Katharina Manderscheid

An introduction to R for sociologists, focusing on typical issues of data analysis like importing data from other statistical programmes, recoding data, producing combined tables, graphing options, exporting tables and graphs into Office documents etc.
The book can serve as a ressource for teaching statistics in social sciences and is written in German.
In 2016, the book will be published in a revised second edition.

Against the background of processes of socio-spatial polarisation in European cities, in my PhD thesis which I carried out at Freiburg University, Germany, I analysed a newly built urban neighbourhood, located in the small university town of Tübingen in the south west of Germany. Its underlying urban plan aimed at attracting a broad socio-economic spectrum of households. Drawing on approaches of the spatial turn and Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, subtle mechanisms of exclusion inherent within the urban concept were theorised, thus explaining the large over-representation of certain socio-cultural groups that was discovered empirically.

"[W]ith both mobilities and Foucault being such diverse bodies of thought, there are evidently multiple ways that the two may be brought into dialogue. Analytically, one can work in either of two directions, studying Foucault’s writings for discussion of mobilities or working on issues of mobility with the assistance of Foucauldian themes and concepts. Similarly, in either case, the goal of such research may be primarily aimed to be a contribution to either tradition – that is, developing Foucauldian thought or elucidating mobilities. This suggests a continuum of approaches, which is evident, for instance, in the papers of this Special Issue.
This variety of approaches leads to a similar diversity of insights, which is a significant strength – not weakness – of a programme of concerted dialogue between the two traditions. For this leads not only to insights from a hugely rich set of issues and perspectives, but also to work that is mutually informing and that displays significant convergence and resonances. Consider first the diversity, proceeding across this rough ‘spectrum’.
In the opening paper, Philo shows how even the seemingly least promising of Foucault’s texts on institutions of immobility helps substantially to illuminate mobility as a social phenomenon – imperative, condition, form of politics – by showing that certain (anatomo-political) interventions brought about immobility precisely for the purpose of training and managing ‘positive’ mobility. Here, then, is an archetype of the insights available to mobilities research from a programme of Foucauldian exegesis and scholarship.
Shifting from the socially immobilized to what society demands should be maximally mobile, O’Grady then sets out the importance of the Foucauldian concept of ‘milieu’ in illuminating a political geography of emergency services. He thereby brings attention to this understudied concept, while also showing how it needs development from its original Foucauldian formulation to accommodate an explanation of contemporary empirical changes in the technology-assisted decisions on where to site fire stations in the UK.
Mincke and Lemonne take us back to the prison, but not to conduct a Foucauldian exegesis. Instead, they demonstrate how contemporary Western governments (specifically Belgium) are grappling with the abstract impossibility of constructing a water-tight normative case for prison as an institution alongside the exhaustion of the current patchwork discourses of legitimation in terms of punishment and/or rehabilitation. Instead, the prisoner is being reconstructed as deficient precisely in their capacity for responsible mobility, yielding insights both into a ‘mobilitarian’ regime of contemporary social policy and the necessary development of Foucauldian concepts in order to be able to understand this process.
Usher takes a further step away from a Foucauldian starting point, instead deploying Foucauldian concepts and arguments to reveal the importance of material flows and the ‘government of nature’, specifically of water, in characterising the ‘nature of government’. A connection is thus drawn, mediated by Foucault’s description of the centrality of urban circulation to modern government, between mobilities and political ecology, invoking a material turn in the former that attends to government of, by and through materialities, including energy (cf. Urry 2013; Tyfield and Urry 2014).
Again working from a mobilities starting point, Paterson tackles an even more unfamiliar form of mobility, namely of a bizarrely non-material material, fetishised carbon. Noting that ‘climate change politics has been precisely organised around the generation of newly mobile objects – specifically of rights to generate carbon emissions’ (p. 570), he shows how ‘this reinforces the importance of [a Foucauldian-inspired] cultural political economy to mobilities research’ while simultaneously highlighting the centrality of mobilities to contemporary global political economy. As a central precondition of ever-expanding accumulation, mobility is fundamental to the ongoing formation of carbon markets that attempt to square continuation of this political economic order with the energic and environmental costs that accelerating mobility of people and freight entails. Here, then, bringing mobilities and Foucault together shows starkly how responses to the ecological emergency must be understood in terms of how ‘capital needs to find other ways of realising its mobility-related accumulation imperative’ (p. 580).
Staying with climate change, Tyfield focuses on ongoing attempts to decarbonize automobility itself in the geographical site of arguably greatest significance in this project – a ‘rising’ China. Again part of a cultural political economy perspective, Foucault is used specifically to broach two key challenges for theorizing transitions in socio-technical systems. These pertain to the concept of power and the capacity to think through qualitative socio-technical system change.
Finally, Manderscheid again uses Foucault in conjunction with culture-attentive post-structural political economy, specifically the regulation approach, to illustrate the value of the concept of dispositif for thinking through the system of automobility and the increasingly deep inequalities it systematically (re)produces. This key Foucauldian concept thus ‘allows for a multidimensional view on […] different manifestations of mobile socialities, bringing patterns of power structuration to the fore which otherwise remain hidden’ (p. 605).
Here, then, we have substantive issues ranging from the paradigmatically mobile to the archetypically immobile, regarding key contemporary issues including inequality, climate change, urbanisation, emergency/disaster services and carceral security, and tackled from perspectives that use mobilities to read Foucault and Foucault to disclose mobilities. There is no reason to expect, therefore, much in the way of dialogue emergent across the papers. Yet there are indeed such resonances and even emerging themes. We note only four.
First, several of the papers speak to an emerging securitisation and complexification of power/knowledge technologies in regimes of anticipation or preparedness of the specific (possibly ‘black swan’) instance, not just generalized management of aggregate risk probabilities (cf. Lentzos and Rose 2009; Adey and Anderson 2010; Oels 2014). This marks a shift in political logic, from neoliberal governmentality and its emphasis on the individual entrepreneurial self to a seemingly paradoxical conjunction between emergent imperatives of system-level responsibility and a revived moral discourse of inviolate personal autonomy (see also the papers in this issue by O’Grady, Mincke and Lemonne, Usher, Paterson, and Tyfield).
Secondly, circulation (conceived in individualist liberal terms) is confirmed as a key aspect of contemporary politics with respect to global political economy (papers by Paterson, Tyfield, and Manderscheid), the environment (Usher, Paterson, and Tyfield), and social policy and ‘law and order’ (Philo, O’Grady, and Mincke and Lemonne).
Thirdly, that this heterogeneous collection of issues and perspectives does indeed speak to each other hinges on the clear sense – both in the papers themselves and, we anticipate, in the minds of their readers, as discussed above – of the profound conceptual transformation at play today, which thereby reaches across supposed conceptual ‘boundaries’. In short, it is precisely the breadth of issues brought together by a generalized interest in issues of mobility and the power involved in, and itself constituted through, their construction that makes the ongoing engagement of these two schools of thought so promising in this moment of profound social restructuring. Only a project that can encompass the car, the border and the hotel; the prison, the canal and the carbon market; the atmosphere and the fire station can hope to witness, and intervene in, systemic social transformation and thereby make good on the mobilities paradigm’s promise of remodelling the social sciences.
Fourthly, by working with the concept of the dispositif, several contributions foreground the links between different elements of mobilities – knowledge/discourses, materialisations/objectifications, practices of movement, governmentalities and subjectifications (O’Grady, Mincke and Lemmone, and Manderscheid). Thus, rather than understanding mobility as a monolithic entity, this focus highlights, against a background of wider socio-political processes, the continuities, contradictions, autopoietic forces and ambivalences that collectively reinforce existing mobility regimes and constitute the seeds of their transformation." (Manderscheid, Schwanen, Tyfield 2014)

Motorized traffic is problematic ecologically and in the context of urban development. In the following, a perspective on mobility, traffic behaviour and individuals is presented, which links sociological practice­theoretical approaches with insights from mobility research. In addition to gaining insights into the mechanisms of persistence of automobility and its inherent dimension of inequality as well as the resulting consequences for a policy of sustainable mobility, this paper contributes to the further development of quantitative approaches in practice-theoretical research.

The car has been identified as an element of modern identities, interwoven also with gender relations. The masculinity of the automobile subject draws on the steering and controlling of the car as a technological object. Thus, driverless cars potentially call into question the gendering of the automobile subject. With the aim to assess this potential degendering, in this article I analyze two very different visions of driverless automobility. The focus is placed on the imagined users, the sociospatial context, and its gendered dimensions. I then reflect on the status of the videos, elaborating on their impact on the future of (auto)mobility and their meaning for mobility research. Gendering of cars, then, is seen as an element of a deeper socioeconomic order and its inherent power relations. Thus, future genderings cannot be simply read off technological visions but will instead develop in unforeseeable social contestations.

One of the key arguments of the mobilities paradigm is that people's mobility practices are embedded in their spatial, cultural, political, economical, social and personal context. Yet, empirical mobility research tends to research these two sides of the social separately – either mobility practices and their subjective sense and experience or their discursive, spatial or structural foundation. Taking this desideratum as point of departure, I will make a proposal for researching the links between structures and practices of mobilities consisting of the application of multiple correspondence analysis. This proposal attempts, furthermore, to operationalise mobilities as relational practices, which reinforces that social networks rather than solitary subjects are the origin of mobility decisions. This methodological approach is demonstrated by a comparative data analysis of movement patterns in England and Switzerland. In the final part of the paper, I will reflect upon methods and...

Die Kernthese des Mobilities Paradigm, dass Soziales aus Bewegungen besteht, impliziert, dass Mobilität innerhalb sozial und räumlich strukturierter Konstellationen entsteht und daher nicht vollständig aus Individualmerkmalen abgeleitet werden kann. Um die damit verbundene Ungleichheitsrelevanz methodisch adäquat zu analysieren, stellt der Beitrag eine ländervergleichende Korrespondenzanalyse vor, die für residentielle Migration und Pendelwege in Paarhaushalten nach spezifischen Konstellationen sucht.

ABSTRACT Der in der Transcript-Reihe Sozialtheorie erschienene Sammelband von Iris DZUDZEK, Caren KUNZE und Joscha WULLWEBER kann als Versuch gesehen werden, materialistische Gesellschaftskritik mit poststrukturalistischer Theorie zu verbinden. Dabei wird insbesondere auf GRAMSCIs Hegemonieverständnis und LACLAU und MOUFFEs Diskurstheorie zurückgegriffen. Neben dem unbestreitbaren Verdienst, die Kontinuitäten und Synthesemöglichkeiten beider Perspektiven herauszuarbeiten, lassen die Beiträge noch viel Raum für Kritik und politische Einmischung, die die HerausgeberInnen ankündigen, und ebenso für methodologische Fragen der Umsetzung.

III \Cnag V5 VERLAG FÜR SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTEN VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften Entstanden mit Beginn des Jahres 2004 aus den beiden Häusern Leske+Budrich und Westdeutscher Verlag. Die breite Basis für sozialwissenschaftliches Publizieren Bibliografische ...

„Die Region zwischen Ruhr und Emscher ist die einzige in Deutschland, in der sich das Milieu der alten Arbeiterquartiere erhalten hat. Freizeit wird gemeinsam mit sozial Gleichgestellten organisiert: in der Schreberjugend, der Solidaritätsjugend und in Eppes [Heinrich Eppes, Historiker, Ergänzung K.M.] eigenem Verband, den Falken. Doch auch die Sozialistische Jugend Deutschlands – Die Falken erlebt das Siechtum ihrer Milieus, das

... 257 – 286 Bourdieu, Pierre (1983): Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital. In: Kreckel, Reinhard (Hg.): Soziale Ungleichheiten. ... Oxford: Blackwell: 314 – 366 Castree, Noel/Gregory, Derek (Hg.) (2006): David Harvey. A Critical Reader. ...

In this paper, I focus on the subject conceptualisations within mobilities research. In order to strengthen the argument of the co-constitution of social formations and mobile subjectivities, I will highlight the role of automobility in  constituting prototypically modern subjectivity. In opposition to the ‘rational subject’ appellation, the works subsumed under the mobilities paradigm outline a theorem of mobility as a relational practice which will be sketched in the second part. This central concept entails a fundamental critique of the autonomous mobile subject and thus the modern rational subject in general. However, there seems to be a cleavage
between the theoretical assumptions and the research practice of mobilities scholars, as will be highlighted in the third section. By privileging certain methods and perspectives on what is social, segments of mobilities research implicitly affirm the solitary mobile subject by ignoring conditioning contexts and dependencies. In the conclusion I will then suggest developing further some methods and methodologies that account for a more relational subjectivity and agency.

Applying Foucault’s thinking to automobility, I argue that the notion of “mobility as dispositif” facilitates traversing and tracing different narratives about mobilities, which in turn foreground the interweavings of discursive knowledge, material structures, social practices and subjectifications. Specific value of the dispositif concept consists in analysing multifaceted, but decentral power relations effecting inequalities in relation to mobilities at different scales,
shown by way of existing studies of automobility. Thereby, the co-constitution of social order, space and hegemonic mobilities regimes moves to the fore. Yet, what is missing in this Foucauldian genealogy of mobility dispositifs is a broader conceptualisation of stabilising material conditions. Accordingly I use elements of regulation theory as a complementary and framing social theory to understand the dispositifs of mobility as embedded in and stabilised
through (but not as a simple function of) specific modes of regulation and regimes of accumulation. Finally, I consider the current automobility dispositif and conclude by sketching some signs of its decline.

Although there is an observable increase in socio-economic polarizations within most (Western) countries, the debate on social inequalities has lost its former central position within sociology. Against the background of current political and economic changes as well as technological developments, which appear to re-structure social relations, traditional approaches to social class, social mobility and social inequality show less and less analytical and interpretative power. This paper seeks to contribute to an improved understanding of the mechanisms through which social inequalities are being continuously reproduced. I suggest a synthetic approach which understands social inequality as multidimensional and relationally constituted within different social spaces. For this purpose, Bourdieu's approach to relational social inequalities represents a fruitful point of departure but also contains several shortcomings. Therefore, I propose an extension by Shepphard's concept of positionalities as the relationally defined places of actors within these spaces. Furthermore, I elaborate on the relational character of the socio-spatial world by drawing on the mobilities paradigm. The establishment and sustaining of social relations, which constitute spaces through material practice, rest to a large extent on mobilities allowing or denying access to the spatialities of resources, activities and goods. Understood in a broader sense encompassing potential, virtual and physical movement of goods, symbols and people, mobilities thus constitute a significant stratifying force through which unequal life chances are being continuously reproduced. The suggested integration of so far largely unconnected strands in social theory is seen as a fruitful frame for further research of the reproduction of social inequalities and their impacts on people's lives. A corresponding research agenda is at the end of the paper.

Subsequent to the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Our Common Future), sustainability has been set up in many countries as a mission statement of cross-sectoral policies. Sustainable development carries the normative notions of equity, empowerment and environmentally sensitive economic development. Thus, it seems to suggest a fundamentally different vision to neoliberal dogma, which is at the same time described as dominating all socio-political processes. This paper intends to explore the relation between these two discursive framings of contemporary policies through the example of German spatial planning guidelines. More precisely, it addresses social justice as one pillar of sustainability and how it is operationalised in spatial planning policies in Germany. This may exemplify how the seemingly opposing discourses interact in policy practices. The empirical analysis suggests that the ways in which the German spatial planning report focused on social space in territorial terms promotes an economistic and truncated view of social justice, one which fosters the neoliberal idea of regional competition for global capital and reduces socio-spatial justice to territorially equally distributed economic inclusion.

While traces and techniques of power and contestation around the understanding and production of spaces are clearly recognized in the sociological and planning research literature, there has been little rigorous attention to how socio-spatial inequality is put at stake in strategic mobilization around particular spatial imaginaries. In an analysis of the German Spatial Planning Report, the paper examines how inequalities are represented in relation to space and movement in spatial strategy. The analysis shows how, in the report, the spatial dimension of the social is represented as a territorial container, in which the social merges into regional and national entities. Correspondingly, movement is only interpreted as a derived demand, ignoring its integrative aspect as precondition of participation and part of network capital. On the other hand, the spatiality of the economy is represented as something outside and fluid which is meant to be channelled into the territorial containers by means of regional development and spatial planning. These representations of the social suggest a territorialized culturally integrated society as the unquestioned frame of reference which has lost its adequacy and explanatory power against the background of a qualitatively and quantitatively increase of border transgressing relations and movements. However, this view  covers the economic forces producing inequalities and reduces the political space of manoeuvre to redistributions within territorialized socialities, thus sustaining the dominant neoliberal paradigm.

In regards to labour market policy, one can observe an enforced mobilisation of employee subjects disregarding their social and spatial embeddings. Yet, this atomised subject construction is mirrored in many empirical studies on transportation behaviour. Drawing on the assumptions of the mobilities turn, the contribution makes some suggestions on how to study practices of mobilities in a more socially contextualised way and finds evidence for the gendering of mobilities and immobilities in regards to labour market inclusion. The contribution thereby suggests a more theory informed way to quantify practices of movement and mobility.

This edited book by Georg GLASZE and Annika MATTISSEK constitutes an introduction to the debate on space and discourse in human geography. The book comprises three parts. The first and lengthiest one consists of theoretical contributions and concepts of discourse studies in human geography. The articles in the second part conceptualise space from a discourse-theoretical perspective, and the third part of the book presents a selection of methods for discourse analysis in empirical geography. The book is a very useful introduction for researchers and students as well as an intermediary overview over the emerging field of social scientific research into spatialities inspired by poststructuralist approaches.

Call for Papers for a Forum “Shapes of Post-growth Societies”, at the Final Conference of the DFG Research Group ‘Landnahme, Accelearation, Activation’ and the 2nd Regional Conference of the German Sociological Association at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, September 23 to 27, 2019

Shapes of socio-ecologically sustainable mobility regimes
The growth of transport and of the economy are inseparably linked. For personal transport, in present societies, the private car constitutes the hegemonic mode of movement. Yet, car-based personal transport constitutes a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite all socio-political attempts to reduce these emissions, the distances travelled by private car as well as the average size of car engines continuously grow and counteract technologically-induced improvement of efficiency or the increase of alternative modes of travel within cities. To tackle these problems, sustainable transport policy debates suggest environmental impacts have primarily technological solutions, such as electrification, automated driving or smart traffic control. Such ‘technical’ solutions ignore systemic issues, increasing compulsions to travel, social injustices and freedom constraints in the automobile-centred mobility system. Many contributions on this topic often unproblematically equate (auto)mobility with social inclusion or opportunity, replicating associations between moving, freedom and justice in the sense of access to social ‘goods’.
As social scientific mobilities research has outlined, it is the ‘system of automobility’ (Urry, 2004) that defines personal transport and the ordering of mobility, space and society in the modern age. This system comprises the steel-and-petroleum-car itself, its production, fuel and infrastructure industries, the policies that create automobile landscapes that separate work, residence and other activities in space, as well as the discursive and cultural association of cars with freedom and autonomy. Modern lifestyles that archetypally centre on one-family-houses in suburbia, shopping centres and leisure facilities on the edge of cities represent the ideal of the ‘good life’ under automobility. The perspective on automobility as a system (or as a regime or dispostif) underlines on the one hand its deep entanglement with the organisation of the social and everyday life, as well as its centrality in the current regime of economic accumulation and, on the other hand, its dynamics of self-perpetuation and continuous self-reinvention.
At present, the environmental crisis, ‘peak oil’, and potentially ‘peak car’ constitute sound reasons to think beyond this mobility system based on the privately-owned car. Critiques of automobility extend beyond environmentalism, touching on issues like liveable cities, social interaction, physical health, regional modes of production and consumption or wellbeing – many of which are part of post- and de-growth scenarios.
Our point of departure is thus the necessity to problematize compulsions to be mobile themselves in order to reconcile the connected environmental and justice dimensions of ‘sustainable’ mobility. Together with other scholars, we understand the current (auto)mobility system as unsustainable and unjust, curtailing freedoms. Yet, what is missing are alternative imaginaries of how an environmentally sustainable and socially just mobility regime could look like. We suggest calling such an alternative regime “autono-mobility”; intending to underline an altered understanding of (im)mobility, self-determined conduct of life and freedom. Rather than taking access to mobility or certain sites as an end (as proposed in a distributive model of mobility justice), autono-mobility entails both a right to move and a right not to (Cass and Manderscheid 2019).
The event intends to bring together social scientists and activists in the fields of sustainable mobility in order to think ‘out-of-the-box’ about radical concepts of autono-mobile futures in post-growth societies. This implies in particular focussing on movement, transport and mobility as an integral part of everyday lives, and to address the social and economic implications a sustainable transformation of travel may have. Making use of academic freedom, we want to place the emphasis on possible forms and shapes of autono-mobility regimes as such, and discuss potential problems and implications, rather than the question of their political, economic or technical feasibility.
We invite contributions discussing autono-mobility along the lines of, for example, the following issues:
• imaginaries, concepts and visions of autono-mobility systems in history, present or fiction;
• seeds of present mobility practices that prefigure possible ways ahead;
• experience in working with methods of researching mobility futures e.g. futures workshops, back-casting etc.;
• identification of major obstacles and counter-forces to socially and ecologically sustainable autono-mobility regimes;
• discussion of potential social conflicts in the transition from automobility to autono-mobility.
In order to account for the different perspectives and ways of thinking and backgrounds of potential participants, we explicitly do not want to limit contributions to the format of standard academic paper presentation.
Abstracts (500 words) of contributions are invited to be submitted by 31 of March 2019 to the organisers (Noel Cass: n.cass1@lancaster.ac.uk; Katharina Manderscheid: katharina.manderscheid@uni-hamburg.de) and should be accompanied by a brief note on the background of the author(s).
Further information on the joint conference of the research group “Postwachstumsgesellschaften Landnahme, Acceleration, Activation: The (De-)Stabilisation of Modern Growth Societies" and the German Sociological Association can be found at https://www.great-transformation.uni-jena.de/en