Programme full

Wednesday 15 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 2
in the life course and a segmented approach to life stages. We also explore what mapping adds to conventional
interviewing (Emmel 2008) and reflect on Vertesi’s (2010) argument which states that asking people to draw produces
remarkable objects and rich stories about place and movement. We focus on the ways in which life trajectories and
personal histories of mobility, travel and transport impact future behaviours through engaging both theoretically and
empirically with the panel study data to examine how people’s decisions are embedded in shifting networks of
relationships over time and in different dimensions of the life course.
The Time of Trauma
Moore, N.
(University of Edinburgh)
In this paper we restate a central assumption of much qualitative research, that interviews can clearly be understood
as involving movement through time. Specifically we draw on trauma narratives to highlight the movements in people’s
lives. In the Step Change project we have been struck by the number of trauma narratives, many of which revolve
around serious illness, which have emerged in our interviews about travel and transport and everyday lives and life
histories. While the new mobilities paradigm appears to struggle with time, transport studies exhibits different
dilemmas, an obsession with time, though usually time that is reducible to cost. More recently transport modelling has
begun to take on board the notion that ‘active travel’ may contribute to well-being, that travelling time may also be
conducive to health. However it is nonetheless the case that transport planning has historically not taken into account
that people may get ill, and that this might have a bearing on the temporalities of transport. We understanding trauma
as a response to overwhelming events, which is about time (eg repetition, amnesia, forgetting, return, rupture, turning
points) and movement (freeze, flight, fight), all of which can disrupt efforts to produce progress narratives of coherent
selves. We turn to the trauma narratives which have emerged in our interviews as exemplary sites through which to
raise questions about academic amnesia, which forgets that interviews are sites of movement, as well as to think
through the relationship between time, space and movement in mobility studies.
Culture, Media, Sport and Consumption
W110, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
'The Trouble with Quotes You See on the Internet is That You Never Know if They are Genuine.' (William
Shakespeare): Regressions to Hegemonic Power and Instrumentality in Digital Leisure Spaces
Spracklen, K.
(Leeds Beckett University)
This paper will explore the emergence and importance of on-line social media and networks in everyday leisure time
and leisure practices, based on original virtual ethnography. I will look at the ways in which social networks are used
to build a sense of community and belonging, and the ways in which social networks serves as Goffmanesque public
spaces in which people perform acceptable social identities. I will trace how the Net has become a social network and
communicative leisure space in more general terms away from the branded and commodified sites such a Facebook. I
will show that fans of sports, music and other forms of popular culture can use the Net to discuss their private
obsessions with other fans. But I will show that the Net can also be a place where social activism can be supported,
where politics can move from the on-line to the off-line to build effective protests and campaigns. While this
development is a boon to radical activists on the left, it is also something that can be and is utilized by activists on the
far-right. Hence the communicative freedom of the Net, as I will show, is prone to producing climate-change deniers
as much as anti-fascists.
Video Game Cultures and the Construction of Identities in Contemporary Society
Muriel, D.
(University of Salford and University of the Basque Country)
In the last three decades key social theorists have discussed the crisis of modernity and the decline of many of its
institutions (Bauman, 2000; Giddens, 1991), and the suggestion that we are witnessing the emergence of new kinds of
identities (Hall, 1996; Bauman, 2004). Based on an ongoing research, this paper considers the processes through
which contemporary identities are produced; focusing on the identity of video gamers and the social worlds of
meaning where they dwell.
BSA Annual Conference 2015 88
Glasgow Caledonian University