Call for contributions for young researchers

If you are a young researcher, if you are working on a controversy concerning an urban mobility related public issue in one of the world's big cities, your proposals for a contribution to the international conference on "What is it that drives public action on urban mobility issues? The making of movement" will be welcome!

This conference will be held in Paris in March 2012. It is organized by the City on the Move Institute, its China and Latin America chairs, La Fabrique de la cité, in partnership with Paris-East University and the Île-de-France Institute of Urban Planning and Design.

Why respond to this call?

• To compete for “The making of  movement” Young Researcher Prize and thereby attract visibility and contacts.

• To take part in a high-level international seminar in Paris.

• To be published on our international collaborative research platform:www.movemaking.com.

• To network and exchange ideas with other researchers through our platform.
  
  

Objectives of the call for young researchers

This is a call for contributions to a conference which has as its general purpose to decode the public policies associated with urban mobility (see below).It asks young researchers to present an analysis of a recent controversy about a public issue associated with urban mobility in one of the world’s big cities (population of at least 500,000 in Europe, at least a million elsewhere in the world), whatever the continent or geographical area in which it occurs.

The idea is to retrace the history of a controversy between social stakeholders in a context where the methods of traditional evaluation based on public interest are contested.What expression of the stakeholders’ interests, what representations of the city, of sustainable development, of public action, of values… reveal the processes underlying the conflict?How did the problem emerge into the public arena?Who are the social stakeholders involved?How did it come onto the media and/or political agenda?What are the “arenas” in which these public conflicts take place?What projects/megaprojects/fetish objects are at the centre of the debates?Around which questions do conflicts of ideas and/or interests emerge?What arguments are brought to bear?By whom?In the name of what values or visions of urban order?According to what references to other places (urban models, imported ideas, etc.)? …

The contributions can pertain to different disciplines and involve several:urbanism, planning, urban sociology, sociology of public problems, sociology of public action, transport and mobility engineering, discourse analysis, moral and political anthropology, etc.

General objective of the international conference

The general objective of this conference is to decode the public policies associated with urban mobility, on the basis of examples taken from a dozen global cities.How, in a multi-actor and multi-issue process, are urban mobility policies – successful or not – currently constructed and discussed?The systems underlying mobility policies are multiple, a mixture of economic constraints, values, utopian visions, image politics, conflicts of interest, political opportunities…The aim of the research programme is to gain a better understanding of the processes arising from these combinations of values, dreams and constraints, by focusing on recent situations.

“The making of  movement” Young Researcher Prize

The Scientific Committee will award the prize for the best contribution.Its author will be invited to give a lecture in one of the universities of the City on the Move chairs in Latin America, China or in France.
 

Entry procedure and timetable

• The call for contributions is addressed to researchers under the age of 35 holding or working towards a doctorate.
• Deadline for proposal submissions:September 30, 2011. Researchers who are interested should send a short CV and a summary of their paper (maximum 3000 characters including spaces) including the title of the contribution, or the full text of their paper (maximum 30,000 characters including spaces), to Gaëlle Rony, Project Manager at City on the Move Institute, at the following address: JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING .

• Texts should preferably be submitted in English.French will be accepted.
•   The Scientific Committee will select around ten proposals.
• Announcement of results:October 15, 2011.
• The proposals selected by the Scientific Committee will be included in the programme of the March 2012 conference.
•  Deadline for submission of full texts:December 15, 2011.
• The full texts of the selected papers must be no more than 30,000 characters, including spaces.They must be sent, in English or French, to Gaëlle Rony, Project Manager at City on the Move Institute, at the following address: JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING .
•  The texts will be published on the website for the research programme on “What is it that drives public action on urban mobility issues?The making of movement”  www.movemaking.com.

Practical information

• Registration for the conference is free.
• Travel and accommodation costs are borne by the participants and contributors.
• The conference will run over two days in Paris in March 2012. The precise dates and venue of the conference will be specified in September 2011.