words) of contributions are invited to be submitted by 31 of March 2019 to the organisers (Noel Cass: [email protected]; Katharina Manderscheid: [email protected]) and should be accompanied by a brief note on the background of the author(s).
Further information on the joint conference of the research group “Postwachstumsgesellschaften Landnahme, Acceleration, Activation: The (De-)Stabilisation of Modern Growth Societies" and the German Sociological Association can be found at https://www.great-transformation.uni-jena.de/en