The discursive accomplishment of rationalities in the automobility regime

Today, a century after the introduction of the Model T, automobility has proven to be a severe, if not unsurpassable problem for contemporary Western societies. This chapter proposes to conceptualise our current, car-dependent living as a regime of automobility embedded in advanced liberalism and bound up with the freedom as autonomy discourse. It reports on a recent ethnographic study in a small village in Denmark in order to demonstrate the proposed approach to regimes of automobility. Considering the blatant fact that automobility accounts for such an extremely high amount of human-caused environmental pollution and CO2 emissions, it may be no surprise that reducing energy use and mitigating climate change both feature prominently on the current academic transport research agenda. The chapter focuses on the ethnomethodological methods of conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) throughout the analysis of the focus group data in order to study the accomplishment of rationalities in the automobility regime.