The discursive accomplishment of ‘the system of the car’: – A Study of Everyday Transportation Practices in a Rural Danish Village

Description

This paper aims to heighten the understanding of everyday transportation practices and their apparent locked-in-ness in ‘the system of the car’.
It draws on Dennis and Urry’s idea that the complex system of the car is one of the systems that most saliently has contributed to and represents a major challenge in the current climate change crisis.
More specifically, the idea of such a car-system starts out from the idea that it is complex systems that explain how the world comes to be the way it does. This idea importantly opposes all naturalisations of stability, but whereas it focuses on process, moving and unpredictable responses, it at the same time suggests that certain systems at certain times come off as rather stabilised and path-dependent.
That is, as the paper follows Dennis and Urry and talk about a ‘locked-in-ness’ of the system of the car, this is not supposed to imply that it cannot be any different, and that the system can never change. Rather, the very starting point for Dennis and Urry as well as for this paper is that the system of the car is one of those locked-in legacies that – in Dennis and Urry’s wording – "need to be got rid of”.

Period	13 Jun 2011
Event type	Seminar
Location	Lancaster, United Kingdom