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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines how the act of driving a car shapes identity and considers how a person becomes a 'driver' only after recognizing and accommodating for their relations with the objects, environments, and people they come into contact with while operating a motor vehicle.

Paper Abstract:

So often in our social interactions individuals are recognized through the roles they inhabit or actions they repeatedly undertake, whether that be teacher, father, gardener, etc. These roles are not solidified identities, but are rather performances that an individual must temporarily embody in accordance with the circumstances they find themselves in. In this paper I will be examining how an individual takes on the role of a driver of an automobile by being in relation with their surroundings. For many people, driving is a mundane practice that enables 'more important' activities in their daily lives, and yet for the time that a person operates a motor vehicle they must make their embodiment of that role a top priority. Using auto-ethnography, I will be looking at how a person 'becomes' a driver when they are driving by locating themselves in relation with their surroundings and how those interactions may shape identity for the duration of time that a person is driving. I will be considering how the individual is an intermediary point of contact in a web of relations and how responses to those interactions can shape how that person shows up in the world. This paper will be drawing from a forthcoming article that I will have published later this year in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry.