Theresa Harada

Driving, Cities and Changing Climates

The relevance of cars in relation to changing climates seems indisputable: scientific evidence points out the significant contribution of cars globally in causing greenhouse gas emissions. Despite higher levels of general public understanding and concern about climate change, this has not generally resulted in decreased car use. This paper outlines how a spatial perspective drawing on a cultural economy approach may provide insights into the paradox of the environmental ‘value action gap’ by focusing on suburban belongings, passions and anticipations derived from driving. Drawing on insights from Burraneer Bay, an affluent Sydney suburb, the paper illustrates how habituated and embodied knowledge of driving props up class envy, the spatial bordering of the city and the transformation of a love of driving into driving as love, underpinned as much by a desire to consume as by the performance of an identity. The implications for urban policy are considered that look beyond culture as attitudes.

‘Let’s Have Some Music’: Sound, Gender and Car Mobility

Abstract This paper draws on a visceral approach to explore the role of sound/music for people who drive cars. We examine the ways in which gendered subjectivities emerge from the pleasures associated with listening to sound/music during short car trips. The first part of the paper reviews the recent literature on ‘feelings for cars’. We highlight why gender is often absent from the literature before offering a conceptual lens drawing on geographical feminist thinking to consider sound/music, feelings, gender and mobility. We draw on driving ethnographies to explore the role of sound/music in how gender is assembled with the flow of connections between bodies, spaces and affects/emotions. Considering the contextual pleasures of listening to sound/music on these trips and emergent gender subjectivities we provide a more nuanced interpretation of why people choose to drive cars. To conclude, we point to the implications for applied research for new context-specific transport and climate change policy.

Parenting, care and the family car

Abstract This paper draws on driving ethnographies conducted with heterosexual parents in a regional centre in New South Wales, Australia, to illustrate the doing of family care in the mobile space of the car. Our analysis employs a narrative ethnography used by geographers working in materialist more-than-human feminist perspectives. In doing so, we advance writing in the gendered geographies of care and car dependency by exploring mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in driving their children. We engage with work which challenges the epistemological and ontological orthodoxies that once dominated transport and family studies in order to better tackle car dependency in the Anthropocene by understanding how parents ‘do’ family somewhere-on-the-move. Parents’ care for and about kin is lived and felt through the sociality of driving somewhere together. We conclude with insights for theory and policy.

Transnationalism reversed, women organizing against gendered violence in Bangladesh

(dude)’, ‘metrosexual’, and so on. Post-1950 there has been an ‘unleashing of possibilities’ (p. 11). However, while there is increased diversity of the models of masculinity in the media, Moss identifies that ‘since 11 September 2011, it has been suggested that “manhood” is once again being held in “high esteem”. With the return of male heroes – firemen, policemen, soldiers – a renewed emphasis on “going back” has been in vogue’ (p. 17). Moss explains that there tends to be a re-invigoration of traditional and ‘proven’ macho, brawny, dominant, tough, stoic, vigorous, assertive, strong, and independent tropes when there are ‘real or imagined’ threats (p. 7). Moss writes that despite this, the ‘boundaries of being a man have expanded . . . Swaggering masculinity, infantile masculinity, and preening masculinity are all possible to exist and can all be combined at the same time’ (p. 17). It would have been interesting at a few points for Moss to briefly consider how the Anglo heteronormative models rub up against alternatives. Interesting new accounts of masculinity are coming out of such intersections. The impetus to produce new interpretations tends to come from analyses that are ‘lines of flight’ – lines of transformation – that ‘blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 15). Moss’ emphasis on the influence of the media on boys and men is consistent throughout the book. However, he provides little supporting evidence for the extent of the pedagogic role of the media. Moss appears to be working with assumptions drawn from a media effect paradigm. There is no consideration of the substantial critiques of this paradigm by media scholars, such as by Gauntlett (2008). Boys and men are not only influenced or directed by the media but re-articulate, reproduce, re-interpret, contest, discard, rework, and re-imagine media representations and the mediums (Gauntlett 2008). This book left me with an appreciation for how historical, social, and cultural factors produce particular models of masculinity in the media. The argument that the mass media are a key site where some men carve out homosocial spaces to perpetuate and verify certain models is well-made, for example, sport radio. An important point that stayed with me throughout the reading was the resilience of some traditional tropes of masculinity despite them being ‘long past their veracity’ (p. 4).