Road Trip Research Articles

A manual for girlhood – the embodied mechanical intertext in Exploded View

This paper interrogates my 2019 novel Exploded View, which uses a Holden workshop manual as its central scientific intertext and narrates a closely observed road trip from the west to the east coast of Australia. I reflect on the traumatic girlhood of the novel’s narrator and examine how she subverts the phallogocentric text of an automotive repair manual to question her silent place within the machinery of family and society. I look at how a motif like a car engine can function metaphorically and allegorically within a novel and unpick my use of the vocabulary of the workshop manual, its processes and its visual structures (the exploded view) and reflect on how they are used to represent the violent constraint of life for an Australian girl. I conclude with a reflection on my obsession with scientific intertexts and their subversion through situated, embodied or somatic knowledge. This is something I trace back to my status as a migrant searching to ground myself in this country and perhaps even before that as I attempted to situate the alphabet in its landscape.

Are We There Yet?: The First Road Trip Across the USA by Stacy McAnulty (review)

Are We There Yet?: The First Road Trip Across the USA by Stacy McAnulty (review)

Future-proofing cities against negative city mobility and public health impacts of impending natural hazards: a system dynamics modelling study.

Future-proofing cities against negative city mobility and public health impacts of impending natural hazards: a system dynamics modelling study.

The Great (Soviet-)American Road Trip

The Great (Soviet-)American Road Trip

William Least Heat-Moon’s American Travels: Representing Spaces through the American Road Narrative

William Least Heat-Moon embarked on a road trip across the United States in 1978, after having lost his job as a professor and after divorcing. With his van, called Ghost Dancing, after Native American ceremonies, Heat-Moon hits the open road for three months, travelling only through the backroads of America, with the intention to find pristine places. These experiences on the road are recounted in his well-known road book Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982). The aim of this article is to discuss the representation of space—natural and manmade—within Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, using ecocritical and geocritical studies as a methodological mapping for the analysis. Applying the ecocritical and geocritical approaches will contribute to provide a more comprehensive study on the topic of space, leading also to a reconsideration of the genre of the American road narrative, and consequently, providing new insights on mobilities and space studies.

Optimizing electric bus performance via predictive maintenance: a combined experimental and modeling approach

IntroductionThis study explores the optimization of Electric Bus (EB) performance by integrating predictive maintenance strategies, utilizing real-time data and advanced modeling techniques.MethodsThe study involves installing measurement sensors to capture dynamic behavior and energy consumption during actual road trips, analyzing the collected data to refine vehicle dynamics models and assess battery degradation under various operational conditions, and employing a multi-objective optimization framework to minimize battery degradation while ensuring efficient energy use and maintaining operational requirements.Results and DiscussionThe study offers valuable insights into battery management strategies, revealing that battery degradation can be reduced by 25% through optimum driving behavior, which can be achieved in real driving conditions by avoiding aggressive driving. This research supports the broader goal of promoting sustainable public transportation solutions through the effective use of electric buses, enabling operators to extend battery longevity and enhance overall vehicle performance by implementing the identified strategies.

COMMUNAL BONDS IN BIRD SUMMONS

The novel Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela explores the various intricacies of female friendship, migration, faith, and self-discovery. It is a story about three Muslim women, Salma, Moni, and Iman, who take a road trip to the Scottish Highlands, yearning to visit the grave of a historical woman, Lady Evelyn Cobbold, known as the first British woman to perform Hajj. Additionally, their journey is not just a journey of pilgrimage but rather a transformative experience wherein they face different challenges. These challenges helped them to grow independently and become a new community with their own set of rules and principles. Leila Aboulela explores the themes of communal displacement, religious faith, and female solidarity throughout the book. All these are interwoven to illustrate how communal bonds enable the protagonists to meet the challenges regarding their issues of identity, belonging, and personal development. Although each of the women is on her own journey, the story suggests that their shared experiences steer their quests for self-discovery in similar directions. This paper looks into how their sisterhood develops in the book and how female solidarity serves as a source of strength, healing as well as self-realization. This paper examines how Bird Summons illustrates the significance of communal bonds through feminist, postcolonial, and Islamic literary frameworks, emphasizing their role in fostering intersubjective connections that contribute to the development of individual identity and the challenge of social and personal dilemmas.

COMMUNAL BONDS IN BIRD SUMMONS WRITTEN BY LEILA ABOULELA

The novel Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela explores the various intricacies of female friendship, migration, faith and self-discovery. It is a story about three Muslim women Salma, Moni, Iman who took a road trip to the Scottish Highlands, yearning to visit the grave of an historical woman Lady Evelyn Cobbold known as the first British woman to perform Hajj. Additionally, their journey is not just a journey of pilgrimage, but rather a transformative experience wherein they face different challenges. These challenges helped them to grow independent and come out as new set of community having their own set of rules and principles. Leila Aboulela throughout the book, explores the themes of communal displacement, religious faith, and female solidarity. All these are interwoven to illustrate how communal bonds enable the protagonists to meet the challenges regarding their issue of identity, belonging, and personal development. Although each of the women is on her own journey, the story suggests that their shared experiences steer their quests for self-discovery in similar directions. This paper looks into how their sisterhood develops in the book and how female solidarity serves as a source of strength, healing as well as self-realization. This paper examines how Bird Summons illustrates the significance of communal bonds through feminist, postcolonial, and Islamic literary frameworks, emphasizing their role in fostering intersubjective connections that contribute to the development of individual identity and the challenge of social and personal dilemmas.

Glimpsing Angie Xtravaganza: The Trans Latinx Imaginary of Paris Is Burning

Abstract This article examines the outtakes and supplemental footage of Paris Is Burning (dir. Jennie Livingston, US, 1990), tracking across these seconds and sound bites the various glimpses of trans Puerto Rican performer Angie Xtravaganza. Through a conceptual schema the author terms critical otiosity, a process through which to vitalize with trans Latinx liberatory possibilities the seemingly superfluous, unproductive, irrelevant, and other pilloried and/or overlooked affective comportments found in the filmic outtakes, this article mounts a rereading of Paris Is Burning against the grain of neoliberal, cissexist capitalist regimes, which valorize above all else narratives and displays of spectacle, bootstrapping, tragedy, assimilation, uplift, and premature death. Glimpses of Angie across the extra footage casually chitchatting in Spanish or lethargically dancing in pink rollers on a road trip, the author contends, durationally slow down and stall cisheteronormative temporalities, obviating from the showy and profitable trans and queer of color performance-labor crucial to the filmic gaze and capitalist drives and scrambling representational coherence and historical linearity. Retooling the means of how we understand the filmic and historical lives of trans of color and Latinx people, distinct from the cisnormative, capitalist-driven productivity of spectacle, is eminently crucial for enacting trans of color counter-histories and counter-discourses about popular films like Paris Is Burning. The nature of the outtakes and supplemental footage is precisely what instantiates their critical merit, a critical otiosity giving conceptual heft to these seconds and scenes of quotidian trans Latinx existing while imagining alternative trans of color histories and liberatory lifeworlds.

아딜한 예르자노프의 영화 ｢황야의 늑대｣ 연구

In the film Steppenwolf director Adilhan Yerzhanov continues to tell the story of the “road trip” of the two main characters, who are still unable to form a complete family. As in other films released since 2018, the protagonists are forced to embark on a path destined for destruction, with no possibility of redemption in sight. Nevertheless, they do so because it is the only way to face the world. Adilhan Yerzhanov's Steppenwolf also inherits the Soviet montage technique represented by Eisenstein. In particular, he illustrates in this work the technique of intellectual montage, which emphasizes the collision of opposites and the intervention of the viewer's perception. He seems to have referenced these classic Soviet montage techniques in masterpieces such as The Wild Bunch. Adilhan Yerzhanov also uses the white space of the shots to depict the desolation and dystopian landscape of empty space. Another stylistic feature of Steppenwolf` is that it borrows from the Western genre. The director blends the styles of classic Westerns and revisionist Red Westerns in the film, reimagining them as Kazakhstani Westerns. Another Kazakh red western, Erlan Nurmekhamdov's The Horse Thieves. The Roads of Time(2019) focused on the visualization of the landscape and the redemption of the characters in a traditional Western, while Steppenwolf depicts a dystopian world where the possibility of redemption is absent. Also, as in his previous film The Yellow Cat, Adilhan Yerzhanov creatively quotes and transforms masterpieces of world cinema in Steppenwolf. In conclusion, Adilhan Yerzhanov's Steppenwolf can be seen as a reflection of the director's ambition to combine the specificity of Central Asia with the universality of world cinema.

Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, written by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, written by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

The Microbial Road Trip: Are We Nearing the Golden Era of Orthopaedics?: Commentary on an article by Sunqi Nian, MM, et al.: "Landscape of the Lumbar Cartilaginous End Plate Microbiota and Metabolites in Patients with Modic Changes".

The Microbial Road Trip: Are We Nearing the Golden Era of Orthopaedics?: Commentary on an article by Sunqi Nian, MM, et al.: "Landscape of the Lumbar Cartilaginous End Plate Microbiota and Metabolites in Patients with Modic Changes".

Collaborative Route Planning of Road Trips in Regional Central Cities of China: An Approach Based on E-CARGO Model

Collaborative Route Planning of Road Trips in Regional Central Cities of China: An Approach Based on E-CARGO Model

Mapping Shadows of the Bight: a road trip residency

ABSTRACT In August 2023, a collective of arts and humanities scholars undertook a mobile residency on the Far West Coast of South Australia, along the Great Australian Bight. Moving through deeply storied country that is largely marginal and neglected in the cultural and political imaginary, and negotiating our relation to this displacement as settler-colonial scholars with the privilege of mobility, the residency sought creative and critical approaches to self, place and others that might build capacity for shared reparative futures. Encounter, embodiment and entanglement – modes of staying with shadows cast by global forces of capitalism, industrialization, colonization and climate change and, just as importantly, staying clear of research methods that rehearse epistemic violence – formed the core of our intentionally indeterminate methodology. In keeping with a framework that accepts the contingency of knowledge and knowledge production, we offer not findings but seekings: invitations to engage in pursuing new collaborations, methods and politics for expanding imaginaries of materiality and connection, resistant to the dematerialization, dissociation and disregard inherent to the contemporary global order.

Cuba and Chile: Revolutionary Dialogues for Latin America

This article analyses the structural challenges of the Latin American revolution in the early 1970s, which echoed from Fidel Castro’s extensive road trip around Chile during the Salvador Allende administration in November 1971. Castro’s presence promoted massive mobilizations of Chilean workers and peasants who came in droves to listen to his speeches. By then, an interesting dialogue between the Cuban and Chilean revolutionary paths had developed on a mass-collective basis, considering the dialogical skills of both leaders, Castro and Allende, who participated together in many mass demonstrations during the 24 days that the Cuban leader spent in Chile. While Cuba experienced an insurrection and guerrilla war, Chile was promoting a “peaceful road to socialism” through electoral victories. This article investigates the relations between the two revolutionary processes through the dialogues during this visit. This article is based on press materials from those days, Castro’s and Allende’s speeches and other primary sources. It concludes that the Cuban and Chilean Revolutions were more complementary than antagonistic, contrary to the historiography that emphasizes rivalry between them.

Driving While Brown: The American Road Trip in H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy

ABSTRACT H.M. Naqvi’s novel Home Boy features three men of Pakistani background who embark on a cab ride from New York City to Westbrook, Connecticut. They wish to check on an elusive character, Mohammed Shah (a.k.a. the Pakistani Gatsby or the Shaman), who is missing after 9/11. I analyze this journey, known as the “Shaman Run,” as an American road trip. For critical analysis, I synthesize Nancy Leong’s concepts of “open road” and “traffic stop narratives,” highlighting the racialization of American roads, with Sarah Sharma’s notion of “Brown Space” regarding the post-9/11 criminalization of cabdrivers with ties to the Global South. I argue that the Shaman Run begins as an open road narrative but is transformed into a traffic stop narrative overlaid with Brown Space, leading to a reconsideration of the possibilities of open road narratives. Naqvi incorporates elements of road trip fiction in Home Boy to recount how certain Americans did not regard Muslims as fellow mourners in the aftermath of 9/11. Writers and filmmakers from Pakistan and the Pakistani Diaspora have depicted the othering of Muslims in post-9/11 America, but Naqvi is distinctive in foregrounding this theme by repurposing a well-known genre of American literature.

PERANCANGAN PROYEK RUMAH MAKAN DAN REST AREA TONGAS ASRI DENGAN PENDALAMAN HEALING ARCHITECTURE OLEH KONSULTAN ARSITEKTUR INTERIOR KUMO LIVING

The tourism industry in Indonesia, especially domestic tourism, has experienced an increase after previously slumping during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mount Bromo, which is situated in the Probolinggo region, is one of the outdoor tourism destinations in Indonesia that has seen a rise in tourists. One of the access points to Mount Bromo is Raya Tongas Street, which is where the Tongas Asri Restaurant and Rest Area project is located and will be designed. The visitors who stop by Tongas Asri Restaurant are generally tired from the long road trip. By indulging guests’ five senses, the approach healing architecture used in this design project is anticipated to enhance the resting experience for guests. A location created with healing architecture aims to provide its occupants with a therapeutic and nurturing environment. It is intended that Kumo Living’s healing architecture will offer a way to positively stimulate each of the five human senses, namely sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste, thereby producing a refreshing environment that helps visitors feel calm and happy again. Deepening healing architecture was selected for this project, with a stimulating environment as the final result of achieving a therapeutic environment in this project, such as nature connectedness, use of natural materials, use of restorative gardens, and designs that pamper visitors’ senses, thus, when stopping at the Restaurant and Rest Area, guests can rest and recuperate their physical and mental state.

A Road Trip of Acceptance and Love

The author reviews Amber McBride’s 2021 young adult novel Me (Moth), providing a brief summary, potential classroom audiences and instructional strategies, and similarly-themed texts.

Queer Home on the Road: Lesbian Escape and the Great American Road Trip

Abstract: The road trip narrative is a quintessentially American form of prose. Traditionally, road trip narratives not only exclude women, but female subjectivity more generally. There are, however, some notable early and midcentury contributions to the genre from a queer female perspective that have currently gone understudied. Novels like Patricia Highsmith's Price of Salt (1952), Lilyan Brock's Queer Patterns (1935), and Tiffany Thayer's Thirteen Women (1932) posit an alternative paradigm for the iconic American road trip story. This paper explores how the road trip allows for lesbian escape from the confines of hetero-patriarchal gender norms and domestic constraints through a new, queer definition of "home" on the road. In Highsmith, Brock, and Thayer's novels, the road trip functions as a radical act of queer self-preservation and invention.

Towards New Proximities: A Conversation on Photographic Encounters Between Southern Africa and Mexico

This dialogue between South African photographer Jo Ractliffe and Mexican art historian Daniela Montelongo draws upon conversations initiated during Ractliffe’s exhibition Hay tiempo, no hay tiempo at the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo in Oaxaca, Mexico, in November 2018. The exhibition formed part of Hacer Noche, a project exploring rituals and practices around death and the afterlife in artworks from southern Africa. Hacer Noche also included artists’ residencies, workshops and a conference that aimed to connect guest artists, curators, art historians and the broader Oaxacan community. Hay tiempo, no hay tiempo comprised photographs taken from Ractliffe’s negative files from the mid 1980s to the present, and included images that have been widely circulated in exhibitions and books, alongside previously unpublished images. When conceptualising the Hacer Noche exhibition, Ractliffe proposed Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s (Mexico City, 1902–2002) photograph Striking Worker, Assassinated (1934) as the starting point for selecting works. In so doing, Ractliffe sought a fluid, associative process, engaging individual images, rather than a particular photo-essay. Unhinged from their originating intentions, groupings and contexts, the images could be encountered in new and unexpected proximities, not least in their physical relocation from southern Africa to Mexico for the exhibition. A year later, in August 2019, Ractliffe and Montelongo resumed their exchange during a research trip to South Africa undertaken by Montelongo. They continued their conversation during a road trip across the Western Cape, from the coast, across the mountains and into the Karoo desert. Reflecting on these two transnational encounters and their attendant discussions in the aftermath of a global pandemic generated a reconsideration of the role of photography in mediating such encounters, especially when international travel can no longer be taken for granted and communication faces a profound restructuring.