CSS161. Exploring your “Third Culture” – methods to think differently about sustainable mobility and beyond

• Contributions format: interactive
• Keywords: Third Cultures, Thinking otherwise, Making, Art, Sustainable Mobility
• Related track(s): 3. Human creativity and innovation without growth / 10. Challenging dominant values, ideologies, and imaginaries
• Organizers: von Schönfeld, Kim Carlotta (Høgskulen på Vestlandet, Bergen, Norway); Ferreira, António (University of Porto, Portugal); Tan, Wendy (Wageningen University, The Netherlands)

How people think about what they are capable of can make a big difference (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021; Lucas & Ogilvie, 2006; Woiwode et al., 2021). It influences our actions, the future we imagine, and the pathways we construct to get there. A key guide for what and how we think, especially in our subconscious daily practices, is culture. As Useem et al. (1963, original italics) write, “Culture has been defined in a number of ways, but most simply, as the learned and shared behavior of a community of interacting human beings.” Culture determines what people assume should be “done” and “not done” in both public and private affairs. It can be shaped by nationality (Spanish, Norwegian, Chinese), region (Galician, European, Latin American), group of belonging (surfer, vegan, goth), among other possibilities.

In a globalised and highly mobile world, identifying with more than one culture is increasingly common, and leads to the emergence of “third cultures”, that is, highly personal cultural mixes (Chernilo, 2021; Pollock et al., 2017). Interestingly, people that identify with third cultures are more compelled to engage meaningfully with others that also have third culture experiences than with people who identify more exclusively with one culture (Pollock et al., 2017). However, people are usually not aware of their third culture and how it influences their thinking patterns and practices.

This session provides an opportunity for conference participants to identify their third cultures and how their unique cultural mix might help them think about degrowth mobilities in inspirational ways. Artistic productions of several kinds have been shown to have important capacities to discover, communicate and process relations between personal experiences and larger societal issues (Buizer & Barba Lata, 2021; Derr et al., 2018; Gaztambide-Fernandez & Arráiz Matute, 2021; Kocsis, 2019; O’Neill & Roberts, 2019). This workshop builds on these insights to see how writing, drawing and collage might, first, help participants discover their third cultures and, second, trigger insights about transformative degrowth possibilities applied to the transport sector.

To ground and trigger the discussion, participants will be asked to reflect about how their third cultures trigger certain expectations of what is “done” and “not done” in terms of mobility. The way mobility is conceptualised and practiced (or avoided) can be key in rethinking needs of consumption, speed, connections to local spaces, origins of cultural diversity, and so on (Cresswell, 2020; Jensen, 2009; Rosa, 2018; von Schönfeld & Ferreira, 2022). The interplay between sustainable mobility and third cultures is therefore both concrete enough to facilitate debate and artistic action, and a highly relevant topic in the context of possible degrowth futures. 

Dynamic of session:

• Part 1 (10 minutes): A brief introduction provides inspiration and guidelines while explaining the motivation and context of the session. The introduction will clarify that the session is designed as a safe space for participants to engage with personal themes. 

• Part 2 (15 minutes): This part of the session is about individual artistic expression. Participants are asked to use artistic materials provided to individually create an illustration of what they consider to be key elements of their “third cultures” and what “dos and don’ts” these cultures imply. They will not be required to share their creations.

• Part 3 (15 minutes): Participants form small groups to share the insights they gathered while creating their artistic pieces. 

• Part 4 (20 minutes): In the same groups, participants discuss their mobility practices for daily (e.g. to work, school, friends, groceries) and extraordinary travel (e.g. conferences or vacation) and how their third cultures influence their mobilities. Participants can choose to make a collective artistic creation to illustrate their insights and share it with other participants in the final debate. 

• Part 5 (30 minutes): The final part of the session asks the groups to designate a representative to share their insights with all participants. This culminates in a plenary debate about whether and/or how perceiving their mobility practices from the perspective of their third cultures differs or not from what they would have considered if they had been arguing from one single cultural perspective (e.g. “In X country, this is how things are done” or “As an environmentalist, this is how I do things”). 

At the end of the session, and strictly on a voluntary basis, participants may share their artwork with the organisers by allowing a photo to be taken. Participants may also voluntarily take part in a digital survey for future research purposes at the end of the session.

• Interactive session: no presentations except for introduction by organisers.
  
• Organisers function as chairs/facilitators.
• Participation open to all Conference Participants, maximum of 25 participants.
• Optimum duration: 90 minutes.
• Link to Mobile Worlds project website with more information on the background: https://mobileworlds.online. The project Mobile Worlds (2023-2025), led by Kim Schönfeld and Wendy Tan, explores the potential of third cultures for breaking out of cultural silos that narrow down possibilities for thought and action. It is a transdisciplinary project with a focus on urban and regional planning and mobility/transport planning, but with close collaboration with artists and with expertise from fields such as history, geography, economics, and others. The proposed workshop draws on insights from this project and may in turn inform it.