CfP: Social Aspects of Ageing - Selected Challenges, Analyses, and Solutions
In the last decade, the “mobility turn” in human sciences has led to a reconsideration of the concept of mobility that includes now short-distance, daily and/or regular movements and the wider circulation of goods, objects and ideas (Merriman and Pearce 2018). In the same perspective, administrators and urban planners have gained awareness about the fact that women and men move, travel and commute differently. Also, it has been pointed out the recurrent gendered imbalance in the transport sectors, and the need for policymakers to consider also gender in transport planning.
Research has shown that women
move on foot or with public transportation more often than men. In addition,
male trajectories are usually simpler and more direct than women’s
trajectories, and this is strictly connected to their economic roles. Indeed,
while usually men move from home to their workplace, in a round trip, female
trajectories are more complicated, and has been described as a trip-chaining.
These latter depend on the fact that women are almost always in charge of the
care of the family members. Women for example push strollers and wheelchairs,
bring and pick up the children at school, accompany family members to medical
checks, shop for the family (i.e. medicine, foods, clothes) and move also for
reaching their work. Yet women’s transportation and way of moving depend also
by their economic resources (usually more modest than men’s resources) and by
specific ideology of masculinity and femininity which in turn lead to expected
behavior of women and men in the society and in the family. Moreover, an
intersectional approach also provides evidence of the fact that as women, migrant
people, minorities and elderly have different way to move and make a different
use of transportation (Moraglio and Kuttler 2021).
These works and research
focus primarily on contemporary societies: however, their findings
question also scholars studying societies of the past. How have gender
practices and transports articulated in different time and space? This
panel aims to explore transportation patterns of women and men in a historical
and gender perspective, and from a range of disciplinary approaches (economic
and social history, history of representation, urban history, history of
literature).
Papers should address one (or more) of the following questions:
1.
How can we
understand transportation and mobility trajectories of women and men in the
past societies? What are the differences between them? How the gendered body
and spaces have been conceived within the history of transports?
2.
What kind of
transport did women and men use? What kind of knowledge was required?
3.
How did the use
of different transport techniques (caravan porters, working animals,
steamships, trains, cars, etc.) and the increase of speed in crossing long
distances participate in the redefinition of new spaces, dress and gender
roles? Which role did different transport techniques play in producing gendered
stereotypes and in the (re)production of gender roles?
4.
How women and
men’s transportation patterns were shaped by economic, cultural and/or social
factors (access to economic and/or social resources, expected behaviour for
women and men, situation of danger)?
5.
How do
transportation patterns change representation of women and men?
6.
How did
transportation policies influence the activities of women and men?
Please send a short abstract
(500 words max) and a short CV to the organizers by 10th
April 2022: Silvia Bruzzi and Beatrice Zucca.
We will inform you about the
result of the panel selection in June 2022. For further information on the
conference please visit : https://www.mobilityandhumanities.it/t2m2022conference/
Contact
Info:
Beatrice Zucca Micheletto
University of Padua (Italy)
Contact
Email: