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Speakers

This event will bring together leading theorists and practitioners, transport professionals, computer experts, artists, policy-makers, established academics and junior researchers who are contributing in some way to this paradigm.

Invited speakers include:

• Peter Adey
• Rachel Aldred
• Barry Brown
• Bianca Freire Medeiros
• Ole B Jensen
• Caren Kaplan
• Sven Kesselring
• Eric Laurier
• James Marriott
• Valerie November
• Leysia Palen
• Kim Sawchuk
• Mimi Sheller
• Elizabeth Shove
• Adriana da Souze e Silva
• John Urry
• Susan Zielinski

Conference Format

Based at Lancaster University, the conference will be multi-sited with events, lectures, seminars, exhibitions, video streams and short talks linked together around the world.

It will be curated by Lancaster staff but with high participation from other mobility centres and networks.

Speakers Mini Biographies

Peter Adey

Peter Adey - Reader in Human Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London

Rachel Aldred

Rachel Aldred is a sociologist based Westminster University's Department of Planning and Transport. She has written extensively on cycling, having led the ESRC Cycling Cultures research project (2010-11). Current projects include the ESRC seminar series Modelling on the Move and the ESRC Secondary Data Analysis project Changing Commutes. Her website can be found at rachelaldred.org

Barry Brown

Barry Brown is co director of MobileLife at the University of Stockholm. He was previously an associate professor at the University of California, a research fellow at the University of Glasgow and a research scientist at Hewlett-Packard’s research labs in Bristol. His recent work has focused on the sociology and design of leisure technologies - computer systems for leisure and pleasure. Recent publications span top forums in both social and technology fields, and include studies of activities as diverse as games, tourism, museum visiting, the use of maps, television watching and sport spectating. He has a book forthcoming with MIT press titled "enjoying machines", and he has edited books on music consumption and mobile phone use. His qualifications include a degree in computer science from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD in sociology from the University of Surrey.

Bianca Freire-Medeiros

Bianca Freire-Medeiros is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Center for Research and Documentation on Brazilian Contemporary History (CPDOC) at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She was a Research Fellow at the Center for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University in 2009 and is the author of Touring Poverty (Routledge Advances in Sociology, 2013). 

Ole B Jensen

Ole B. Jensen is Professor of Urban Theory at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University (Denmark).He holds a BA in Political Science, an MA in Sociology and a PhD in Planning. He is co-founder and board member at the Center for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS), Aalborg and Task Force Member in the Cosmobilities Network. His main research interests are within Urban Mobilities, Urban Networked Technologies, and Performative Environments. He is the co-author of Making European Space. Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity, Routledge, 2004 (with Tim Richardson), and author of Staging Mobilities, Routledge, 2013.

Caren Kaplan

Caren Kaplan - Professor of American Studies, University of California, Davis, US. Studies of travel, tourism, displacement; postcolonial studies; consumer subjects in transnational culture; the visual logics of location and navigation technologies; and theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism.

Sven Kesselring

Sven Kesselring is professor in mobility, governance and planning at Aalborg University, Denmark, and teaches at the Technische Universität München. He is the head of mobilities research at Innovationsmanufaktur GmbH in Munich and since 2004 spokesman of the international Cosmobilities Network (www.cosmobilities.net).

Since 1996, he has been conducting research projects that centre on mobility and risk, governance and planning, corporate mobilities regimes and mobile technologies.

His current research centers on the social ramifications of corporate mobility and mobile work and on the social and politic consequences of new networking technologies on urban mobility politics and planning.

Eric Laurier

Eric Laurier, is currently the principal investigator on 'Assembling the line: amateur & professional work, skills and practice in digital video editing', funded by the ESRC, working together with Barry Brown & Ignaz Strebel. Although officially completed, as is the way with university research projects, I continue to work on the ESRC funded 'Habitable cars: the organisation of collective private transport' with Barry Brown & Hayden Lorimer. Alongside this I organise the Scottish Ethnomethodology, Discourse, Interaction & Technology group (SEDIT) with Sue Widdicombe & Claire Haggett and various activities of the Human Geography Research Group at the School of Geosciences, Edinburgh. Previously I was the PI on 'The Cappuccino Community: Cafes and Civic Life in the Contemporary City', carried out with Chris Philo, and before that I had an Urban Studies Research Fellowship which allowed me to pursue research on community practices in the city. The latter drew on ethnographic fieldwork on neighborhoods and community in an Edinburgh suburb as part of the Living Memory Project. From 1997 onwards I was the principal researcher on an ESRC funded project: 'Meet You At Junction 17: a socio-technical and spatial study of the mobile office', again with Chris Philo as a co-applicant.

James Marriott

Valérie November

Latts - Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés

Valérie November specializes in risk analysis urban and natural environments, particularly their effects on the territory. She founded the ESpRi Group at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and has conducted scientific visits to Oxford University and the University of East Anglia.

Between 2006 and 2011 she led the project RiskPrint aimed at understanding the complex spatiality of risk, focussing on the exploration of new visualizations of risk. More recently, she turned to the study of risk monitoring devices (road, air transport, weather, electricity, humanitarian crises) and the analysis of the flow of information in situations of risk and crises.

Leysia Palen

Leysia Palen, Associate Professor in Computer Science, Director Project EPIC: Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis and Director of Connectivity Lab, University of Colorado at Boulder, US.

She is part of the Human-Centered Computing area. and is especially interested in multi-disciplinary research on the issues that crop up when people-meet-technology (and vice versa).

However, currently and most actively, she is working in the area of Crisis Informatics, which describes the intersecting trajectories of social, technical and information matters in crises and disasters.

Kim Sawchuk

Kim Sawchuk, Professor of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada

Mimi Sheller

Mimi Sheller, Director, Center for Mobilities Research and Policy and Professor of Sociology, Drexel University, US

Elizabeth Shove

Elizabeth Shove, Professor and Director of EPSRC/ESRC Research Centre DEMAND, Lancaster University

Adriana da Souza e Silva

Adriana da Souza e Silva, Associate Professor of Communcation, North Carolina State University, US

John Urry

John Urry, Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, and Distinguished Professor of Sociology.

Together with Mimi Sheller, Drexel University, US and Kevin Hannam, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK he is a founding editor of Mobilities journal.

Susan Zielinski

Susan Zielinski, Professor of Transportation Research and Director of Sustainable Mobility & Accessibility Research & Transformation (SMART), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, US.