Seminar Series1: Gender, transport and information communication in the developed world.

Week 6:Gender, transport and information communication technology: new sociabilities, new travel patterns.

This seminar will explore the new sociabilities that are emerging around the advent of domestic information communication technologies and explore the travel patterns that have emerged and are likely to emerge around them.

The key readings are:

The first reading summarises the literature on ICTs, mobility and gender. The literature cited in this report (updated in 2002) is very thin. It does not provide detailed patterns of the gendered use of new information communication technology or information on the implications of such patterns of gendered use for changes in travel behaviour. It does provide a useful review of what is known: it draw our attention to the development of 'remote mothering', that is the use of the mobile telephone to interact with and supervise offspring. It also draws our attention to the research finding that women are more likely to acquire a mobile phone to deal with matters of crisis and emergency: this can range from the need for personal security in the event of a car break down to the organising and reorganising of time, tasks and schedules in the context of some household disruption or disaster.

The report also draws attention to the complexity of children's travel patterns in the context of widespread divorce. It is another door by which the need for ICTs in household coordination enter: remote mothering of children who are visiting with their fathers is likely to create niches for ICTs.

The second reading is in fact a set of readings: it is a bibliography of on line readings on the sociology of mobile phones. It is presented in order to provide a gateway to the wider literture but also to demonstrate that whilst the materials on ict, gender, household organisation and travel patterns are presently thin, there is reason to believe that this is a field that will develop in the near future.

Here are some of the online readings taken from this bibliography which demonstrate this new ground of research:

Click here to return to seminar course outline.

Margaret Grieco, D.Phil.(Oxon.)
Professor of Transport and Society
Napier University
Edinburgh
and
Maria Goeppert Mayer Visiting Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering under the auspices of the Centre for Gender Studies
Technical University of Braunschweig
Germany

e-mail at [email protected]

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