Car Culture

Do commodities (from cigarettes to automobiles, from hamburgers to ladders) embody violence? If so how, and how do the injuries that objects cause lead us to rethink our understandings of what violence is?

 

Automobile death and wounding has been understood and rationalized differently at various historical moments, and the automobile itself shifted being nearly unthinkably dangerous in the early twentieth century to becoming acceptable, celebrated, and even iconic within thirty years. This body of work examines different ways that automobile injuries have been rationalized.

 

 

2005   "Violent Submission." Cultural Critique, vol. 61: 186-214.

2005   "Urban Violence: Luxury in Made Space." Mobile Technologies of the Future, Mimi Sheller and John Urry (ed.), Taylor and Francis.

2005   Entry for "Technology and Gender, Race and Class." The Oxford Dictionary of Science, Technology and Society, Oxford University Press.

2004   "'Dangerous Instrumentality': The Bystander as Subject in Automobility." Cultural Anthropology, vol. 19(1): 61-94.

2002   “Urban Errands: The Means of Mobility.” Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 2(3): 385-404.