Traffic in the Americas

Public Events:
-10:00am-12:00pm: Opening Address by Professor Kevin Lewis O'Neill (University of Toronto) "Eat or Be Eaten: Motorcylce Taxis in Guatemala City"
-12:00pm-1:00pm: Lunch
-1:00pm-3:00pm: Public Roundtable moderated by Professor Ananya Roy (UCLA), with Professor Austin Zeiderman (LSE), Professor Deborah Cowen (University of Toronto), and Professor Dana Cuff (UCLA) "Traffic: A Keyword for the Contemporary"
-3:30pm-5:00pm: Keynote Address by Professor Mariana Valverde (University of Toronto) "Notes Towards a Genealogy of Traffic"

This research collaboration will explore the varied relationships that exist between two understandings of the word traffic. The first is vehicles moving on a road, and the second is the trading in something illegal. “Traffic” is the first of four workshops on the intersections of these two understandings of the word, with subsequent meetings planned for Los Angeles (Spring 2020), Bogotá (Spring 2021), and London (Spring 2022). Each will engage the themes of security, mobility, and infrastructure from the perspective of traffic, with four research units currently driving this experiment in collaborative theorization. These units are the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, the Latin American and Caribbean Centre at the London School of Economics, the Institute on Equality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre Desarrollo at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. The intention is for each of these units and their cities to structure each workshop, but the emphasis of each contribution need not be local. The first workshop will juxtapose an exploration of traffic in Toronto with comparative insights from other sites throughout the Americas.