ABOUT
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
OUTLINE
THE WORKSHOP
PARTICIPANTS
SCHEDULE
Eric Laurier
Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh
Research Interest
Driving and cycling for more than a decade Laurier can parallel park white vans and carry a
baguette on his handlebars.
Over the past ten years he has done ethnographic studies of sailing, driving, walking, work and resting. These were done in a variety of settings: yachts, cars, parks, car-parks, cafes, libraries, households, vehicle parts-supply and the city streets.
His most recent major project was on the relationship between cafes and civic life in contemporary cities.
The workshop
In my current project 'Habitable Cars: the organisation of collective private transport', along with
Barry Brown and Hayden Lorimer, I'm looking at what happens when we travel together in the car and
how we organise that happening using extensive video record of car journeys made by various social groups.
What appears to be 'waiting' crops up all the time as those in the car wait for someone else to join them or
leave them and where the whole vehicle is waiting at traffic lights or waiting in a traffic queue or
waiting to pull out and so on. It may only appear to be waiting when in fact it is something else, or
as the call for papers suggest, those who are present artfully insert other activities into the time spent
waiting. In a recent analysis session we looked at a video clip of children waiting on their mum in the car
and the question was raised as to whether we are always waiting on or for someone or something throughout
our lives (as in Waiting for Godot). More prosaically we began to analyse waiting's relationship to patience,
impatience and to children investigating the reasonableness (or not) of adults' activities that they have to
wait on and for.
