Disrupted! Exploring public transport travelling through the lens of disruption

Beskrivelse

Various research strands have utilised the phenomenon of disruption as a device to magnify “normal” everyday practices and social ordering. Ethnomethodology, for instance, has developed from Garfinkel’s (1984) so-called breaching experiments where Garfinkel designed experiments to disrupt and, by implication, expose the basic principles of social ordering. From a phenomenological perspective, Heidegger (2010) pointed towards related insights when he noted how our awareness of things, for instance, a hammer, significantly crystalises when the hammer breaks, and, based in such insights, Graham and Thrift (2007) suggest that disruptions represent invaluable moments for change. Not only do disruptions reveal how broken things were supposed to work, they also have the potential to generate change in that the recovery from disruptions ‘produces learning, adaptation and improvisation.’(Graham and Thrift 2007: 5) Taking inspirations in this thinking, mobilities studies have approached disruptions as an inevitable, interdependent part of our “normal” everyday lives (Murray and Doughty 2016), or even as a route for unlocking carbon intensive mobilities (Marsden and Docherty 2013; ‘Http://Www.Disruptionproject.Net/’, n.d.)

According to Vollmer (2013), the notion of disruption can be understood as the misalignment of ‘coordination of activities and expectations’ (2). Based in this broad notion, the workshop is open for contributions that explore an array of – often interdependent, yet quite different – empirical phenomena, such as disruptions caused by violent passengers, service breakdowns, weather situations, the pandemic, transfer issues (caused by delayed connections, for instance), lacking wheelchair ramps, lifts that are out of order, clashes of intentions/interests, or negative structural stories/discourses/ governmentalities. Contributions may explore disruptions as they are perceived by and attended to by various categories of passengers (including categories based on age and abilities, such as older people and children, and people with/without disabilities; and categories based on responsibilities, such as parents and carers) as well as by more “molar” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) categories, such as transport providers and local governments. Further, contributions could approach disruptions at the intersection of institutionalised strategies and passengers’ everyday tactics (Certeau 2013), or of governors’ attempt to conduct the conduct of passengers and passengers’ conduct of their own conduct (Foucault 1982) in the face of disruption. Or, contributions could explore embodiments, affects, social dynamics, atmospheres and materialities associated with various kinds of disruptions, potentially including discussions of the methodological challenges of capturing, analysing and representing such phenomena (Thrift 2008).

The workshop has a twofold aim. Firstly, drawing on empirical examples in which public transport travelling is disrupted, the workshop contributions explore how people adapt and improvise in the face of disruptions, and, thereby, the workshop aims at providing learning (Graham and Thrift 2007), both about responses to disruptions in public transport travelling, and about various aspects of the “normal” of everyday public travelling that become exposed only in and through the lens of disruption. As such, the workshop has the potential to teach us about unknown barriers and enablers for public transport travelling. Secondly, the workshop aims to utilise the empirically based contributions as a first starting point for broader conceptual discussions, not only of the disrupted, but simultaneously of the “normal”. As the workshop engages with disruptions, it simultaneously interrogates the place that “the normal” has had in the formation of travelling infrastructures, and, by implication, it may have the potential to enrich our understandings of related issues, such as our understanding about the “universal” in inclusive, universal design in public transport.

Periode	28 maj 2024 → 29 maj 2024
Begivenhedstype	Workshop
Placering	Aalborg, DanmarkVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International