Seminar on Social Theory, Transport and Energy Modelling

I will be speaking at one of the seminars organised by Rachel Aldred (University of Westminster) in the context of the ESRC-funded seminar seriesĀ Modelling on the Move: Towards Transport System Transitions? on 13th September in London.

This particular event focuses on the relevance of social theory for transport and energy modelling, and my talk will offer reflections on the way transport researchers have conceptualised, understood and ‘done’ process and change over the past decades. It will problematise conventional ways in which change has been examined and argue that insights from ‘process philosophies’ can usefully inform standard practice in transport research. Process philosophies are a heterogeneous collection of philosophical thinking, including amongst others the work of authors as diverse as Henri Bergson, William James, Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and also Alfred North Whithead. IN the presentation and accompanying paper I will be drawing on the latter and show how his philosophical ideas and metaphysics can be used to think about change in a transport research context.

More information on the seminar, including an abstract of my talk, is available here, and registration for the seminar can be done here.

Slack time?

It has been a while since I last wrote on this blog, but that doesn’t mean I have been idle over the past two months. I have just returned from a visit to Chile and more specifically the University of Concepcion, where I have worked with our great host Juan-Antonio Carrasco as well as Karen Lucas and colleagues from Ghent and Concepcion on a collaborative project about the relationships between social exclusion and transport disadvantage in different geographical contexts. This three-year project — funded by the EU’s Marie Curie programme – has been under way for quite a while now, but our visit to Concepcion has been important in taking the project to a new level. I am really excited about the empirical work with data from Chile and Belgium (and the UK at a later stage) that we have set out to undertake.

Since June the Research Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand, in which the Universities of Sussex, Manchester and Oxford collaborate and which is funded by the UK research councils (primarily the EPSRC), has officially been in existence. We are currently in the starting-up phase and our website is still under construction. However, a summary of what the Centre is about is available here. As part of the Centre we are currently developing a project about what drives the emergence and success of low-energy initiatives in energy consumption reduction in urban transport, in which we will be comparing different city-regions in the UK: Greater London, Merseyside (Liverpool), Brighton and Hove, and Oxford. The idea of the project is to more fully integrate understandings of niche developments in sociotechical transitions thinking in innovation studies with thinking on the role of space and place from economic, urban and cultural geography.

There is no doubt I will report on the development of the project and the Centre on this blog in the (near) future!