Principal Investigator: J.A. English-Lueck, Ph.D.

Project Team:
Gianina Bebb, Leah Grant, Jeffrey Greger, Chelsea Halliwell, Erika Harvey, Sarah Luce, Johnny Luna, Jamieson Mockel, Angela Moniz, Ari Pimentel, Alisha Ragland, Ailea Scheffler, Kelli Sullivan and Megan Watson.

Project Partners:
Drs. Melissa Cefkin and Brigitte Jordan (Nissan Research Center)

Description:

In the tradition of the Anthropology department, this graduate seminar has a “client” that will work with the students to create an applied deliverable. Working with the Nissan Research Center, we are collaborating with SJSU Visiting Scholars, Drs. Cefkin and Jordan, who looking broadly at the social and cultural implications of autonomous vehicles. Forecasters imagine that autonomous fleet vehicles will affect parking, since they can be continuously booked and used. Yet, parking, as a social rather than a planning phenomenon, has been subject to only a few ethnographies. This graduate seminar studies such issues as adapting traditional research methods for special-purpose clients, human-centered service design, and heritage management and community engagement. The class has broken into research teams that explore facets of parking related to the course topic, creating mini-projects suitable to the class domains. These team projects include tracking historic changes in land use of the corner of San Fernando and Market, reimagining park and ride services, mapping emotional landscape of campus parking, and using an innovative experimental use of parking “mini-parks” to attract and engage people to think about the role of parking on community. Students will conduct their research, and share summaries and videos with the Visiting Scholars from the Nissan Research Center.