Mobility types. Infrastructural Human Differentiation in Urban Traffic (E04 (ehem.C04))

• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442261292

The project examines the infrastructural human differentiation of urban mobility types. It focuses on car drivers, cyclists and pedestrians and explores how their status is renegotiated in the context of the mobility transition through the expansion of sustainable transport infrastructures in urban areas. It asks how mere technical-functional types of participating in traffic become identity-laden categories of self- and external attribution, in which the vehicles used appear as representatives of mutually exclusive lifestyles. By comparing the three metropolises of Berlin, Paris and Montreal, the project analyzes how the agentive entanglement of people and vehicles, the political claims to space of the different mobility groups as well as images and affects are involved in the emergence of identity categories.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1482: Studies in Human Differentiation
• Applicant Institution: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
• Project Head: Professorin Dr. Gabriele Schabacher