John Urry Article Prizewinner 2023
Brian L. Due has been awarded the John Urry Memorial Article Prize 2023 for the article Guide Dog versus Robot Dog: assembling visually impaired people with non-human agents and achieving assisted mobility through distributed co-constructed perception.
The Editors were unanimous in their decision to award Brian L. Due’s article the 2023 John Urry Memorial Article prize due to the key strengths of the piece being its cross disciplinarily nature – conducting robotics experiments within a conceptually social science framework. In this sense it is a good example how different disciplines and interests can combine to create new insights into real world problems and issues, in this case the mobilities of visually impaired people. The originality of the piece is clear throughout. It moves the field of mobilities forward by focusing on the significance of perception, and specifically how perception is distributed in these kinds of mobility arrangements. The Editors also found it very well written, outlining its contribution clearly and persuasively.