Which mobility transition?

In her dissertation project Which Transport Transition? Selective Facilitation between Funding Logics, Responsibilities, and Location Policy, Julia Kühl examines how the transport transition is conceived, justified, and organized in practice at the municipal level in the Saale district. The focus is on administrative routines, political decision-making processes, and civil society action, as well as the question of how the future, economic efficiency, and accountability in terms of financial viability and administrative enforceability are established in everyday municipal governance.

Instead of viewing transport policy as the implementation of clearly defined goals, the project approaches these processes ethnographically: as a socio-cultural and political practice in which certain interpretations of financial viability, practical constraints, and capacity to act are stabilized. Here, the future does not appear as an open space of possibility, but as an administratively framed project whose legitimacy is based on criteria of economic viability and institutional responsibility and which selectively makes alternatives visible or invisible.

Against the backdrop of a current debate about various possible interpretations of public anthropology, the project does not see itself as a form of direct intervention, but rather as a critical analysis of the political, administrative, and economic frameworks through which certain forms of the future are marked as responsible, while others are labeled unrealistic or not financially viable.

Here, public anthropology means making taken-for-granted public assumptions accessible to ethnographic analysis, thereby creating the conditions for reflection, critique, and possible future practice. This understanding is based on the idea that practice (in the sense of intervention) is not individualized, but understood as a collective process (cf. Nonini 2016). The role of ethnographic research, therefore, is to provide analytical perspectives that can be reconnected to existing (emancipatory) political projects and taken up by them.

Nonini D (2016) Praxis. Dialectical Anthropology 40(3): 241–249.