ABSTRACT
How is the future of automobility envisioned in US policy discourse? This paper examines the policy documents of the US Energy Department, Transportation Department, and Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the writings of the post-carbon movement. Using discourse analysis, the paper investigates how, in narrating the future of the automobile in the US, these texts perform political work: producing forms of subjecthood and legitimating action. It concludes that the dominance of automobility in the American imagination is being unsettled as discourse about the future of the automobile fragments into three distinct narratives of progress, return, and radical change.
