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Dear colleagues,

Please find below a call for abstracts for a special issue that may be of interest to you (apologies for cross-posting).

Best regards, Merlin

Call for abstracts Case Studies on Transport Policy

Special Issue: The many faces of labouring transport: attending to workers across mobility modes, technologies and spaces

Guest editors Wojciech K=C4=99b=C5=82owski Chiara Vitrano Monika Maciejewska Merlin Gillard Karen Lucas

Transport policies and practices are usually scrutinised against the alleged benefits they may provide to users in terms of accessibility, flexibility, speed, and cost reduction. However, they are rarely assessed in terms of their impact on diverse workers engaged in mobility, their workload, job security, work-life balance, time pressure, and access to key opportunities. To address this gap, this special issue aims to focus on transport workers as producers, users, and resisters of mobility systems.

As producers of mobility services, workers experience how socio-economic and political changes in mobility systems shape their working conditions (e.g. job contracts, wages, security, access to social protection, workspaces and working times quality, skills and competences required), which are also strictly related to the capacity to provide a good quality, safe, and reliable service. As users, transport workers may belong to groups who are exposed to accessibility inequalities due to lower resources for access and specific access needs (e.g. the need to use mobility services in non-standard time slots due to atypical working time arrangements or the need to reach peripheral destinations, e.g. depots or end/start stations, sometimes from likewise peripheral origins). As resisters, transport workers are active agents that engage in collective bargaining and collective actions towards improving their livelihood, which may cause temporary service disruption and regulatory changes.

We welcome theoretical and empirical papers that explore one or several mobility modes, technologies and spaces to engage with passenger and/or freight transport workers. We are open to contributions across geographical scales and contexts in the global North, South and East. The themes explored may include (but are not limited to):

• The livelihoods, working conditions and agency of transport workers
• Changing working conditions within formal transport companies and operators
• Informalisation of transport work, e.g. in =E2=80=9Cdigitalised=E2=80=9D = mobility platforms
• Spatialities and temporalities of transport work
• Technological innovations and their relation to work-related stress
• Transport decarbonisation and transport workers
• Transport related activism: unions and strikes
• Everyday mobility practices of transport workers
• The work of being a (public) transport passenger, e.g. calculating routes, looking out for transport, helping others

In exploring these themes, this special issue seeks to shed light on the often-overlooked aspects of transport work and its impact on workers, highlighting the need for a comprehensive understanding of the intersection between mobility systems and labour dynamics. The insights gained from this research can inform policy decisions, improve working conditions, and enhance the overall quality of transport services.

If interested, please submit your abstract (200-250 words) together with 5 keywords by 15th April 2024 to wojciech.keblowski@vub.be and monika.maciejewska@uab.cat

We welcome contributions from diverse disciplines addressing the question of transport (and) labour.

If selected, you will be expected to prepare the first draft of the paper by 31st July 2024. The special issue is provisionally scheduled for publication in November 2025, although individual papers might be published earlier, depending on the review process.

Please consult the guide for authors in Case Studies on Transport Policy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/case-studies-on-transport-policy/publ= ish/guide-for-authors

-- Merlin Gillard PhD Candidate Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Cosmopolis