Winging it: visions, automation, and narrating alternative mobility futures

Oliver Bock-Brown, Adam Badger and Peter Adey

Mobilities, 2025, vol. 20, issue 2, 255-270

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the way that futures for autonomous mobility are envisioned, specifically in industry representations. We begin by analysing a pair of representative commercial narratives around future autonomous mobility, from Wing and Audi, finding them to be simplistic, exclusionary, and focused on individual freedoms. Building on this analysis, we draw on ideas around mobility justice and creative mobilities methods to craft an alternative science fiction vignette, one that augments a future from a gig worker’s perspective. In doing so, we foreground multiple injustices and insecurities, and aim to highlight the potential within creative and narrative methods to complicate dominant stories about technological futures, to articulate alternative futures, explore them, research with them, and make other futures more tangible. The paper concludes by discussing the need for such approaches given the dominant framings around autonomous mobility futures.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17450101.2024.2414785 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rmobxx:v:20:y:2025:i:2:p:255-270

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rmob20

DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2024.2414785

Access Statistics for this article

Mobilities is currently edited by Professor Kevin Hannam, Professor Mimi Sheller and Professor John Urry

More articles in Mobilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().