CS 414F

Automobiles are everywhere but rarely discussed in Communication Studies as mobile media. This course considers how the automobile is as significant for global communication as other mobile media such as cinema and television. Drawing primarily from scholarship in Critical Mobility Studies, we will examine how sociotechnical infrastructures, commonsense representations, and human experiences connect and sustain global automobilities, or a worldwide assemblage of hegemonic car culture. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the elite mobilities, spectacle, and environmental costs of global motorsport circuits; the global circulation of ideologies about gender and race via road movies, car advertisements, and auto shows; colonial logics in the global mediation of speed tourism and drive tourism; paradoxes in global imaginaries about autonomous vehicles and post-automobilities; as well as counter-mobilities, ontomobilities, creative expressions, and car subcultures in Western and non-Western contexts. Also, we will consider the sustainability of global automobilities and create future scenarios about this.