Making Sense of Heterogeneous and Unequal Geographies of Passengers - CfP AAG 2016

[Jean-Baptiste Fretigny]

Making Sense of Heterogeneous and Unequal Geographies of Passengers

Call for Papers: AAG 2016 San Francisco, CA

Jean-Baptiste Fretigny (Université de Cergy-Pontoise)
Weiqiang Lin (National University of Singapore)

Apologies for cross-posting

 

Mobilities scholars have stressed the significance of passengering as an (out-of-) every day event of modern life, both a product of travel- and transportation-related industries and a relatively passive form of mobile subjectivity. A stimulating and increasing body of work on such topic is now at stake and this session intends to contribute to this dynamic by addressing the question of heterogeneities in the geographies of passengers.

 

Most studies tend to particularly describe the individualizing and generic experience of being a passenger in different transportation modes, echoing the standardization processes involved in the production of passengering. Other works however situate passengers’ spatialities more precisely in various social and cultural contexts, be they of gender, age, race, class or nationality. They are concerned with addressing the contrasted geographies of passengers with which institutional actors and mobile subjects are confronted every day. Diversifying our often too unifying narratives of passengering involves revisiting (non) academic categories, as well as our empirical materials, tools and theories to understand in more encompassing ways how multiple differences, social hierarchies and power geometries shape geographies of passengering in its unique situation.

 

Paying more attention to multiple differences between passengers is indeed paramount to better understanding the personal and collective meaning encapsulated in the complex spatialities of passengering. This session intends to open up further directions, inviting scholars to bridge the gap between the micro-scale of the body or the macro-scale of the world on the one hand, and the multiple intermediary spatial and social scales, collectives, institutions, and infrastructures on the other. It welcomes discussions on the power dynamics engaged when passengers and/or others are thrown together and set apart, in a mobile segregation between and inside each transportation network. To grasp inequalities cutting across passengers and others, binaries or discrete categories, such as business and leisure, global and local, hypermobile and slow passengers, kinetic elite and kinetic underclass, as well as new categorizations, will be challenged. This session seeks to explore not only their analytical power as representational figures, but also their uses by institutional actors, their performativity as possible mobile forms of identifications as well as their potential blurring by passengers’ own practices.

 

In this CFP we invite all submissions intending to unpack plural passengers’ geographies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• gender, race, class, age, sexuality and other social and intersectional relationships of domination at play in the power geometries of passengers geographies;

• categorical, binary, iconic or universal figures of passengers;

• the travel-industry making of passengers as a social and spatial engineering;
• security profiling and heterogeneous experiences of passengering;

• passengers’ agency, performances and resistance to standardized categories;

• contrasted (im)mobile activities and travel time uses of passengers;

• collective/individualized spatialities of passengers;

• passengers and confrontation to alterity;

• contrasted affects, bodies and emotions of passengers;

• socially and spatially situated imaginaries of passengers;

• changing, contingent and spatially situated production and experience of passengers at different scales.

 

Please email abstracts of less than 250 words to Jean-Baptiste Fretigny (jean-baptiste.fretigny@u-cergy.fr) and Weiqiang Lin (weiq...@nus.edu.sg) by 15th October 2015.

Successful applicants will be contacted by 22th October 2015, and will be expected to register and submit their abstracts online to the AAG website by 29th October 2015.