Participants
Ghadeer Alasan - Lancaster University
Will Andrews - University of Aberystwyth - Department of Geography & Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University - I am a first year PhD student and my research is an investigation of automotive enthusiasm, in particular working with modified car enthusiasts. The main site for my research is the modified car show event and in terms of research methods I am currently utilising a reflexive autoethnographic approach based on my own position as a modified car enthusiast. My research is positioned within mobility geographies in two distinct ways. Firstly I am interested in the embodied practice of driving a modified car, in particular to and from car show events and the particularities of this practice, for example driving in convoy. Secondly one of the ways I approach the car show event is as a space in which enthusiasm circulates between bodies of enthusiasts and is felt or promoted differently as people move around the space and encounter different people or things.
Brian Baker - Lancaster University
Katherine Baxter - University of Northumbria
Alan Beattie - Lancaster University
Alan has been both a Professor of Dance and a Professor of Public Health, and was an Honorary Research Fellow at CeMoRe 2007-2012. He has pursued an interest in mobilities – material -and-discursive - throughout a wandering-scholar career that has zig-zagged between many fields. Stopping-off points include (in chronological order):
Molecular biology: ‘Metabolic pathways in the regulation of DNA duplication in rapidly dividing cells’.
Neurophysiology: ‘Postural reflexes in the coordination of movement in dance, gymnastics, and motor rehabilitation’.
Experimental dance/choreography: ‘Five situations in which dance and sculpture come together’.
Computing research: ‘A Fortran programme that evaluates hospital layout against statistical data on patient journeys’.
Operational research: ‘Patient pathways to the Casualty Department: quantitative mapping for 12 Hospitals in East London’
Socio-architectural research: ‘Pedestrian circulation patterns in complex buildings: a test-case for space syntax’.
Sociomedical research: ‘Patterns of movement in the corridors of 12 long-stay psychiatric hospitals’.
Sociomedical research: ‘Changing boundaries of health: structure, system, transformation in the promotion of wellbeing’.
Sociomedical research: ‘Journeys into thirdspace: health alliances and the challenge of border-crossing’.
Socio-psychiatric research: ‘Experiential learning from movement metaphors: dance therapy and mental health’.
Sociolinguistic research: ‘From complex causes to mobile meanings: madness as ontological choreography’.
Medical humanities: ‘Minds on the run: movement as metaphor in the poetry of psychiatric survivors’.
Literary research: 'Disquieting timescapes: writing-through the eco-poetry of Norman Nicholson'.
Literary research: ‘Not Waving but Drowning? bringing a choreographic imagination to bear on the study of poetry’.
Literary research: ‘Landscapes, mindscapes, timescapes: kinesthetic imagination in eco-poetry and survivors’ poetry’.
Sarah Becklake - Lancaster University
tBruce Bennett - Lancaster University has published on film, media and popular culture in the journals, Jump Cut, The European Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics, Studies in Documentary Film, and Film-Philosophy, among others. His publications cover the areas of Hollywood spectacle, film technology and film theory, border cinema, contemporary Chinese cinema, the war on terror and visual culture, British film and television. He is currently co-editing a special dossier on Michael Bay for the journal Senses of Cinema and researching a monograph on the cultural history of cycling and cinema, Revolutionary Films.. He has co-edited the collection, Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and his most recent monograph is The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom: Borders, Intimacy, Terror (Columbia University Press, 2014).
Homepage: http://goo.gl/b8CSY9
Blog: http://btbennett.wordpress.com
Twitter: @BruceTBennett
Thomas Birtchnell - University of Woolongong, Australia
Jo Carruthers - Lancaster University
Noel Cass - Lancaster University - is a researcher in Organisation, Work and Technology, who completed a doctorate in Climate Change Policy in Local Authorities after many years of environmental campaigning. His research focuses on environmental issues regarding transport and energy, with a focus on how the public view these issues and engage with them. He has worked on demand responsive transport, marine/hydro renewable energy technologies and nuclear waste management policy, and his current major research project is on transport as part of everyday life, using social practice theory.
Jennifer Christensen - Crime Reduction Initiatives (CRI)
Peter Cox - University of Chester - I am currently Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Chester but from October 1st will be a visiting Scholar and Leverhulme International Academic fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. My current work crosses disciplines, investigating people’s experiences of bicycle mobility and the construction of environments. I’m interested in the historical recording of space and place in image and travel accounts, as well as contemporary experience analysed through mobile sensory ethnography, coupled and integrated with biometric data and GPS journey tracking. Overall, it could be summed up as an interest in cycling and experience.
Joel Evans - Lancaster University
Julia Gillen - Lancaster University - Director of the Literacy Research Centre and Senior Lecture in Digital Literacies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language. Julia is interested in mobile literacies of the present and past including social networking and the Edwardian postcard.
Juliet Jain - University of the West of England - is a social scientist employed as a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Transport and Society, UWE. She is currently a co-investigator on a multi-disciplinary project ‘Family Rituals 2.0’, which is concerned with how mobile workers connect to family life while away with work. She has also researched passenger time use and experience on rail and bus, and the role played by digital technologies; digital technologies in the organisation of everyday life; and cycling behaviours.”
Didem Ozkul - Lancaster University
Cosmin Popan - Lancaster University
Susan Pringle - Having spent a large amount of my working life in a non-academic environment, engaged in road safety research that focused primarily on means of supporting education for, and attitude change in, road users, I discovered the potential of mobilities research when working for my PhD. The PhD (Automobility and injury inequality: road safety for a diverse society), an ESRC funded case studentship conducted in partnership with Transport for London, set out to explore circumstances behind datasets showing that teenage Black boys living in London were apparently at greatest risk of becoming pedestrian casualties than other pedestrians living in London. The thesis proposes that road space is not a discrete space whose use is governed by rules and codes of behaviour; rather that roads facilitate the performance of roles (with gender of particular relevance to this research) and thus should not be seen only as vectors used simply for the purpose of joining two points. The thesis suggests that an apparently higher rate of road accidents involving Black teenagers is a function of the constructed social space of the road. Being at risk in road space is not a fixed or given state but is the result of an interaction between users of that space, each of whom brings a unique set of expectations and interpretations to the experience. Rather than anything intrinsic to the individual, the circumstances of a road accident involving a Black teenage pedestrian can reveal many tensions that underpin a community or wider society.
In exploring different types of mobility in road space and the effects of automobility on interactions there, I also became very interested in the development and application of appropriate ‘mobile methods’. I am keen to develop and extend my knowledge and experience in mobilities research.
pringle2003-research@yahoo.co.uk
Alastair Neil Roy - Psychosocial Research Unit, School of Social Work, University of Central Lancashire - has a particular interest in the development of psychosocial and psychosocietal approaches to research and his recent work has focused on the use of mobile methods. He is the academic lead for a three year Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Crime Reduction Initiatives. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council the project is using mobile methods as part of exploring recovery oriented drug and alcohol treatment provision. In another recent project - ‘Surviving in Manchester: Narratives on Movement from the Men’s Room, Manchester’ - he used mobile methods to explore the lives of socially excluded young men http://www.mroom.co.uk/history/articles
Jen Southern - Lancaster University - is an artist and lecturer in Fine Art and New Media at Lancaster University. She has a practice-based PhD in Sociology from the Centre for Mobilities Research, where she is now artistic director. Southern’s collaborative art work, exploring hybrid digital and physical spaces and practices has been exhibited at festivals and galleries in Europe, Canada, India, Japan and New Zealand since 1991. She currently works collaboratively with Chris Speed on Comob Net, exploring collaborative uses of GPS technology, and producing and making visible a sense of comobility, of being mobile with others at a distance. Her writing about comobility and locative art has been published internationally by Transcript, The Canadian Journal of Communications, Second Nature: International journal of creative media, and the Fifth IEEE International Conference on e-Science. She has produced work through residencies and commissions including: The Banff Centre; Mobile Media Studio, Montreal; FACT, Liverpool; The Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol.
Stephen Stradling - Napier University - is an emeritus professor of transport psychology at Edinburgh Napier University now based in Manchester where he continues to be interested in why we love our cars (if we still do) and how alternatives to ICE use may be promoted. His main research findings are succinclty summarised in STRADLING, S. G. (2011). Travel mode choice. In B. E. Porter (Ed.), Handbook of traffic psychology (pp. 441-453). San Diego: Elsevier Academic Press.'
Amit Thakkar - Lancaster University
John Urry - Lancaster University
Raquel Velho - Lancaster University
Alex Wilkinson - Lancaster University - I am in-between History at Lancaster University, and Sociology at Newcastle University, and - in fact - I see this as a fair summation of my work - the 'in-between' - and my interest in mobilities. I completed my doctorate in history in 2013, writing a thesis reappraising the relationship between modernity, history and desire, arguing that history (and its own historical becoming) is much better appraised as a desire peculiar to modern social relations than as any hermeneutic becoming of a peculiar academic form. This brought me into contact with infrastructures, and passages between space; in particular, I have been drawn by non-representation methods to consider the endlessly and immanently floating structures of place and space, which refuse any attempt to pin them down. I have attempted to tie these interests back into a founding desire of my PhD work, the attempt to draw a potential surrealist philosophy of history. My other interests in this regard have included photography, queer theory, and ethnographic methods.
Samantha Wilkinson - I am a second year PhD student, attending The University of Manchester. My research is interested in enhancing understandings of young people’s alcohol consumption practices and experiences. More specifically, I aim to explore young people’s alcohol consumption experiences whilst they are traversing space; this goes beyond the predominant view in the literature of young people drinking in bounded, pre-formed drinking arenas. I am interested in two predominant aspects of young people’s alcohol-related (im)mobilities. First, I aim to elucidate the embodied, emotional and affective aspects of young people’s alcohol-related (im)mobilities. For instance, how young people move whilst drinking in an attempt to maintain friendships, seek excitement, and thrill etc. Second, I am interested in the more rational aspects of young people’s alcohol-related (im)mobilities – how young people drink in mobile spaces in an attempt to extend the cost-effectiveness of the pre-drinking session beyond the realm of the home, to ensure their level of drunkenness does not decline prior to accessing their desired drinking destinations for the night. In order to do so, complimenting interviews and diaries, I utilise more-than-representational methods, including: go-along (auto)ethnographic participation, and ‘go along’ mobile phone interviews, which aim to capture the fluidity of young people’s drinking practices and experiences.
Dennis Zuev - Lancaster University
