scholarly journals Introduction

Transfers ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jutta Weber ◽  
Fabian Kröger
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Media Images ◽  
Potential Shift ◽  
Car Culture ◽  
Driverless Cars ◽  
The Future ◽  
Feminist Cultural Studies

This special section on “Degendering the Driver” explores how gender intervenes in the potential shift from a driver-centered to a driverless car culture. It focuses on representations of imagined futures—prototypes, media images, and popular discourses of driverless cars. Following the tradition of feminist cultural studies of technoscience, we ask in our introduction how these new techno-imaginaries of autonomous driving are gendered and racialized. We aim to explore if the future user of an autonomous car is gendered or degendered in the current media discourse. The four articles explore what kinds of images are used, what promises are made, and how the discourse about autonomous driving is influenced by gendered norms. Some authors emphasize that self-driving vehicles could encourage pluralized forms of masculinity. Nonetheless, all authors conclude that driverless cars alone will not degender the driver but rather encourage a multiplication of gendered and racialized technologies of mobility.

scholarly journals Hope against hope: COVID-19 and the space for political imagination

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110045
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gross
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Devised Theatre ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Future

COVID-19 has loosened neoliberalism’s hegemonic grip on the future. Amid the enormous suffering experienced internationally, there is much discussion of how to ‘Build Back Better’, and hope for a more caring, just and sustainable world. But competing futures are being imagined and planned. Hope is never politically neutral, and the content of collective hope is a key site of political struggle. This is partly a question of space: who has the literal and discursive space in which to develop visions of the future? The following article considers the role that cultural studies can play in this struggle. ‘Conjunctural analysis’ has a key task, making visible the competing futures contained within the present. But cultural studies should go further: combining conjunctural analysis with methods drawn from a range of scholarly and activist traditions – including critical pedagogy, devised theatre and the interdisciplinary field of futures studies – that deliberately create spaces for imagining new futures.

scholarly journals Automated futures and the mobile present: In-car video ethnographies

Ethnography ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Pink ◽  
Vaike Fors ◽  
Mareike Glöss
Keyword(s):  
Research Agenda ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Automated Vehicles ◽  
Video Ethnography ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
The Future

New technological possibilities associated with autonomous driving (AD) cars are generating new questions and imaginaries about automated futures. In this article we advance a theoretical-methodological approach towards researching this context based in design anthropological theory and sensory ethnographic practice. In doing so we explain and discuss the findings of an in-car video ethnography study designed to investigate the usually unspoken and not necessarily visible elements of car-based mobility. Such an approach is needed, we argue, both in order to inform a research agenda that is capable of addressing the emergence of automated vehicles specifically, as well as in preparation for understanding the implications of automation more generally as human mobility is increasingly entangled with automated technologies and the future imaginaries associated with them.

scholarly journals Unintended Effects of Autonomous Driving: A Study on Mobility Preferences in the Future

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 2404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Pakusch ◽  
Gunnar Stevens ◽  
Alexander Boden ◽  
Paul Bossauer
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Unintended Effects ◽  
The Future

scholarly journals Shaping proactive higher education: Pandemic research and its value for future-proofing

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-206
Author(s):  
Anca Greere
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Special Section ◽  
New Normal ◽  
Roles And Responsibilities ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Way

This editorial to the Special Section on COVID-19 emphasises the importance of researching pandemic realities and the value that the findings can bring to the way we shape decisions in the future, for the ‘new normal’. The pandemic, with its rapidly changing timeline, required swift action in untrialled circumstances and its consequences have been experienced differently by diverse institutions and across national contexts. Depending on the roles and responsibilities we may have taken on during this time, our capabilities to document our experiences and emerging trends have varied.

scholarly journals A Methodological Review of fNIRS in Driving Research: Relevance to the Future of Autonomous Vehicles

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Balters ◽  
Joseph M. Baker ◽  
Joseph W. Geeseman ◽  
Allan L. Reiss
Keyword(s):  
Brain Imaging ◽  
Near Infrared ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Functional Brain Imaging ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy ◽  
Methodological Review ◽  
The Future

As automobile manufacturers have begun to design, engineer, and test autonomous driving systems of the future, brain imaging with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) can provide unique insights about cognitive processes associated with evolving levels of autonomy implemented in the automobile. Modern fNIRS devices provide a portable, relatively affordable, and robust form of functional neuroimaging that allows researchers to investigate brain function in real-world environments. The trend toward “naturalistic neuroscience” is evident in the growing number of studies that leverage the methodological flexibility of fNIRS, and in doing so, significantly expand the scope of cognitive function that is accessible to observation via functional brain imaging (i.e., from the simulator to on-road scenarios). While more than a decade’s worth of study in this field of fNIRS driving research has led to many interesting findings, the number of studies applying fNIRS during autonomous modes of operation is limited. To support future research that directly addresses this lack in autonomous driving research with fNIRS, we argue that a cogent distillation of the methods used to date will help facilitate and streamline this research of tomorrow. To that end, here we provide a methodological review of the existing fNIRS driving research, with the overarching goal of highlighting the current diversity in methodological approaches. We argue that standardization of these approaches will facilitate greater overlap of methods by researchers from all disciplines, which will, in-turn, allow for meta-analysis of future results. We conclude by providing recommendations for advancing the use of such fNIRS technology in furthering understanding the adoption of safe autonomous vehicle technology.

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