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.

The Societal Readiness Assessment (SoRA) panel at the Decarbon8 ‘Real Zero in a Hurry’ conference provided an excellent opportunity to delineate, develop, and discuss the SoRA framework with a live audience and representatives from , and the .

We need to reduce carbon emissions, and the societal readiness framework will make a valuable contribution to securing a more sustainable future. 

So, how can we ensure everyone develops an unwavering “comic faith in technofixes” ()? How can we make certain everyone purchases the latest decarbonising technologies? How can we make sure everyone adopts whatever new initiative ‘the experts’ come up with?  I don’t know. That’s not what societal readiness is about – although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise – especially because societal readiness is an emerging, already contested, concept.

Sometimes, societal readiness assessment is presented as a means of gauging how ready society is to embrace new ideas and products; a preliminary step in determining how best to stimulate maximum uptake of innovations. Conversely, the DecarboN8 version of societal readiness champions probing how ready decarbonising interventions (technology/policy/innovation/scheme) are for society.

Citizens deserve the chance to play an active role in shaping the technologies, policies, and schemes that will help us reach Net Zero and the DecarboN8 SoRA framework is methodology attuned to this need, as it offers a formative, collaborative means of evaluating decarbonising initiatives. Furthermore, SoRA offers a necessary counter to prescriptive solutionism by placing issues of mobility justice () and response-ability () at the fore.

Innovation doesn’t occur in a vacuum – design, production and dissemination are inextricably entangled with issues of power, equality, and access. Accordingly, societal readiness assessment offers a means of scoring a decarbonising intervention in terms of social good, equity, and utility. Additionally, evaluations are iteratively undertaken with stakeholders throughout the lifespan of a project so that many people (not only anticipated users and customers) play a part in influencing every stage of design.

It’s important to emphasise that collective development extends to SoRA too. Since its conception (), the framework has been designed in partnership with a stakeholder reference group and repeatedly restyled following trials with various collaborators. Continuing in this vein, the panel provided an opportunity for stakeholders, including the conference attendees, to critique the SoRA framework and share their SoRA analyses of other ideas presented at the event: Check out the results !

It’s difficult to summarise a panel that covered so much – the best thing to do is to encourage you to watch the video and see for yourself! You’ll be able to hear about how SoRA has been used to evaluate an e-scooter trial, why SoRA is important for young people, how SoRA could be used in tandem with , and the potential for SoRA to work in conjunction with an initiative like (Hubs of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the Transformation of Historic Urban Areas), which focusses on innovating in historic urban areas whilst maintaining the unique identity of the locale.

Watch the video here:

Please get in touch if you’d like to share your thoughts, ask questions, or collaborate in some way:

societalreadiness@lancs.ac.uk

m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk

c.cronshaw1@lancaster.ac.uk

28th Feb 2022: Abstract deadline 

4th March 2022: Acceptance emails sent  

17th June 2022: Deadline for 2,500-word papers

24th June 2022: Final Programme available. 

4th-6th July 2022: Climate Emergency Mobilities Symposium. 

Please follow this to submit your 300-word abstract

If you are an early career researcher and thinking of submitting an abstract for the symposium, you may also be interested in applying for our New Researcher Support Scheme

Nicola Spurling and David Tyfield at Lancaster CeMoRe invite contributions to the Climate Emergency Mobilities Symposium in July 2022.

Climate Emergency Mobilities Symposium Overview 
The Climate Emergency is the agenda of this generation and mobilities scholarship has a vital part to play. The impacts of anthropogenic climate change, and the associated social, technical and political responses, disrupt vital mobilities, create uninhabitable geographies, force human climate mobilities, and foreground that the capacity to move is unevenly distributed. They are also effecting major transformations in the multiple circuits of mobility, of people, things and ideas, reshaping ‘everyday life’ across the world through the construction of new (mega-)infrastructures, socio-technical innovation and political-cultural movements. Meanwhile, the transformation in local and global mobilities (from local transport to the large-scale movements of people, resources, and information around the world) is the most significant mitigation challenge.  

Responding to this situation, the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) has established climate emergency as our key research theme for the period 2020-2025, publishing a Manifesto.  Our aspiration in the next 5 years is to address the socio-cultural implications and transformations of the climate emergency through creative extensions and expressions of mobilities scholarship. This includes local and global transport, but is meant much more inclusively than this, to embrace the extensive, relational connectivities that constitute social, political and economic life. Our aim is to enable a transformation of contemporary (im)mobilities that prioritises climate justice, and which acknowledges that there is no contemporary issue that climate change does not speak to in some way. 

Building on this initial work, this Call for Abstracts takes the next step regarding a Symposium on the agenda of climate emergency and mobilities, with a view to a unique publication of the contributions to this event.  The key question motivating this work is:  

“How can mobilities thinking help formulate a new, compelling and common sense understanding of  socio-cultural change in an age of climate emergency and a changing planet?”&�Բ�����;&�Բ�����;

And equally, then in turn: 

“How does thinking with and through climate emergency, in all of the diverse forms through which it manifests in actual lives and livelihoods, alter, deepen and illuminate mobilities thinking?” 

The two questions, together, feel particularly urgent and promising to us, regarding the possibility of new and insightful ways of thinking about and responding to climate emergency.  This is not just because, as listed above, issues of actual mobilities, and immobilities, are obviously so central.  But also because mobilities thinking has, now for some 20 years, proven itself particularly generative of profound conceptual innovation, productive transdisciplinary synthesis and exciting horizon-stretching reflection. We presume, expectantly, that this fecundity will continue and this call invites paper proposals from scholars working across all disciplines who have an interest in engaging with these questions. 

Although we are unable to chart exactly where this agenda will lead, we set out a few pointers by way of inviting your contribution to this programme. Perhaps the most obvious place to start is by reflection on just how far the mobilities paradigm has itself developed since its initial emergence.  The first writing about mobilities arose at the turn of the century in the context of critiques of a burgeoning globalisation and a world that was (seen only to be increasingly) ‘on the move’.  This early work embraced the need for a new approach that could incorporate both these new constitutive, and often trans-boundary, mobilities and the various neglected immobilities they presupposed and/or enforced.  It also, therefore, both argued for and demonstrated the explanatory power of an approach that went beyond the long-settled boundaries and disciplinary silos of a presumptively static and contained social science, characterised by methodological nationalism and settled sociological categories.   

Most importantly for our purposes, while concerned about socio-environmental issues from the beginning, in the intervening two decades, climate change has escalated – whether as issue or as actuality – from one topic amongst many on which research could focus to become the ground on which all social and cultural life, and thus all research, must find its feet.  Moreover, the very extension and acceleration of mobility that was the initial interest of the mobilities turn has itself been intimately implicated in this shift. Indeed, it is almost as if the increased movement and contemporary forms of connectivity have created heat, that then, in turn, has driven more mobility in a positive feedback loop that is now leading to a phase shift, a boiling point, in the globalizing way of life and the planet on which it asymmetrically depends.  Confronting such an inflection point calls for new thinking for a new world that seems now to be unstoppably upon us but also radically uncertain.  

In short, climate emergency confronts us with the need for a paradigm shift, expanding the openings already inhabited by the mobilities paradigm to date.  And it is this that we are seeking to explore and develop in this programme.  Hence, what are keywords for the 2020s? What emergent, unanticipated, perplexing social and cultural phenomenon should be of critical concern at this time? What is unseen, yet needs to be made visible? What does this do to common-sense understandings of society, and what does it signal for the 21st Century (and beyond)?   

Our project is thus not a transition studies to keep everything together, but a new way of thinking and doing. Prefiguring a world that is worth living in,  in a way that remains cognizant of the multiple forms of change, loss and emergence that this involves. Our agenda is reflected in the questions we ask, and in our aspirations for a unique publication from the event.    

Questions asked 
The questions below have emerged from recent discussions in CeMoRe Lancaster. We provide them here to initiate a dialogue and are open to other questions asked in relation to the symposium theme.  

For instance, what do contemporary connectivities and mobilities of care look like within and across countries and cultures, and are they supported, enabled or undermined through disasters and disruptions? How is the lifecourse itself in motion, as intra and inter-generational relations, and concepts of family, past and future transform? What mobility politics is it necessary to facilitate, which knowledge should be valued, and through what methods and engagements can this be achieved? What forms of disruption must people and places get adept at living with, not just as effects of a changing climate, but also due to mitigation policies such as increased fuel prices? What aspects of culture and cultural heritage are at stake? What forms of justice and which forms of liberty are important and to be defended, including those manifest in the politics of place? How can we juggle skilfully a turn back to locality without feeding a cutting off from the world and new parochial chauvinism? What (im)mobilities could or should (dis)appear, and how can the diverse existential consequences be understood and supported? 

A Unique Publication 
Our aspiration is for an edited book that is intellectually innovative, and practically useful in equal measure, and a book that takes seriously the project of bringing ground-setting ideas and real–world engagements together. This might be achieved through a Part 1 that includes developed academic contributions which extend and develop mobilities thinking into climate emergency mobilities. In a Part 2, these intellectual contributions could be developed, rewritten, or otherwise conveyed (e.g. through art, poetry, blog style pieces, infographics) into shorter, accessible pieces that focus on practical action, embedded in the novel theoretical extensions to mobilities explored in Part 1. Our aim is that Part 2 could also serve as an appropriate publishing platform for those whose scholarship does not follow the conventional book chapter format. The readers, then, can read the book, or turn immediately to the handbook. We are therefore seeking contributors who are also committed to engaging with us in this creative work. 

How to submit an abstract 
If you are interested in contributing to the Symposium please submit your abstract (300 words max) using the submission form. Deadline: 28th February 2022.  

We are aiming for up to 25 papers at the Symposium of 2,500 words max., and we will consider alternative format contributions. We will require finalised symposium papers to be submitted by June 20 2022.  

Event Format 
The Symposium will run from Monday 4th July 13:00 – Wednesday 6th July 13:00.  

To help us decide whether this should be a blended event or fully online, please indicate in the submission form how you would attend.  

NB Face-to-face attendance would require payment of a £90 fee (approx) to cover 3 lunches and refreshments (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), and 2 evening meals (on Monday and Tuesday). Travel and accommodation would need to be arranged and paid for by participants.  

Papers will be circulated to all participants before the event, and the event itself will focus on discussion and feedback, rather than a detailed presentation of papers. To facilitate this, participants will take the role of discussant for a small number of papers; and each paper will have at least two allocated discussants.  

We will reserve some time in the programme for a creative workshop on the Book format and process.

To submit your 300 word abstract please click .  

In his new role, he works closely with academic staff within the Centre for Mobilities Research to coordinate activities to benchmark and improve SME connectivity in the county in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and in a climate-smart way. The role concentrated mainly on understanding and addressing impacts upon individual businesses and groups brought about by changes in behaviour and patterns of working, greater reliance on digital connectivity and a reduction in all modes of physical mobility. The efforts would be delivered within a work package entitled ‘Connected Cumbria’ as part of the ERDF funded Cumbria Innovations Platform Phase II (CUSPII) project and will feed into a broader raft of analysis designed to inform policy across the broader connectivity landscape within the region.

Nasser has insight gained by more than 10 years of direct experience as a designer, marketer, consultant, and educator-led to focus on a mixture of Design, marketing, and entrepreneurship approaches to help both public and private organisations better connect with their clients, transform data into actionable ideas and see new opportunities. 

As a PhD candidate, his research focuses on identifying the requirements of a cognitive computing platform, which can serve as a service design consultant to enrich the decision-making processes and provide reliable and made-to-order recommendations. 

We look forward to working with Nasser in his new role – congratulations Nasser!

As the CeMoRe Director I am often asked if there are opportunities in the Centre for PhD study and Postdoctoral Research. If you have a PhD or Postdoc idea which connects to or extends our current 5 year Climate Emergency Mobilities Manifesto then we are interested in hearing from you. Continue reading to find out more, including information on how to get in touch.

Does CeMoRe have PhD scholarships available?
If you want to do your PhD in the Centre for Mobilities Research then you need a supervisor (see below). You can apply for the following PhD scholarships:

: Holds an annual competition for postgraduate studentship funding. Candidates may apply for funding towards master’s and doctoral study, or doctoral study only. Part time study is possible. Please check your eligibility for this scheme before contacting us.  Closing date February 2022*.  

: Holds an annual competition for postgraduate studentship funding in Histories, Cultures and Heritage; Creative and Performing Arts; Languages and Literatures. Please check your eligibility for this scheme before contacting us. Closing date February 2022*.

Other scholarships are sometimes available from ����APP���� Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

*TIPS: Although the deadlines are in February 2022, you need to plan ahead. You must hold an offer of a PhD place with a host department before you apply for the funding, so your PhD application to the host institution needs to be submitted in December or January. You also need to work closely with your potential supervisor and the appropriate ‘pathway lead’. CeMoRe can help with these aspects – read more below.

How should I approach CeMoRe about my PhD idea?
To write a good PhD proposal you need the support of your potential supervisor from the start. If you have a PhD idea which connects to or extends our current 5 year Climate Emergency Mobilities Manifesto then we are interested in hearing from you. Initially you should send an email to cemore@lancaster.ac.uk. Please make it clear in the email title that you are interested in PhD study and include the following information:

• A document (1 page maximum) with your proposed PhD title, and a summary of your research topic and proposed methods (500 words in total). Make the connection to our Climate Emergency Mobilities programme clear in this document.  
• Your Masters degree outcome, or predicted Masters degree outcome.
• Indicate if you are self-funded. If not self-funded then inform us which doctoral studentship you are interested in applying for.

From this information we can give you a quick response on whether there are any supervisors available within CeMoRe.

Does CeMoRe have Postdoctoral Fellowships available?
We are keen for Postdocs in the field of ‘Climate Emergency Mobilities’ to come and work with us.  The following postdoctoral fellowships provide potential avenues for working with us.

: This scheme is aimed at providing a career development opportunity for those in the immediately postdoctoral stage of their career. They provide the opportunity to consolidate the PhD through developing publications, their networks, their research and professional skills. . Closing date Expression of Interest: 4^th February 2022. Closing date full application 23^rd March 2022

: This is an open opportunity (no closing date), which supports new researchers at the start of their careers to become independent researchers through gaining experience of managing and leading research projects and teams.

: This scheme is for early career researchers, with a research record but who have not yet held a full-time permanent academic post, to undertake a piece of publishable work. Closing date February 2022.

*TIPS: Please plan ahead, contact us early if you want to apply for a Fellowship with CeMoRe. A strong Fellowship application will be located in a research environment that aligns with the Fellowship focus and will have the support of an appropriate mentor. If your idea aligns with our Climate Emergency Mobilities programme then we might be the right place for you.

How should I approach CeMoRe with my Postdoctoral Fellowship idea?
If your postdoctoral fellowship idea connects to or extends our current 5 year Climate Emergency Mobilities Manifesto then we are interested in hearing from you. You should read all of the Fellowship documentation and ensure that you meet the eligibility criteria before contacting us.

To approach us you should send an email to cemore@lancaster.ac.uk. Please make it clear in the email title that you are interested in applying for a Postdoctoral Fellowship with CeMoRe and include the following information:

• A short 2-page CV

• A document (1-page maximum) with your proposed Fellowship title and summary of the research topic. Make the connection to our Climate Emergency Mobilities programme clear in this document
• Which specific Fellowship you plan to apply for

From this information we can give you a quick response on whether we are able to work with you.