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Alternative Mobility Futures
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Final Programme
Papers
Mobile Communications Workshop

Publication from conference - Mobile Technologies of the City

Future Mobile Communications Scenarios

Conference organised by Mobilities Group and the Department of Sociology to be held at Lancaster House Hotel, Lancaster University, UK, 9-11 January 2004

CONFIRMED PLENARY SPEAKERS INCLUDE

Caren Kaplan, John Law, Nigel Thrift

Technological, social and cultural developments in transportation, border control, mobile communication, ‘intelligent’ infrastructure, surveillance and global positioning are rapidly changing the conditions of possibility for all forms of mobility. New ways of dwelling, communicating, and moving (as well as policing, searching, and excluding) are emerging at the interface between corporeal, imaginative, communicative, and virtual forms of travel and habitation.

This International Conference seeks to explore the new possibilities for ‘dwelling in mobility’ and for ‘mobilising dwelling’ that are the focus of recent work in sociology, geography, science studies, women’s studies, and transport, tourism, and travel studies. As mobile connectivity begins to occur in new ways, what hybridisations of the mover and the moved, the dweller and the dwelling, the human and the digital are occurring and what are some of their likely consequences? What effects will these emerging alternative mobility futures have on the constitution of the bodily, the local, the regional, the national, the diasporic and the global?

Papers will address one or more of the following. How are new technologies of information and mobile communication replacing, converging with, or in other ways re-shaping ‘older technologies’ and patterns of corporeal travel? How are new technologies of surveillance and information retrieval affecting the constitution of borders, belonging, and ‘out of place’ bodies? What kinds of new ‘risk society’, what new ‘disasters’, are these mobilities generating? In what ways does life ‘on screen’ replace, redirect, or re-scale life ‘on the move’? Do ‘cybercities’ and ‘intelligent’ transport systems offer a new connectivity that can solve the impasse of transportation failure and social exclusion? How are the new possibilities for mobile communication changing the boundaries between the private and the public, with what impact on forms of citizenship, participation and democracy? How do the contemporary materialities of the ‘mobile life’ either reproduce or challenge existing forms of difference and inequality?

Conference Organizers: Dr Mimi Sheller m.sheller@lancaster.ac.uk
Prof John Urry j.urry@lancaster.ac.uk Sociology Dept, Lancaster University, LA1 4YL, UK.

The deadline for submissions of abstracts to the conference has now passed. Please see the Final Programme for details of panels and presenters. Non-presenters are very welcome to attend the conference as delegates. Both presenters and non-presenters should submit the booking form which is available at this link.

It is expected that there will be no more than 100 delegates.
Conference Fee: £250 for 48 hours accommodation in 4* Lancaster House Hotel, all meals and papers
Non-Resident Conference Fee: £90 for 48 hours lunches, coffees and papers