DIVA cultural studies account of automobiles and concerns about safety in the U.S. from the 1950s to the present./div

While Americans prize the ability to get behind the wheel and hit the open road, they have not always agreed on what constitutes safe, decorous driving or who is capable of it. Mobility without Mayhem is a lively cultural history of America’s fear of and fascination with driving, from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Jeremy Packer analyzes how driving has been understood by experts, imagined by citizens, regulated by traffic laws, governed through education and propaganda, and represented in films, television, magazines, and newspapers. Whether considering motorcycles as symbols of rebellion and angst, or the role of CB radio in regulating driving and in truckers’ evasions of those regulations, Packer shows that ideas about safe versus risky driving often have had less to do with real dangers than with drivers’ identities. Packer focuses on cultural figures that have been singled out as particularly dangerous. Women drivers, hot-rodders, bikers, hitchhikers, truckers, those who “drive while black,” and road ragers have all been targets of fear. As Packer debunks claims about the dangers posed by each figure, he exposes biases against marginalized populations, anxieties about social change, and commercial and political desires to profit by fomenting fear. Certain populations have been labeled as dangerous or deviant, he argues, to legitimize monitoring and regulation and, ultimately, to curtail access to automotive mobility. Packer reveals how the boundary between personal freedom and social constraint is continually renegotiated in discussions about safe, proper driving.

The power of the bicycle to impact mobility, technology, urban space and everyday life.

Examines contemporary anxiety over the phenomenon of conspiracy theories.

With this book the international academic discourse on mobility is taken a step further, through the intertwined perspectives of different social sciences, engineering and the humanities. The Ethics of Mobilities departs from the recent interest in social surveillance, raised by the use of technology for the surveillance and control of mobility as well as for transport. It widens this theme to encompass a broad scale of issues, ranging from freedom and escape to social exclusion and control, thus raising important questions of ethics, identity and religion; questions that are dealt with by a diverse, yet structured range of chapters, arranged around the themes of ethics and religion, and freedom and control. Through their variety and diversity of perspectives, the chapters of this book offer a substantial interdisciplinary contribution to the socially and environmentally relevant discussion about what a technically and economically accelerating mobility does to life and how it might be transformed to sustain a more life-enhancing future. Ethics of Mobilities will excite not only international interest, but will also appeal to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, in fields as diverse as theology and engineering.