Full Description
Material Mobilities explores the material dimension of various forms of mobilities and its implications for society, politics and everyday experiences as well as investigates how materials themselves are on the move. Together the different contributions and perspectives on material mobilities illustrate how materialities are critical components within mobilities but also shape how mobilities are produced and consumed within contemporary mobile societies. This insight may potentially influence the ways disciplines of mobilities understand and approach mobilities in the future.
This book exemplifies how the new Mobilities turn may profit from foregrounding materials, the material, and materiality as a common pivot for social analysis. During the last decade of research affiliated to the 'new mobilities turn' the societal repercussions of intensive mobilities has been in focus. The 'turn' has documented the social, environmental, economic, and cultural effects of the contemporary patterns of movement of people, vehicles, goods, data and information. In parallel with this work new ideas and concepts about the human/non-human and the 'material dimension' of the social world has surfaced within a wide array of fields such as philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Material Mobilities offers a materially sensitive and focused attention to the new Mobilities turn. The 'turn to the material' opens up a new set of research questions related to how artefacts and technologies facilitating and affording mobilities are being designed, constructed, and instituted. The new material interest furthermore points at new ways of comprehending the political and the power-dimensions of mobilities and infrastructural landscapes. The turn to the material furthermore problematizes the Modern binary distinctions between humans and non-humans, subjects and objects, culture and nature.
Contents
Foreword 1. Material Mobilities 2. From Structure to Infrastructuring? On Transport Infrastructures and Socio-Material Ordering 3. The Cathedrals of Automobility: How to Read a Motor Show Interlude 1: Immaterial Immobilities and the Infrastructuring of Mobile Utopia 4. Relating Movement to Information in Consumer Mobilities, Using Space Syntax 5. "It's Going to Be Very Slippery": Snow, Space and Mobility While Learning Cross-Country Skiing 6. Moving Forward - Left Behind: Asynchrone Experiences. The Use of Mobile Media Technologies When Young People Leave. 7. Mapping Unknown Knowns of Transit Infrastructures Interlude 2: Five Ways to Make Them Political 8. Designing Places for Experiences: A Study of Architectural Practices 9. A Material Review of Costa Rica's Attempt to Carbon Neutrality: Assembling Heterogeneous Actor-Networks of Emissions, Mobilities and Calculations 10. Acupunctural Mobilities Design 'From Below': Reflecting on Uneven Material Mobilities in the Global South, the Caracas a Pie Case Interlude 3: Material Mobilities - 'Keynote Interlude' 11. Moving With: Molecular Mobilities and Our Connective Tissue Fascia 12. Mobile Work, Space and Processes of Transition 13. Dwelling on the Move
