CeMoRe 20th Anniversary Colloquium PGR/ECR Workshop

Monday 17 July 2023

¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½, UK

Application Deadline: 5pm Friday 28 April 2023.    

Contact: Lynne Pearce (CeMoRe Acting Director) L.Pearce@lancaster.ac.uk

CeMoRe is pleased to announce that it has funding for 4 travel + subsistence bursaries (up to a value of ?350 each) to enable PhD students or Early Career Researchers* to participate in a workshop at our 20th Anniversary Colloquium on Monday 17th July 2023.  The conference fee and two night¡¯s accommodation on campus will also be paid for by us.

The purpose of the colloquium is to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of CeMoRe in 2003 and co-founder, Mimi Sheller, will be giving a special anniversary lecture entitled ¡®MOBILITY JUSTICE AND CLIMATE REPARATIONS: REFLECTING ON 20 YEARS OF MOBILITIES ¸é·¡³§·¡´¡¸é°ä±á¡¯. In the morning, CeMoRe¡¯s past and present directors will also present short papers reviewing progress in the field over the past 20 years.

During the afternoon workshop session, ECRs will present short, 20-minute papers on any aspect of their research relevant to mobilities scholarship in the presence of CeMoRe¡¯s current directors and associate directors and any other colloquium participants who wish to attend.

The support of the next generation of mobilities scholars has always been very important to the CeMoRe team – including its late co-founder, John Urry – which is why we feel it important to mark our 20th anniversary in this way.

To apply, applicants should complete the short online form (see link above) by 5pm on Friday 28th April 2023. (N.B.  this asks for full name, current position, disciplinary affiliation(s), Institution, email contact, 300-word statement on why you are applying for the place & how it will contribute to your career, a title and 200-word abstract for a 20-minute talk). 

Given that we have limited funds available for the travel bursary, we expect that most of those who apply will be travelling from within the UK.  However, international scholars are welcome to apply if they are able to fund the cost of the international  travel to the UK themselves.

We look forward to receiving your applications.

Lynne Pearce (CeMoRe Co-Director (Humanities) and Acting Director

*The AHRC definition of ECR grant eligibility applies. Therefore, for the purposes of this opportunity an ECR is defined as someone who is either within eight years of their PhD award or equivalent professional training, or within 6 years of their first academic appointment (the first full or part time paid employment contract that lists research or teaching as the primary function). These periods exclude any career break, for example due to family care, health reasons, and reasons related to COVID-19.  

Stephanie is a Lecturer in Climate Change and Health at the University of  Manchester and he research focuses on vital mobilities — how goods, such as blood, saline IV solution, and oxygen move from the point manufacture to the point of care, and how such  supply chains can be made more resilient in a changing climate. See this blood illustration to learn more about her work.In her book, Stephanie uses two Atlantic Canadian case studies as a springboard, and contributes to pressing cultural and policy discussions about community resilience by imagining human mobility that works with, rather than against, the climate in ways that benefit local communities.

Focusing on community advocates, policy makers, and academics,  Stephanie called for a transformative approach to mobility and offer five recommendations:  revolutionising mobility, prioritizing vital mobilties,embracing green and blue, rebranding redundancy, and thinking flex.

You can now watch the entire webinar below:

This podcast explores social, digital and physical mobilities in Cumbria from a social design and business perspective.  Nasser Bahrami, Social Analyst in the Cumbria Innovation Platform ¡®Connected Cumbria¡¯ project draws on his knowledge as a design researcher to discuss the innovative, and sometimes global relational networks small and medium sized  companies based in Cumbria have spun, he discusses challenges and opportunities for logistics efficiencies in the remote and beautiful Cumbrian hills, the potential of 5G and digital connectivity, how to make businesses more resilient in a climate-smart way, using a systems approach to solve issues without creating new ones. This is a really rich, wide-ranging conversations about emplaced multi-layered mobilities.

Edited by Luis Eduardo P¨¦rez Murcia and Sara Bonfanti

Bringing together the voices of nine individuals from an archive of over two hundred in-depth interviews with transnational migrants and refugees across five European countries, , a new book edited by Luis Eduardo P¨¦rez Murcia and Sara Bonfanti, critically engages with how home is experienced by those who move among changing social and cultural constraints. Highly conscious of the political strength of their voices, migrants and asylum seekers speak out loud to the authors, as this volume seeks to challenge the narrative that these people are ¡®out of place¡¯ or cannot claim their right to belong. Read the following extract from the introduction:

.

Reviews said

Through a series of richly etched and complex life stories of mobility, displacement and home, the book offers a captivating and insightful journey into migrants¡¯ search for home on the move negotiating roots and routes, and the struggles and challenges they face in doing so both in the public and domestic arena, including around practices of food preparation and sharing.

Nando Sigona, Professor of International Migration and Displacement, University of Birmingham, UK.

This is an ambitious exploration of the struggles and journeys of ¡®home¡¯ as it is sought for and experienced by migrants and refugees settling in Europe. The volume impresses with its conceptual scrutiny and width of multiple disciplinarity that together highlight the migrants¡¯ diverse meanings and experiences of home or the lack of it, and how these are traversed on the move. 

The authors¡¯ commitment to ethnographic longitudinal studies and individual biographies brings us close up to concrete life stories and life as it is lived travelling from place to place, thus challenging and extending our knowledge, understanding, empathy, senses and tastes of homes left behind, homes in the making, and homes aspired for ¨C all so much useful for making our communities open for the homes of everyone.

Anne S. Gr?nseth, Professor in Social Anthropology, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, NO

This unique and highly original contribution to the study of migration and homemaking builds on the long-term and collaborative research of an interdisciplinary team of sociologists, anthropologists and development researchers. With remarkable attention to ethnographic detail, the book engages with the moving life stories of nine diverse migrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America now living in Europe. 

What makes this volume particularly compelling is how it weaves together sophisticated theorizing of home and migration with the lived, felt and narrated experiences of making home under often very difficult conditions. The volume strongly enriches our understanding of how searching, struggling and sustaining to belong is located in the precarious idea of home.

Julia Pauli, Professor in Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg, DE

Finding Home in Europe: Chronicles of Global Migrants is a feast of stories and analysis, carefully curated in relation to the authors¡¯ two kinds of intended reader: academic social scientists and the public at large. 

Skilfully using a combination of oral history and ethnography, each of the nine main chapters is woven around the life story of one of the two hundred people who participated in a large-scale, four-year research project investigating searches for and struggles over home. The chapters are distinct from each other,  each illuminating a specific theme. Impressively, they are at the same time scholarly and highly readable, evidencing long periods of thinking and analysis, as well as collaboration between chapter author and life story narrator (some of whom double as photographer/illustrator). 

This is an ambitious book and a rewarding read. The editors¡¯ substantial Introduction locates the work at the intersection of several academic disciplines, and enticingly sets up the chronicles that follow as lying between fact and fiction. Three subsequent reviews serve to introduce each of the three main sections of the book, the last of which explores the sensuous worlds of food and cooking and their relations to home. While in many ways a beautiful book, the academic authors and their collaborating oral history narrators are not romantic. 

Finding Home in Europe: Chronicles of Global Migrants is simultaneously both a book of individual stories and a critical analysis of how structural inequalities, including class, racisms and patriarchy and the legacies of European colonialism both shape and are occasionally subverted by the lives chronicled in its pages.

Ben Rogaly, Professor of Human Geography, University of Sussex, UK

Until 8 April 2023 Berghahn offers a 50% discount on orders of the hardback for personal use placed directly via , using the code PERE8508.

20th ANNIVERSARY (2003-2023)

Programme of Events

**F E B R U A R Y   U P D A T E **

Academic year 2022-3 marks the twentieth anniversary of Lancaster¡¯s Centre for Mobilities Research which was founded by John Urry and Mimi Sheller in 2003. The current CeMoRe team would like to celebrate this special occasion by reaching out to friends and colleagues around the world who have been on the mobilities journey with us in the hope that we can meet with you – virtually or in person – at some point over the coming year.

To this end, we share below our continuing programme of events for 2023 and we would like to thank everyone who has attended our events that have taken place thus far. The programme of events culminates in a strand dedicated to the CeMoRe Anniversary at 2023¡¯s Annual T2M Conference. 

We will be hosting an exhibition and in-person event at ¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½ to run alongside the main conference taking place at Konkuk University in Seoul (South Korea). The hybrid format of the conference will also facilitate the participation of groups and individuals from around the world who would prefer to join us remotely.  We will be writing to colleagues who we believe may be interested in this opportunity soon.

In the meantime, we would be delighted to welcome colleagues based in the UK to the Lancaster-based events listed below as well the online workshops and seminars.

10^th March, 1.00-2.30pm (British Standard Time): CeMoRe Spring Webinar (Online)

Dr Stephanie Sodero (Climate Change and Health, Manchester University) 

¡®UNDER THE WEATHER: REIMAGINING MOBILITY IN THE CLIMATE CRISIS¡¯ 

 At this online event Stephanie Sodero will be talking about her new book, ‘Under the Weather: Reimagining Mobility in the Climate Crisis¡¯, with discussants Monika Buscher and Mimi Sheller. There will also be an opportunity to participate in the discussion and ask questions.

Follow this link for more information and to .

12^th May: Art Mobilities Webinar (Online) 4.00-5.30pm BST

Dr Jen Southern (¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½) and Kaya Barry. 

Details to be confirmed at a later date, please refer to our website and mailing list for upcoming information. 

25^th May:  CeMoRe Summer Seminar with Dr Sharon Wilson (¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½ / in-person) 4.00-6.00pm BST (Room to be confirmed).

Dr Sharon Wilson (Northumbria University and Mobilities Futures Research Network)

PUTTING ¡°FLESH ON THE BONEYARD¡±; EVERYDAY MILITARIES AND MUSEUM, A MOBILITIES PERSPECTIVE.

This is an in-person event, exact location on campus to be confirmed closer to the date. For more information and to register for the event please .

17^th July 2023:  CeMoRe 20th Anniversary Colloquium (¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½ / in-person and online) 

This event will incorporate presentations from CeMoRe¡¯s past and present directors, a PGR/ECR workshop/masterclass (with competitive travel bursaries for up to four students) and Mimi Sheller¡¯s 20th Anniversary Lecture:

¡®MOBILITY JUSTICE AND CLIMATE REPARATIONS: REFLECTING ON 20 YEARS OF MOBILITIES ¸é·¡³§·¡´¡¸é°ä±á¡¯

Eventbrite registration (online and in-person) will be advertised via the CeMoRe website and mailing list in the near future together with details of PGR/ECR funding for the workshop.

Early expressions of interest are also welcome: please contact us at cemore@lancaster.ac.uk  

October 25-28th 2023:  Annual T2M Conference (Seoul, South Korea and ¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½ / in-person and online)

CONFERENCE THEME: MOBILITY, AESTHETICS AND ETHICS

A conference strand will be dedicated to CeMoRe¡¯s 20th anniversary at this year¡¯s T2M conference and we will be reaching out to colleagues around the world in the hope of putting together a series of online panels. In the meantime, if you would like to propose your own panel please contact us at  cemore@lancaster.ac.uk.

 To coincide with the conference, Jen Southern will be curating an online international exhibition – ¡®ROCKY FUTURES¡¯  (see link following for details) – and at least two in-person / live-stream panels relating to the exhibition will take place at ¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½.

CeMoRe is also happy to host in-person / live-stream panels convened by UK/European conference participants, with ¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½  functioning as a European hub for those unable to travel to South Korea. 

26^th October 2023: Annual John Urry Lecture (¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½/ in-person)

Alice Mah (Professor of Sociology and Head of Department, University of Warwick). 

Full details and registration to be confirmed at a later date. 

To be kept up to date on future events and activity at CeMoRe please view our website. 

CeMoRe Website:  /cemore. 

If you are not already signed up the CeMoRe mailing list and would like to be kept updated, please email cemore@lancaster.ac.uk to be added to the list. 

If you have any other queries please contact:

Lynne Pearce (Co-Director Humanities and Acting Director): L.Pearce@lancaster.ac.uk

Harriet Phipps (CeMoRe Administrator): cemore@lancaster.ac.uk

The tech entrepreneur predicts smart solutions will eliminate the need for purchase and traffic restrictions in China by 2027, and traffic jam could be basically gone by 2032.

Baidu, once the ¡°B¡± in China¡¯s so-called BAT Internet titans (A=Alibaba and T=Tencent), has for some years been considered as increasingly lagging behind its larger rivals in arenas such as video, gaming, and social media.

The dominant search engine in China, where Google isn¡¯t available, has doubled down on artificial intelligence with notable progress. In August 2022, two big cities Baidu approval to operate ride-hailing services without a driver or a person overseeing safety in the vehicle. At the end of the year, Baid and Toyota Motor Corp-backed startup pony. ai were  the first licenses to test fully autonomous vehicles without safety operators as a backup in the Chinese capital of Beijing.

More recently, curiously,  and  cited an anonymous source, respectively, as saying Baidu would launch a ChatGPT-style bot in March. It¡¯s unknown if it¡¯s the same talkative person who leaked the same thing to the .

Anyways, Baidu is known to have bet heavily on artificial intelligence. Robin Li, its Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, recently elaborated on Baidu¡¯s thinking in the . Below is an abridged translation of his speech, entitled ´´ÐÂÇý¶¯Ôö³¤£¬·´À¡Çý¶¯´´Ð Innovation drives growth, feedback drives innovation.

[Disclosure: This is NOT sponsor content. Fei Yu, a contributor to Pekingnology and Ph.D. student at ¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½ studying mobility, wanted to run something related to mobility.]

Over the past year, there have been fewer discussions about windfall and more focus on growth health. Today, my talk will center around the topic of growth. Where does growth come from? What drives sustainable growth?

The world’s average GDP per capita over the past 2000 years is shown in the graph. As you can see, there was not much change in the average GDP per capita in the early 1800s. However, there has been significant growth in the past 250 years. This explosive growth was due to several technological revolutions in human history. Technology innovation drives significant growth.

In my opinion, deep learning algorithms would be the hallmark of the fourth technological revolution. The efficiency gains brought about by this technology, and the economic growth it drives are greater than many people imagine. Major innovations in deep learning include self-driving vehicles and intelligent scheduling systems in fields such as hydropower. These innovations have significant social impacts, similar to the impact of inventions like automobiles and the internet.

So, it is technology innovation that drives significant growth. But where does innovation come from?

The concept can be summarized as “feedback-driven innovation.” Scientists conducted a thought experiment. If a blind person is given a scrambled Rubik’s cube and asked to restore it at a rate of one rotation per second, how long will it take for the person to restore the cube? The answer is 137 billion years. But if someone gives feedback to the blind person after each rotation, indicating whether they are getting closer to or farther away from the goal, how long will it take to restore the cube? The answer is just 2 and a half minutes! This demonstrates the power of feedback.

Innovation cannot be a closed-door activity. Innovation requires market entry and continuous feedback from users and customers. It can only be achieved through “feedback”.

Baidu has many examples of “feedback-driven innovation” in its business development. For example, Baidu’s Kunlun Chip, which has leading performance in AI chips, was optimized for Baidu’s search services for ten years. Baidu’s search services respond to billions of real user demands daily, providing the most accurate and timely feedback, and driving optimization of large models, deep learning frameworks, and chips. This is a classic case of real large-scale feedback driving innovation.

Another example is Baidu’s release of the number of orders for its Apollo Go every quarter since last year. The goal is to maintain the leading global position in orders for autonomous driving services. This is also the philosophy of “feedback-driven innovation”. The largest number of orders means the most market and user feedback.

The actual development path of things is often different from the original idea. Technology development does not have a roadmap, only a compass. By iterating based on feedback from practice, valuable innovation can be achieved with the direction roughly correct.

Baidu is one of the few global AI companies that implement full-stack deployment. The company’s work can be divided into four layers: chip layer, framework layer, model layer, and application layer. From the high-end chip Kunlun to the deep learning framework PaddlePaddle to the pre-trained large model WENXIN, there are key self-developed technologies at each level, with feedback between each level. By continuously receiving feedback, end-to-end optimization is achieved.

The technology architecture becomes more general as it moves down and more specialized as it moves up. This means the threshold for industry use of technology is continuously lowered while the application is deepened in the industry.

Specifically, there are two aspects to consider in developing artificial intelligence. On the one hand, the general applicability of AI technology is improving, and the barriers to development and application are lowering. On the other hand, AI is penetrating industries and driving the growth of the real economy.

Intelligent transportation, called by me an “intelligent dispatch system,” can enhance traffic efficiency by controlling the flow through smart traffic lights. This can increase traffic efficiency by 15% to 30%. Baidu’s solution has been implemented in 63 cities and officially recognized by the Ministry of Transport. The Ministry has listed Baidu as a pilot in building a strong transportation nation.

It is predicted that intelligent transportation will eliminate the need for traffic restrictions in first-tier cities in China before 2027, thereby boosting automobile consumption and revitalizing the city’s economy post-pandemic. Before 2032, the problem of traffic congestion can largely be solved by improving traffic efficiency.

The application of intelligent transportation creates new opportunities in energy, electricity, water supply, and other fields by utilizing the “intelligent dispatch system” to achieve significant efficiency gains. This presents a great opportunity for developers and creators.

As the barriers to technology application continue to decrease, creators will enter a golden era of AI. While the direction of development is clear, the implementation process is challenging and there will be obstacles. However, these challenges drive innovation and innovation is the true driver of growth.

In recent years, there has been a directional change in AI, both in technology and business applications. On the technological level, AI has shifted from content understanding to content generation, including AI-generated content for various forms of creation, such as paintings, texts, graphics, videos, etc.

In terms of commercial applications, self-driving is the most significant change. Previously, it was thought that technology would progress from L2 to L5 incrementally. However, L4 technology may enter commercial use before L3, as liability for accidents in L2 and L4 is clear, but liability in L3 is uncertain. Baidu’s L4 self-driving has quickly gained traction with over 1.4 million orders as of September 2023. It operates in multiple cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, and has opened fully unmanned operations in Chongqing and Wuhan.

However, the challenges are significant. Many areas of the real economy have not yet undergone digital transformation, and digitalization has not yet brought about significant efficiency improvements. The widespread implementation of AI will take time, and its impact on the real economy is not yet widely accepted. The commercialization of AI still requires exploration in the unknown.

Difficulties stimulate innovation, and innovation is the driving force of growth. The keywords “crisis and hope” can be used to summarize this.

However, we must acknowledge that the challenges are substantial. In reality, the digital transformation in many aspects of the real economy has not yet been fully realized, and digitalization has not resulted in a substantial increase in efficiency. The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence still takes time, and its potential impact on the real economy is yet to be widely acknowledged. Thus, the commercialization of AI still has some uncertainty ahead of it.

I used “crisis and hope” as keywords and an AI generated this painting on the Baidu AI drawing platform. I find it very vivid. A new, lively life has broken through the ice, but the cold has not yet fully receded. All great enterprises and creators face the same challenges, with no smooth sailing but only persistent difficulties and triumphs. Difficulties drive innovation, and innovation is the real driving force behind growth.

The talk had an excellent audience with interesting discussion led by Dr Luciana Barbosa and Dr Yvonne Reddick.

Thank you to all attendees and special thanks to Dr Andrew Baldwin for his fascinating talk; to Dr Giovanni Bettini for chairing the discussion and to our discussants Dr Luciana Barbosa and Dr Yvonne Reddick for their through provoking comments and questions.

If you missed the webinar or would like to watch it again please click the link below the recording of the event:

¡°And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?¡±
(Virginia Woolf: Street Haunting, 1927)

While in Lancaster, I visited the Oxfam secondhand book shop on Penny Street and happened to buy a collection of eerie tales edited by the folklorist Elizabeth Dearnley, including among others Virginia Woolf?s 1927 essay on street haunting. In it, the first-person leaves their London home on a winter evening to buy a pencil, but actually to follow the desire of rambling the streets. The narrator also visits a secondhand book shop, and Woolf writes:

¡°Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather¡±

As a historian of walking and material entanglements, I often think about such wild flocks. For are we not all parts in swarms of vitalities, as Jane Bennett would put it? And what does that mean to us as academic beings, being parts of academic flocks and swarms?

I was delighted to be the first visiting scholar in CeMoRe since the start of the pandemic. The visit was included in my Academy of Finland fellowship for studying the history of non-motorised modes of mobility in Finland. I spent a couple of weeks at the university in the late October and early November, had the much-appreciated opportunity to present my work focusing on pedestrian activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and met several wonderful colleagues who gave me their time for discussions, dinners and lunches, as well as walked with me or generously drove me around in their cars and showed me unforgettable sights; trees, towers, mills, moors.

But I also spent quite a large amount of my time wandering along dimly lit streets, looking for the address of my next lodgings with the help of google maps, dragging my unproportionally large suitcase on the bumpy pavement, wondering what to eat, and slightly questioning my life-choices. Or waiting on the side of the road for a bus to university while rain and hails hammered down on me and my fellow passengers-in-waiting, students and school children stoically getting wet while the bus never seemed to come or passed unapologetically bearing the sign ¡°Bus Full¡±. And, in the sense of Woolfian street haunting, maybe this was also a valuable part of my visit.

Woolf?s narrator finds that rambling the streets loosens up the walls of one?s own personality, so fixed and determined while inside one?s own house, allowing the self to be blown this way and that, touching and feeling other lives and existences.

And so I am thinking about all the chance meetings and fleeting moments in Lancaster: 

Different rented rooms where, like Woolf writes, ¡°the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it¡±. How I felt that some of them were so full of past lives distilled that the atmospheres had formed into proper ghosts.

But staying also in a spare room of a couple whose dog was very afraid of the Bonfire Night fireworks. Looking at the miniature railway wagons placed on shelves near the ceiling.

Hearing noises in the dark, smelling unfamiliar things. Using my telephone as a torch in order to find my way on slippery passages through gardens and yards, trying to identify the right door.

Then staying a couple of nights in the hotel where Dickens once stayed and ate cake, but definitely far from his rooms, tucked in the upper-most corner of the building where the wind was attacking windows during the night and the carpets of the corridor were being ripped off by renovators during the day. Coming back late one evening and discovering that the desk and lamp in my room had been replaced by quite different ones, as through magic.

Remembering the Finnish researcher whom I met in a sauna on a German freight ship last summer and whose name I have forgotten. How she had worked in Lancaster and told me: there is this one road in Lancaster, be near it and you will be ok.

Going every day to a very small Spar that in the end of the week did not have any instant porridge cups anymore, because I had bought and consumed them all.

Walking in the middle of streams of students on the campus, amazed by their sheer number. 

Taking the bus with students, hearing them talking about their housing situations or master?s theses, some of them dressed in a bed sheet turned into a toga or using two pencils as chopsticks to eat a risotto.

Glimpsing some persons who looked like professors and lecturers, purposefully disappearing into corridors and rooms, with doors that had posters urging university staff to vote and print-outs with memes about late-stage capitalism.

Meeting a freshly arrived Malaysian master¡¯s student while walking down the Chapel Lane towards Galgate late at night and starting a conversation in order to have the courage to pass the old graveyard illuminated by the moon.

It is apparent that the distant work of past years has made us acutely aware of the mundane peculiarity of bodily meetings. We seem to agree that both distance and presence have their own merits. But what exactly is the value of bodily presence? How on earth is it worth taking the train across half of Europe with too much luggage, desperately trying to understand the workings of British rail system, just because one stubbornly avoids air travel while the world continues to melt down and burn up, nonetheless? 

Is it even possible to describe the material complexity of a university, to define the value of all the bodies coming together? A university follows the depressing workings of late-stage capitalism, to be sure, but also includes some magic of its own, a flock and swarm, a shifting of variegated feather. Moving one?s body through such a university is not only beneficial in the sense of facilitating academic meetings that can be richer, more surprising, and more spontaneous than the meetings online. 

Haunting the corridors and passages has its own value that is difficult to pinpoint, as it consists of overheard snippets of ordinary discussions, of the sight and sense of many anonymous others, the way they carry books and expressions, inhabit rooms and lives. It lets the materiality of the world tug at our selves like the Lancaster wind tugging umbrellas. And that necessitates being a body walking in the dark, like Woolf?s narrator who now starts towards home again:

¡°In these minutes in which a ghost has been sought for, a quarrel composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty. Life had withdrawn to the top floor, and lamps were lit. The pavement was dry and hard; the road was of hammered silver.¡±

Author:

Tiina M?nnist?-Funk is an Academy of Finland research fellow at the University of Turku, studying the history of non-motorised transport modes and the change in Finnish living environments. She has recently published for example on the gender of walking, history of kerbstones, and talking cars as a cultural and material phenomenon. She is the editor of the book Invisible Bicycle (Brill, 2019).

References:

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter?: a Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010

Dearnley, Elizabeth. Into the London Fog?: Eerie Tales from the Weird City. London: British Library, 2020.

Colin is Emeritus Professor of Social and Historical Geography in the Environment Centre at ¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½ and has been a member of CeMoRe since its inception. Marilyn Pooley (also a Historical Geography) likewise worked at ¶¶ÒõAPPµ¼º½ for many years prior to her retirement. Their back-catalogue of publications on everyday mobility in nineteenth- and twentieth-century drawing upon diaries and other life-writing is extensive and has brought many invaluable and fascinating resources to light.

Please use the discount code in the image above if you choose to purchase the book.

The workshop, on the theme of ¡®Mobility and the Production of Urban Space¡¯, attracted an audience from across the Humanities and Social Sciences and it was inspiring to see how Tiina and Anna-Leena (based in History and Literary Studies respectively) are bringing long-standing mobilities research on transport, space and urban studies to bear upon their fascinating textual and historical materials.

The titles of their two talks were:

¡°Pedestrian as a by-product or producer of modernist urban space?¡± – Tiina Mannisto-Funk

¡°Clandestine in Paris: Metropolitan mobilities in African fiction.¡± – Anna-Leena Toivanen

Recent Publications include:

Tiina Mannisto-Funk

M?nnist?-Funk, Tiina (2022): ¡°One fine day your car will also start to speak:¡± Automotive voices as promises of machine intelligence. ICON 27 (1), 117¨C138.

M?nnist?-Funk, Tiina (2021): What kerbstones do: A century of street space from the perspective of one material actor. Cultural History 10 (1), 61¨C90.

M?nnist?-Funk, Tiina (2021): The Gender of Walking: Female Pedestrians in Street Photographs 1890¨C1989. Urban History 48 (2), 227¨C247

Anna-Leena

Anna-Leena will be visiting us in Lancaster in the spring/summer of 2023 and if anyone would like to get in touch with either scholar please send an email to?cemore@lancaster.ac.uk?and we will put you in touch.

The featured image for this post is the title page for Tiina’s current Whose City Project, the link for the full comic can be found by clicking