Everyday Mobilities Symposium - Thursday 4 July 2024

The Everyday Mobilities Workshop was a hybrid event at the University of Exeter with some speakers on-site and others online.

In recent years, daily travel - especially in urban spaces - has been increasingly politicised. Concerns about the climate emergency, air pollution, and inequities of health and risk exposures have shifted discussions about everyday mobility, simultaneously producing new policy thinking, planning experiments, activist movements, and public backlash. This workshop opens up these developments to critical reflection, interdisciplinary exploration, and historical consideration. It explores the social relations, cultural frames, and environmental concerns with which everyday travel has become entangled in different local, national and transnational contexts, as well as attending to the varied histories and possible futures of "getting around".

Session 1: Culture & Mobility
Chair & Comment: Professor Judy Green
Dr Martin Moore (Exeter): “You’re riding this train over and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over… and then you die”: health, illness and the commute in Britain since 1945”
Professor Alison Stenning (Newcastle): "Children, families, the environment and play on streets” remote presentation
Dr Anant Jani (Oxford): “The medicalisation of mobility”

Session 2: Environment & Mobility
Chair & Comment: Dr Emma Garnett
Professor Dian Nostikasari (Drake), “"Inhabiting Digital Spaces: An Informational Right to the City for Mobility Justice" remote presentation
Dr Tom Breen (Oxford Brookes), “Mapping movement: documenting rights of way on the definitive map”

Session 3: Age, Gender & Mobility
Chair & Comment: Professor Peter Norton (Virginia) remote presentation
Dr Tiina Männistö-Funk (Turku), “Gender and age in activism: A history of situated transport knowledge”
Silke Zimmer-Merkle (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology), TBC remote presentation
Dr Elsa Devienne (Northumbria), “‘Surely the time has come to abolish that barbaric twice-daily ritual?’: Performance, Politics and Pollution on the British School Run”

Queer mobilities: The hidden costs of LGBTQ+ people in public transportation
Plenary Session led by Professor Martin Zebracki

Where Next?
Discussion: Network future and special edition