scholarly journals Shifting gears for the automated vehicle: findings from focus groups in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Élyse Comeau
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Travel Demand ◽  
Travel Behaviour ◽  
Disruptive Technology ◽  
Automated Vehicles ◽  
The Public ◽  
Automated Vehicle ◽  
Wise Decision ◽  
The Public Sphere

The emergence of automated vehicles (AVs) may potentially transform the ways in which individuals travel, and integrating the impacts and opportunities of AVs into travel demand forecasts and transportation planning will be important for wise decision-making. This paper presents findings from focus groups designed to explore Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) residents’ interest and responses to AVs. Results suggest that the general public is interested in AVs and eager to learn more, and that individual travel habits carry significant weight. The findings from this study emphasize the planner’s responsibility to engage in consultations internally, within organizations and across departments, as well as externally, with stakeholders and members of the community. On-going internal and external engagements will first allow organizations to prepare and consolidate appropriate strategies for this disruptive technology, and second, will keep the public sphere informed and engaged in the implementation of AVs. Key words: automated vehicles, planning, transportation, travel behaviour, focus groups.

scholarly journals Shifting gears for the automated vehicle: findings from focus groups in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Élyse Comeau
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Travel Demand ◽  
Travel Behaviour ◽  
Disruptive Technology ◽  
Automated Vehicles ◽  
The Public ◽  
Automated Vehicle ◽  
Wise Decision ◽  
The Public Sphere

The emergence of automated vehicles (AVs) may potentially transform the ways in which individuals travel, and integrating the impacts and opportunities of AVs into travel demand forecasts and transportation planning will be important for wise decision-making. This paper presents findings from focus groups designed to explore Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) residents’ interest and responses to AVs. Results suggest that the general public is interested in AVs and eager to learn more, and that individual travel habits carry significant weight. The findings from this study emphasize the planner’s responsibility to engage in consultations internally, within organizations and across departments, as well as externally, with stakeholders and members of the community. On-going internal and external engagements will first allow organizations to prepare and consolidate appropriate strategies for this disruptive technology, and second, will keep the public sphere informed and engaged in the implementation of AVs. Key words: automated vehicles, planning, transportation, travel behaviour, focus groups.

‘The Democracy of Conversation’: The Panel and the Public Sphere

2005 ◽  
Vol 116 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Harrington
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
News Media ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fundamental Part ◽  
News Program ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Worrying Trend

If news is a fundamental part of the public sphere and ideals of democracy, then continuing assertions about the public's lack of engagement with its topics is a worrying trend. However, much of this worry may be conflated by a lack of understanding about both the lived experiences of audiences (particularly youth audiences) and the news media environment more generally. This paper examines The Panel, a Ten Network ‘new’ news program which appears to have a significant deal of power in the mediatised postmodern public sphere. Through its discursive format, and by making news more comprehensible and interesting, the program is able to increase the potential for everyday ‘rational-critical’ debate at the heart of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989: 117). This theory is examined here through the use of interviews with members of The Panel's production team and focus groups conducted with youth audiences.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

Habermas, Cultural Hegemony, and the Educational Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Arabic Speaking

This study explores Habermas’s work in terms of the relevance of his theory of the public sphere to the politics and poetics of the Arab oral tradition and its pedagogical practices. In what ways and forms does Arab heritage inform a public sphere of resistance or dissent? How does Habermas’s notion of the public space help or hinder a better understanding of the Arab oral tradition within the sociopolitical and educational landscape of the Arabic-speaking world? This study also explores the pedagogical implications of teaching Arab orality within the context of the public sphere as a contested site that informs a mode of resistance against social inequality and sociopolitical exclusions.

The Dynamics of Egypt’s “Semi-opposition,” 2004–11

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-103
Author(s):  
Mai Mogib Mosad
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political System ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

This paper maps the basic opposition groups that influenced the Egyptian political system in the last years of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. It approaches the nature of the relationship between the system and the opposition through use of the concept of “semi-opposition.” An examination and evaluation of the opposition groups shows the extent to which the regime—in order to appear that it was opening the public sphere to the opposition—had channels of communication with the Muslim Brotherhood. The paper also shows the system’s relations with other groups, such as “Kifaya” and “April 6”; it then explains the reasons behind the success of the Muslim Brotherhood at seizing power after the ousting of President Mubarak.

I Think We’re Alone Now

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-210
Author(s):  
Erin Nunoda
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
The Public Sphere

This article examines YouTube videos (primarily distributed by a user named Cecil Robert) that document so-called dead malls: unpopulated, unproductive, but not necessarily demolished consumerist sites that have proliferated in the wake of the 2008 recession. These works link digital images of mall interiors with pop-song remixes so as to re-create the experience of hearing a track while standing within the empty space; manipulating the songs’ audio frequencies heightens echo effects and fosters an impression of ghostly dislocation. This article argues that these videos locate a potentiality in abandoned mall spaces for the exploration of queer (non)relations. It suggests that the videos’ emphasis on lonely, unconsummated intimacies questions circuitous visions of the public sphere, participatory dynamics online, and the presumably conservative biopolitics (both at its height and in its memorialization) of mall architecture.

The public and the private: reconfiguring the interrelationship during a civil act

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Natalia Kostenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Physical Interaction ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

The subject matter of research interest here is the movement of sociological reflection concerning the interplay of public and private realms in social, political and individual life. The focus is on the boundary constructs embodying publicity, which are, first of all, classical models of the space of appearance for free citizens of the polis (H. Arendt) and the public sphere organised by communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas). Alternative patterns are present in modern ideas pertaining to the significance of biological component in public space in the context of biopolitics (M. Foucault), “inclusive exclusion of bare life” (G. Agamben), as well as performativity of corporeal and linguistic experience related to the right to participate in civil acts such as popular assembly (J. Butler), where the established distinctions between the public and the private are levelled, and the interrelationship of these two realms becomes reconfigured. Once the new media have come into play, both the structure and nature of the public sphere becomes modified. What assumes a decisive role is people’s physical interaction with online communication gadgets, which instantly connect information networks along various trajectories. However, the rapid development of information technology produces particular risks related to the control of communications industry, leaving both public and private realms unprotected and deforming them. This also urges us to rethink the issue of congruence of the two ideas such as transparency of societies and security.

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