From March 16-18 2012, NC State University will be hosting Local and Mobile, a joint international conference of the Pan-American Mobilities Network and the Cosmobilities Network, and the 3rd annual research symposium of the Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM) program at NCSU.

Invited keynote speakers:
Paul Dourish (University of California, Irvine)
Rich Ling (IT University of Copenhagen)
Teri Rueb (University of Buffalo, SUNY)

Mobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic and political practices. Being interdisciplinary in its nature, Mobilities focuses on the systematic movement of people, goods and information that “travel” around the world in rates much higher (or much slower) than before. As such, mobility studies challenge traditional scholarship that often ignores the social dimensions of mobility, overlooking how travel, movement, and communication and transportation networks help to constitute modern societies and communities. Mobility has always been critical for the creation of social networks and to the development of connections to places. In addition, Mobilities contributes to study of the technological, social and cultural developments in transportation, border control, mobile communication, “intelligent” infrastructure, surveillance.

While mobility is an important framework to understand contemporary society, the pervasiveness of location-aware technology has made it possible to locate ourselves and be networked within patterns of mobility. As user generated maps and location-aware mobile devices become commonplace, we experience a shift in the way we connect to the internet and move through space. Networked interactions permeate our world. We no longer enter the internet--we carry it with us. We experience it while moving through physical spaces. Mobile phones, GPS receivers, and RFID tags are only a few examples of location-aware mobile technologies that mediate our interaction with networked spaces and influence how we move in these spaces. Increasingly, our physical location determines the types of information with which we interact, the way we move through physical spaces, and the people and things we find around us. These new kinds of networked interactions manifest in everyday social practices that are supported by the use of mobile and location-aware technologies, such as participation in location-based mobile games and social networks, use of location-based services, development of mobile annotation projects, and social mapping, just to name a few. The engagement with these practices has important implications for identity construction, our sense of privacy, our notions of place and space, civic and political participation, policy making, as well as cultural production and consumption in everyday life.

We invite papers that address themes at the intersection of mobility and location, or related topics, such as:

Mobile communication and location awareness in everyday life practices;
New urban spatialities developed with mobile gaming and locative social media;
Privacy and surveillance issues as they relate to mobile and location-based social networks;
Identity and spatial construction through locative media art / embodied performance;
Civic engagement and political participation through mobile social media, new mapping practices and
location-aware technologies;
Borders, surveillance, and securitization with ubiquitous and mobile technologies;
Aeromobilities, air travel, and aerial vision;
Alternative mobilities and slow movements;
Planning, policy and design for future mobilities and location-based services;
Tourism, imaginary travel, and virtual travel;
Transitions toward sustainable mobilities;
New methodologies for mobilities research.

Disciplines represented at the conference may include (but are not exclusive to): Anthropology, Architecture and Design, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Communication, Criminology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Media and Visual Arts, Politics and International Relations, Public Policy, Sociology, Theater and Performance Studies, Tourism Research, Transport Research, and Urban Studies.