This article draws on an ethnography of road construction in the Peruvian Andes to explore how engineering projects operate as sites of contemporary governance. Focusing on the way in which engineering projects entail a confrontation with dangers of various kinds, we explore how people caught up in road construction processes become preoccupied with the problem of anticipated harm. Drawing on the notion of ‘codes of conduct’, we suggest that the governmental effects of practices which attempt to deal with the uncertainty (...) of the future might be analysed as a tension between the enactment of two different kinds of codification. Building on the notion of coding as a situated material practice, we investigate the appearance of two different ways of encoding a relationship with an uncertain future which we term ‘machinic’ and ‘emergent’. The article builds on a description of these two ways of encoding uncertainty to explore how formal mechanisms of dealing with anticipated harm, such as the regulations of health and safety, are both unsettled and reinvigorated by more affective and relational dimensions of practice. (shrink)

This wide-ranging introduction to the special issue on Automobilities examines various dimensions of the automobile system and car cultures. In its broadest sense we can think of many automobilities - modes of autonomous, self-directed movement. It can be argued that there are many different car cultures and autoscapes which operate around the world, which cannot be seen as making driving a uniform experience of movement in a controlled 'no-place' space. Yet, there clearly is an increasingly globalizing car system, conceptualized as (...) a powerful socio-economic and technological complex which sustains the car as a key object of mass production and mass consumption, which has impacted on spatial organization through roads, city layout, suburban housing and shopping malls and demands new forms of social life, sociability and time-space flexibility. This automobile system currently accounts for some 1.2 million deaths through traffic accidents a year world-wide, with the reversal of the long normalization of this form of 'mass murder,' now seen as a key topic for public health authorities. At the same time while it is potentially possible to subject cars to greater surveillance and systemic control through information technology, this in itself may not automatically lead to a reduction of accidents. In recent years the car has become a complex communicative platform for multi-tasking, a command centre for telephone, television, Internet etc., a place of work and instrumental tasking; but also a place of dwelling and refuge, a comfort zone for emotional decontrol via the sound system. Something which requires a more flexible driving habitus in which the senses are reconfigured and extended through the technology, as driving increasingly depends on the software as we move to intelligent cars and roads. Yet this is also something which generates an expanding set of new risks. The logic is for the driver to become the auto pilot and the automobile to become a sort of datasuit wrap. Yet it is not surprising that this view of the controlled safe car should also summon up its opposite: the car as dangerous and powerful, as a vehicle for excitement and speed. Especially so given that car racing practically originated alongside the birth of the automobile and is now itself a massive global industry whose imagery is central to the marketing of many types of cars. (shrink)

For some customers, the corona pandemic has turned e-shopping into a fine alternative to shopping in brick-and-mortar shops. For other customers in quarantine e-shopping is the only alternative. The long-lasting pandemic, however, has reminded us of the importance of social contacts and interactions – even if it’s just to go the supermarket to ‘mingle’. This paper investigates what ‘mingle’ means when shopping in physical self-service shops amongst unacquainted others in Denmark. It describes customers’ practice of doing self-service by organizing interaction (...) to minimize social involvement. It shows how they, as a matter of fact, co-ordinate their conduct in ways that hampers possibilities for engaging in even small ‘ritual’ exchanges of talk. The paper draws upon a corpus of video recordings of customers’ self-service practices in shops in Denmark. In addition, the customers’ gaze was recorded with the mobile Tobii Pro X3 eye tracker. The study falls within the realm of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies of multimodal interaction. It concludes that self-service is achieved through co-present customers’ tacit coordination of multimodal actions in social interaction and that their practices work to achieve ‘effortlessly’ and ‘spontaneously’ being, getting, and staying out of the way, which seems to be an ideal for self-service shopping. Talk and moreover having a conversation seems to be an impediment to it. (shrink)