This research project is to investigate the reasons behind road accidents and how this new reasoning
may help people realize how dangerous our current societies, organized around the automobile, are.
We aim to come to a different understanding of why accidents happen. This will help us better
imagine what is the problem with our current life built around moving at high speed in, or being near
to, or in the way of a heavy and dangerous object. We bring forward what is hidden, misunderstood,
or suppressed in why road accidents happen.
The project will look at accidents from a different perspective than usually done by police.
Traditionally they find the reason in one of three elements: the driver, the car or the environment.
Traditional research claims that most of the time it is the driver that is responsible. Such a conclusion
is drawn as there are only these three entities investigated. There is more to the reasons of
accidents; the main reason is the way our lives are structured by what we call automobility.
Automobility involves most everything we do or experience in a city: the road, the car, the
workplace, the school, but also why we think it is necessary to go to these places, to do things or
how we imagine moving about, whether it makes us happy, sad, powerful or traumatized.
Automobility is not just the things, but also how we think about these objects in our imagination.
We will be talking to people who have participated in road accidents in some capacity to gather
information on their experiences, how they felt, encountered, wondered about their road
experience at the time, before and after the accident. This will offer us a different view of reasons
why accidents have happened, and also how people experience their connections when on the road
with people, objects, light, noise and so forth. Once these experiences are analyzed, we will ask our
participants to exchange their ideas in a series of meetings and discuss what is at the center of such
experience. We will also discuss with them how such accidents and their reasons can be made more
visible for others to see. We experience that accidents are quickly clean up and explained away so
mostly they remain invisible. This invisibility of accidents, we assume, is a main factor why people do
not realize how dangerous and lethal our current way of life organized around automobility is. The
project is led by Robert Braun, associate professor and senior researcher at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Vienna and Csaba Szalo, associate professor at Masaryk University.