The Road Ahead: American Automobility and the Politics of the Future

How does the United States envision the future of automobility - the autonomous mobility made possible by motor vehicles - in the context of global climate change and resource depletion? This dissertation examines official representations of America's mobility future as articulated in texts produced by the advanced vehicle research programs of the US Department of Energy (DOE); the smart growth initiatives of the Department of Transportation (DOT) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and the writings of Transition US, a part of the broader transnational grassroots Transition Movement. Using discourse analysis, the dissertation investigates how, in narrating the future of the automobile in America, these texts perform political work: producing distinct forms of subjecthood and legitimating a range of actions in the present. The findings indicate that automobility's dominance of the American imagination is being unsettled as discourse about the future of the automobile fragments into three narratives. One narrative envisions technological acceleration into a future where climate change is manageable and where Americans remain highly mobile, autonomous, driver-consumers. One sees the future as an opportunity to repair the social and environmental damage wrought by 20th-century automobility by transforming the built environment to resemble the pre-automobile landscape, thereby recovering Americans' latent social nature and affinity for neighborhood. The third expects the inevitable end of the automobile age in the face of runaway climate change and peak oil; it sees this radical discontinuity as an opportunity for human adaptability and community resilience. In each narrative, expectations about what can and should happen derive from irreconcilable core assumptions about human nature and how much of the world is in human hands. As long as these core assumptions remain contested, we can expect to see the American imagination remain unsettled.