La fabbrica dei guidatori. Culture, pratiche e discorsi sull'automobility nelle scuole guida milanesi

CONSTRUCTING DRIVERS. Cultures, practices and discourses on automobility within Milanese driving schools (Abstract) My research project aims at better understanding the relationship between politics, materiality and cultural representations through empirical case studies of the car and its drivers. The impact of cars on society does not happen "naturally", but is the result of specific historical and cultural conditions. Technologies, artefacts, and objects are means of communication that transcend their instrumental uses. They are like texts which carry the creators’ predefined perspective, and users’ narratives and interpretations (Wajcman 2000). The car is a culturally embedded - and historically determined - object that plays an important role in shaping identities, subcultures and life styles. The car strongly impacts everyday life of people and social organisation (Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007; Redshaw 2008). Looking at the processes of modernisation and the resulting transformations that characterised the 20th century, the central role played by the car can be observed in both macro (industrialisation, consumption) and micro (organisation of everyday life) spheres of social life (Gartman 2003). The car was the symbolic object of the economic boom unfolding in Italy, and not only, during the 1950s and 1970s (Paolini 2007). It moulded the dreams of freedom and adventure of whole generations; it modified the way in which people interpret their time, particularly leisure time; it partly contributed to the female emancipation that enabled women to move more autonomously in the public domain. My PhD explores the politics of the car and its impacts on forms of contemporary everyday urban mobility. If we want to take seriously the idea of a post-car future, we need an informed and instructive understanding of the values and needs manifest in car culture, as well as a deeper knowledge of the cultural assumptions and sources of power that sustain automobility. We need a change in cultural attitudes toward the car and in the identities produced and reproduced by the system of automobility in order to design truly sustainable and alternative forms of mobility. The politics of the car is not simply a set of embodied ideas or a linguistic formation but can be interpreted as a social practice that has material effects in making the world and societal development appear as natural and obvious (Howart 2000). The necessity of the car is produced and reproduced through everyday life practices, material interactions and experiences. We might say that this process is constituted inside language considering that meanings and meaningful practices are constructed within and through discourse (Hall 1997). With the increasingly stronger discourses on hypermobility and automobility as a backdrop, I explored the interconnections between popular culture and choices of mobility. The aim of my research is to answer the question “How is the politics of the car culturally produced and embodied in everyday life practices?” through looking at the process of drivers’ social construction. Despite the symbolic importance of cars in everyday life, the processes through which people become drivers and the meanings and expectations associated with these processes are virtually neglected topics, especially in the Italian context. My PhD explores some of the cultural dimensions that characterise the transition from passenger to driver, as well the practice of driving seeing as a meaningful material interaction between humans and cars. I do so with reference to social, environmental and gender issues. My argument is supported by an empirical case study of the process of drivers’ social construction in which particular interpretations of automobility and cars are produced, reproduced and (re-)confirmed. The research methodology that best supports the objectives of this study is qualitative. Drawing from a diversity of sources, I consider in my analysis interpretations, narratives and beliefs produced around car cultures and the practice of driving. Applying the Weberian concept of “verstehen” I have done ethnographic studies using qualitative techniques such as observations, non-structured and semi-structured interviews.