Robert Braun

Robert studied philosophy of arts and history at the University of Budapest and history at Rutgers University, in 2002 he did his PhD in philosophy and in 2021 his habilitation in Sociology. He is currently also teaching at Masaryk University, Brno and University of Technology, Vienna.

1991-94 he was assistant professor at ELTE University of Budapest, from 1994-2019 he was Associate Professor at Corvinus University in Budapest and currently Associate Professor at Masaryk University. From 2015-2018 he was Professor at Lauder Business School in Vienna. He was Pro-Rector of International Business School in Budapest 2014-2015. He did research at Rutgers University in the US, at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Wassenaar, Netherlands, and taught at numerous universities in the EU and the US. His core reserach interest is in the politics of societal transformation. His past research includes the politics of historiography [creation of power/knowledge and meaning in relation to the past]; the politics of corporations [creation of power/knowledge through social exchange/business]; and, currently, the politics of autonomous mobility [creation of power/knowledge through technology].

Automobility studies is looking at our public (mobile) lives. It studies how we are coerced, restricted, injured and sometimes killed by a sociotechnical order that operates the distribution of power between drivers, passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians and other users of public space. In the language of academia, ‘Automobility,’ an enduring hegemonic sociotechnical order, not the automobile, is the focus of critical automobility studies. Critical automobility studies lies at the confluence of several ‘turns’ in the social sciences that have crossed the traditional disciplinary boundaries of sociology, geography, political science and philosophy. The ‘spatial turn’ conceptualized space in terms of social connections and power; the ‘mobilities turn’ conceptualized the social in terms of movement and, conversely, movement in terms of the social. These two turns were complemented by a ‘social turn’ in technology studies, which emphasized the socially constructed and politicized nature of technology and conceptualized technoscience as a power/knowledge apparatus. SCOT (Social Construction of Technology) and STS (Science, Technology and Society) offered new ways to look at the co-production of technology and society. Inspired by these ‘turns,’ but demarcating the territory of analysis—automobility—from the more general field of mobility studies, as well as from technology focused conceptions of automobility and the automobile.