Debbie Hopkins
Biographic Data
| ID | 3756840 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debbie Hopkins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debbie |
| FAMILY NAME | Hopkins |
| SIGNATURE | HOPKINS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7778-8989 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 212 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Geographies of Hope for the United Nations Decade of Sustainable Transport
Precarious mobilities: Occupational auto-mobilities, precarity and relationality amongst new truck drivers in the UK
In this paper, we advance debates on labour precarity by examining occupational auto-mobilities as a key site through which embodied and relational dimensions of precarity are produced. To do so, we empirically examine the experiences of newly qualified (‘new pass’)1 truck drivers in the UK. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative interviews (2023–2025) with new passes, interviews with insurance and road haulage industry representatives, and observat…
Mobility freedoms: Conceptions of freedom in contestations over urban transport
The link between urban transport and freedom has long been recognised in academic literature and is drawing renewed attention in controversies over initiatives to reduce car use within urban areas and flying between cities. This paper analyses how multiple conceptualisations of freedom from across the humanities and social sciences are, and can be, implicated in public contestations over urban transport. It suggests that individualised notions of…
Truck Dogs: Advancing a Mobile Geography of Multispecies Relations of Care
This paper demonstrates how multispecies relations co‐constitute mobile work in road haulage under supply chain capitalism. Bringing labour and animal geographies into dialogue, we extend the concepts of carescapes and caringscapes to theorise the truck cab, route and logistical infrastructures as multispecies sites of care beyond the ‘static’ workplace. We use multiple methods to create multispecies narrative portraits, through which we reveal h…
Recasting sustainable summer holidaying: Scripts, Time Experiences, Freedom, Place Change and Environmental Imprints
In the summer of 2020, COVID-19 border closures, travel restrictions, infection risks and other uncertainties forced many people to cancel or adapt their holiday plans. This disruption created an exceptional context to study home-based holidaying experiences, representing a departure from pre-pandemic habits and routinely rehearsed summer holiday scripts. Responding to a longstanding bias in tourism research towards (high-carbon) international tr…
Healthy persuasion: A Values-Based Messaging Approach to Leisure Air Travel Decision-Making
Healthy persuasion” is a public health social marketing strategy that aims to counter corporate efforts to drive the desire to consume products that cause negative individual (personal) and/or collective (social and/or environmental) health outcomes. In this paper, we argue that healthy persuasion might be usefully borrowed from public health and applied to leisure air travel (over) consumption to facilitate behaviour changes that past facts-base…
Back to the future: Advancing more sustainable tourism through domestic summer holidaying after the Covid-19 pandemic
Health hazards, border restrictions, insurance limitations, travel uncertainties, and other disruptions following the COVID-19 pandemic reduced international travel in the summer of 2021. The sudden travel changes created a unique opportunity to investigate potentials for reshaping future holidaying. The article’s objective is to investigate how experiences of domestic summer holidaying might have influenced attitudes towards future holiday trave…
Tackling the academic air travel dependency. An analysis of the (in)consistency between academics’ travel behaviour and their attitudes
Current trends in air transport are inconsistent with international climate goals. Without substantial changes from business-as-usual travel demand, neither new technologies nor alternative fuels will reduce emissions at the required rate. Air transport demand is highly skewed towards a small share of frequent flyers in all aviation users. While the unsustainability of aviation is well-recognised in academia, academics themselves are often freque…
Aviation exceptionalism, fossil fuels and the state
Imagining post-fossil tourism mobilities with Norwegian tourists
Sustainable mobility has become a catch-all term to describe forms, modes, policies and practices of mobility that are thought to have a lower environmental footprint and/or fewer social exclusions than the contemporary mobility system which is reliant on fossil fuels and private ownership. As a result, its main application has been in urban mobility contexts, often focused on everyday commuting journeys. In this paper we re-visit sustainable mob…
Sociotechnical expectations of vehicle automation in the UK trucking sector
Expectations about emerging innovations are an important part of innovation pathways that can help to overcome uncertainties and build hype. Such sociotechnical expectations have been studied extensively by social scientists but the focus is often on collective, widely shared expectations and much less on individuals' specific expectations. Examining the latter can nonetheless aid understanding of the development of, buy-in into and power dynamic…
Aeromasculinities and the fallacy of sustainable aviation
Despite growing recognition of the material impacts of fossil fuel extraction and use, many economic sectors remain highly dependent on these fuels. Amid growing pressure to - at a minimum - appear to be doing something, businesses increasingly communicate the actions they (seek to) take to reduce their environmental impacts. Oftentimes they aim to build a sense of compatible coexistence of the sector with particular modes of sustainability. For …
Eating, heating or taking the bus? Lived experiences at the intersection of energy and transport poverty
Experiences of poverty can manifest in multiple aspects of everyday life, often in interlinking ways. One example is ‘double energy vulnerability’, where a household faces both energy poverty and transport poverty simultaneously. This can result in trade-offs, where prioritising one essential need (e.g., transport) makes accessing another impossible (e.g., heating). Such decisions are not easily made, and they can have distinct spatio-temporal ch…
Travel discontinuities, enforced holidaying-at-home and alternative leisure travel futures after Covid-19
The paralysis of global tourism caused by COVID-19 made it possible to conduct a unique and nearly real-time online survey to investigate adaptations and reactions to sudden severe leisure travel restrictions among residents in the Oslo metropolitan area of Norway during the 2020 Easter/spring holiday period. Stress relief, socialising, social bonds and discoveries of local recreation options were important home holiday experiences. Vacation chal…
Buffering as Everyday Logistical Labour
Using “buffering” tactics to deal with devices that measure driving and rest periods, Debbie Hopkinsdemonstrates how truck drivers in the UK navigate chokepoints wrought by Brexit-affected delays
The AAG Review of Books: 10 Years
Recruiting research participants for transport research: Reflections from studies on autonomous vehicles in the UK
Much research is dependent on the willingness of participants to give up their time – whether renumerated or not – and engage with the activities we have designed such as interviews, surveys, writing diaries, and taking photos. We talk about social research being dependent on ‘self-selection’, but we say less about what happens when the people with whom we wish to engage do not agree to do so; when we are unable to get the insights we need to ans…
Stories of the gendered mobile work of English lorry driving
One proposed strategy to overcome labour shortages in male-dominated jobs is to attract female workers. This has been the case for lorry driving in the UK. These efforts, however, often work to reproduce binary gendered stereotypes, or seek to include women without questioning how working conditions and everyday embodied work itself constructs gender roles and difference and is differentially experienced. In this paper, we highlight differentiate…
Climate science and tourism policy in Australasia: Deficiencies in Science-Policy Translation
This paper reviews tourism-relevant advances in climate science and tourism policy in the Australasia region over the past 20 years, focusing particularly on the seven years (2015–2021) since the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Within the Australasia region, Australia and New Zealand have a complicated relationship with climate change, as both countries are dependent upon stable climates for tourism while contributing to high tourism greenhouse gas…
Crises and tourism mobilities
Crisis could be the descriptor of the era in which we live. Financial, health, climate and refugee crises abound, there is significant interest in reflecting on the implications of these intersecting crises for different geographies, human (and non-human) communities, economic sectors and at different timescales. The articles included in the special issue reflect on different forms of crisis, and allow us to see crisis as a condition that impacts…
Adolescents and their aspirations for private car-based transport
The need to transition away from the current car-dominated transport system is well documented in sustainability, health and transportation literatures. Despite growing interest in active and public transport modes, the car still dominates travel preferences for most age groups. There is, however, some evidence of declining preferences for car-based travel for younger generations. In this paper, we use empirical material gathered through a mixed …
Identifying double energy vulnerability: A systematic and narrative review of groups at-risk of energy and transport poverty in the global north
The concept of ‘double energy vulnerability’ describes a circumstance whereby people are at heightened risk of energy poverty and transport poverty simultaneously – a particularly severe form of energy injustice. However, analysis of which people and places are most likely to experience this phenomenon remains limited. This paper begins to address this lacuna via a review of academic literature, aiming to pinpoint the overlapping socio-demographi…
Talking about automated vehicles: What do levels of automation do
A spatial whole systems justice approach to sustainability transitions
Commuter lives: A review symposium on David Bissell's Transit Life
This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities , published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geo…
The energy cultures framework: Exploring the role of norms, practices and material culture in shaping energy behaviour in New Zealand
Generation Y mobilities through the lens of energy cultures: A preliminary exploration of mobility cultures
Gender discourses in academic mobility
Despite increasing geographic mobility among academic staff, gendered patterns of involvement in academic mobility have largely escaped scrutiny. Positioned within literatures on internationalization, physical proximity, gender and parenthood in academic mobility and understandings of gender as a process enacted through both discursive and embodied practices, we use discourse analysis based on interviews with academics in New Zealand to examine d…
Practising academic mobilities: Bodies, networks and institutional rhythms
Notions of what a successful academic should be doing - researching, publishing, teaching, serving the academic community - are often dependent upon particular practices of corporeal mobilities. These practices discursively and materially connect historically situated academic mobilities with the "modern," globalised university system. At the same time, there is increasing attention being paid to the "hypocrisy of hypermobile academics" - often r…
Not more but different: A comment on the transitions research agenda
Eating, heating or taking the bus? Lived experiences at the intersection of energy and transport poverty
Experiences of poverty can manifest in multiple aspects of everyday life, often in interlinking ways. One example is ‘double energy vulnerability’, where a household faces both energy poverty and transport poverty simultaneously. This can result in trade-offs, where prioritising one essential need (e.g., transport) makes accessing another impossible (e.g., heating). Such decisions are not easily made, and they can have distinct spatio-temporal ch…
A spatial whole systems justice approach to sustainability transitions
Autonomous vehicles and the future of urban tourism
Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to disrupt all industries tied to \ntransport, including tourism. This conceptual paper breaks new ground by providing an indepth \nimaginings approach to the potential future far-reaching implications of CAVs for \nurban tourism. Set against key debates in urban studies and urban tourism, we discuss the \nenchantments and apprehensions surrounding CAVs and how they may impact cities in …
Travel discontinuities, enforced holidaying-at-home and alternative leisure travel futures after Covid-19
The paralysis of global tourism caused by COVID-19 made it possible to conduct a unique and nearly real-time online survey to investigate adaptations and reactions to sudden severe leisure travel restrictions among residents in the Oslo metropolitan area of Norway during the 2020 Easter/spring holiday period. Stress relief, socialising, social bonds and discoveries of local recreation options were important home holiday experiences. Vacation chal…
Climate change perceptions and responses in Scotland's ski industry
The negative impacts of climate change for the ski industry have been well documented. However, research has largely focused on key ski markets in North America and Continental Europe. The study presented in this paper addresses climate change perceptions and responses in the more marginal ski destination of Scotland. Using a qualitative, interpretivist methodology, this paper contributes through a local-scale, single-site study of a ski area whe…
Climate science and tourism policy in Australasia: Deficiencies in Science-Policy Translation
This paper reviews tourism-relevant advances in climate science and tourism policy in the Australasia region over the past 20 years, focusing particularly on the seven years (2015–2021) since the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Within the Australasia region, Australia and New Zealand have a complicated relationship with climate change, as both countries are dependent upon stable climates for tourism while contributing to high tourism greenhouse gas…
Aeromasculinities and the fallacy of sustainable aviation
Despite growing recognition of the material impacts of fossil fuel extraction and use, many economic sectors remain highly dependent on these fuels. Amid growing pressure to - at a minimum - appear to be doing something, businesses increasingly communicate the actions they (seek to) take to reduce their environmental impacts. Oftentimes they aim to build a sense of compatible coexistence of the sector with particular modes of sustainability. For …
Solar electricity cultures: Household adoption dynamics and energy policy in Switzerland
Identifying double energy vulnerability: A systematic and narrative review of groups at-risk of energy and transport poverty in the global north
The concept of ‘double energy vulnerability’ describes a circumstance whereby people are at heightened risk of energy poverty and transport poverty simultaneously – a particularly severe form of energy injustice. However, analysis of which people and places are most likely to experience this phenomenon remains limited. This paper begins to address this lacuna via a review of academic literature, aiming to pinpoint the overlapping socio-demographi…
The replication and reduction of automobility: Findings from Aotearoa New Zealand
The work-sociology of academic aeromobility at remote institutions
Theoretically framed by the concepts of networks, co-presence and proximity, we explore the interplay of corporeal and virtual academic mobilities in the context of ‘remote institutions’ to advance the work-sociology of aeromobility at a time of climate crisis. Empirical insights are drawn from 31 in-depth interviews conducted with academic staff at the University of Otago (New Zealand), to explore the complex personal and professional decisions …
Destabilising automobility? The emergent mobilities of generation Y
Denying bogus skepticism in climate change and tourism research
Aviation exceptionalism, fossil fuels and the state
Stories of the gendered mobile work of English lorry driving
One proposed strategy to overcome labour shortages in male-dominated jobs is to attract female workers. This has been the case for lorry driving in the UK. These efforts, however, often work to reproduce binary gendered stereotypes, or seek to include women without questioning how working conditions and everyday embodied work itself constructs gender roles and difference and is differentially experienced. In this paper, we highlight differentiate…
Talking about automated vehicles: What do levels of automation do
No time for smokescreen skepticism: A rejoinder to Shani and Arad
Mobility freedoms: Conceptions of freedom in contestations over urban transport
The link between urban transport and freedom has long been recognised in academic literature and is drawing renewed attention in controversies over initiatives to reduce car use within urban areas and flying between cities. This paper analyses how multiple conceptualisations of freedom from across the humanities and social sciences are, and can be, implicated in public contestations over urban transport. It suggests that individualised notions of…
Change trends in urban freight delivery: A qualitative inquiry
Climate change and Aotearoa New Zealand
With a population of 4.5 million, New Zealand's contribution to total global greenhouse gas ( GHG ) emissions is relatively low. On a per capita basis, however, New Zealand's GHG emissions are the fifth highest among Annex 1 countries, due in part to the relative size of the pastoral agricultural sector. Biophysical impacts of climate change will largely extend current climate trends, with high regional variability. A review of climate change lit…
Learning about Climate: An Exploration of the Socialization of Climate Change
While the term “climate change” is highly recognized by the nonscientific general public, understandings of its manifestations are varied, contrasting, and complex. It is argued that this is because climate change has become simultaneously a physical and a social phenomenon. Thus, climate change is becoming socialized through nonscientific interpretation. Research has considered the roles of independent sources of information used to inform these…
Climate change perceptions and responses in Scotland's ski industry
The negative impacts of climate change for the ski industry have been well documented. However, research has largely focused on key ski markets in North America and Continental Europe. The study presented in this paper addresses climate change perceptions and responses in the more marginal ski destination of Scotland. Using a qualitative, interpretivist methodology, this paper contributes through a local-scale, single-site study of a ski area whe…
Generation Y mobilities through the lens of energy cultures: A preliminary exploration of mobility cultures
Framework conventions for climate change
The global climate change discourse has identified a wide range of physical, social, economic and political issues (Solomon 2007; Giddens 2009; Stern and Treasury 2007; Adger et al. 2009a). Policy responses have emerged at a range of scales, from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the global level, through to national and local government initiatives. These environmental policies have implicated many sectors inc…
The energy cultures framework: Exploring the role of norms, practices and material culture in shaping energy behaviour in New Zealand
Climate change and Aotearoa New Zealand
With a population of 4.5 million, New Zealand's contribution to total global greenhouse gas ( GHG ) emissions is relatively low. On a per capita basis, however, New Zealand's GHG emissions are the fifth highest among Annex 1 countries, due in part to the relative size of the pastoral agricultural sector. Biophysical impacts of climate change will largely extend current climate trends, with high regional variability. A review of climate change lit…
No time for smokescreen skepticism: A rejoinder to Shani and Arad
Denying bogus skepticism in climate change and tourism research
Applying a Comprehensive Contextual Climate Change Vulnerability Framework to New Zealand’s Tourism Industry
The replication and reduction of automobility: Findings from Aotearoa New Zealand
Change trends in urban freight delivery: A qualitative inquiry
Exploring stability and change in transport systems: Combining Delphi and system dynamics approaches
Destabilising automobility? The emergent mobilities of generation Y
Shared mobility in a Māori community
Shared mobility is being advanced as a novel, technologically sophisticated approach to reducing the environmental impacts of high levels of car ownership. However, communities have long shared modes of transport for reasons other than environmental quality. We describe the shared mobility practices undertaken in a Māori community in the East Cape region of New Zealand. They reveal long‐established ways of sharing that are underpinned by, and sup…
Can we fly less? Evaluating the ‘necessity’ of air travel
Solar electricity cultures: Household adoption dynamics and energy policy in Switzerland
Gender discourses in academic mobility
Despite increasing geographic mobility among academic staff, gendered patterns of involvement in academic mobility have largely escaped scrutiny. Positioned within literatures on internationalization, physical proximity, gender and parenthood in academic mobility and understandings of gender as a process enacted through both discursive and embodied practices, we use discourse analysis based on interviews with academics in New Zealand to examine d…
Autonomous vehicles and the future of urban tourism
Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to disrupt all industries tied to \ntransport, including tourism. This conceptual paper breaks new ground by providing an indepth \nimaginings approach to the potential future far-reaching implications of CAVs for \nurban tourism. Set against key debates in urban studies and urban tourism, we discuss the \nenchantments and apprehensions surrounding CAVs and how they may impact cities in …
The work-sociology of academic aeromobility at remote institutions
Theoretically framed by the concepts of networks, co-presence and proximity, we explore the interplay of corporeal and virtual academic mobilities in the context of ‘remote institutions’ to advance the work-sociology of aeromobility at a time of climate crisis. Empirical insights are drawn from 31 in-depth interviews conducted with academic staff at the University of Otago (New Zealand), to explore the complex personal and professional decisions …
Practising academic mobilities: Bodies, networks and institutional rhythms
Notions of what a successful academic should be doing - researching, publishing, teaching, serving the academic community - are often dependent upon particular practices of corporeal mobilities. These practices discursively and materially connect historically situated academic mobilities with the "modern," globalised university system. At the same time, there is increasing attention being paid to the "hypocrisy of hypermobile academics" - often r…
Commuter lives: A review symposium on David Bissell's Transit Life
This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities , published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geo…
Sociodemographic and Built Environment Associates of Travel to School by Car among New Zealand Adolescents: Meta-Analysis
Travelling to school by car diminishes opportunities for physical activity and contributes to traffic congestion and associated noise and air pollution. This meta-analysis examined sociodemographic characteristics and built environment associates of travelling to school by car compared to using active transport among New Zealand (NZ) adolescents. Four NZ studies (2163 adolescents) provided data on participants' mode of travel to school, individua…
Imagining sustainable energy and mobility transitions: Valence, temporality, and radicalism in 38 visions of a low-carbon future
Based on an extensive synthesis of semi-structured interviews, media content analysis, and reviews, this article conducts a qualitative meta-analysis of more than 560 sources of evidence to identify 38 visions associated with seven different low-carbon innovations – automated mobility, electric vehicles, smart meters, nuclear power, shale gas, hydrogen, and the fossil fuel divestment movement – playing a key role in current deliberations about mo…
Shadowcasting tourism knowledge through media: Self-driving sex cars
Tourism is central to late-modern life, and tourism research that threatens this centrality is prone to media attention. Framed by sociotechnical transitions theory, we introduce the concept of 'shadowcasting' to show how tourism knowledge disseminated through the media, combined with public comments on its reporting, cast shadows that co-constitute imagined futures. We illustrate shadowcasting through a mixed method approach that demonstrates ho…
Not more but different: A comment on the transitions research agenda
Political science (32 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Geography (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · Business (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Engineering (16 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Social science (13 works) · Tourism (13 works)