Ashton R. Rohmer
Ashton R. Rohmer is an urban planner and doctoral researcher in peace and conflict studies. She studies our transportation system as a site of power, violence, care, and commons. Using an interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach including critical discourse analysis, participant observation, interviews, and surveys, her dissertation theorizes how the language people use in civic forums to maintain power atop the modal hierarchy evidences an ideology of car supremacy and how in response to a conflict system of vehicular violence, neighbors are reimagining our streets for safety, connection, and joy.
Přednáška
Planning and mobility policy practice increasingly grapple with how to build public support for shared and active mobility, but contemporary transportation debates often assume the problem is one of communication or infrastructure. This session instead argues that mobility practitioners must navigate – and should strive to combat – two powerful societal forces: first, the conflict system of cultural, structural, and direct vehicular violence and second, car supremacy as the ideological construct that perpetuates and legitimizes a modal hierarchy that oppresses people who ride bikes and other non-drivers.
Understanding these forces as reinforcing conceptual frameworks not only reveals the scale and complexity of the problem but also illustrates myriad opportunities for disruption. The session opens with a brief presentation of both frameworks, grounding them in empirical mixed methods findings from different geographic contexts. The second half is structured around breakout groups tasked with a single question: given what you now know about vehicular violence and car supremacy, what could you – within the constraints of your institution, your role, and your political context – reasonably change?
Seed examples will be offered to open the conversation, from small and subtle shifts such as substituting "crash" for “accident” in public discourse to larger scale efforts such as restructuring stakeholder engagement around intersectional modal identities. Participants will leave with a collectively generated toolkit of interventions, grounded in the reality of bureaucratic and political constraints, that they can bring back to their daily work.