The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, is organising a public lecture by Prof Ian Loader from the University of Oxford on the topic, “When is Obstructing the Road not Obstructing the Road?: On the Affective Sovereignty of Urban Automobility”. The event will be held on 5 September 2026 from 5.00 to 6.30 pm in the Conference Hall, Ground Floor, Training Centre, NLSIU.

About the topic

Across the Global North, and increasingly in much of the Global South, cities are often assumed to be places of flow and roads the arteries that make flow possible. Urban mobility is heavily, and perhaps excessively, car-dependent – part of a societal attachment to driving as a form of ‘freedom’. But what happens when movement, especially by car, is ‘obstructed’? What affects are activated? What new possibilities might emerge or be occluded? In this paper, we trace some scenes of everyday obstruction and examine the differential conditions under which road obstruction becomes a matter of concern and an actionable public problem. We propose a prospectus for a comparative socio-spatial analysis of attention and denial that seeks to clarify what is at stake in the scenes named as obstruction arising in infrastructural repair, protest, collective rituals, and the provisioning of other transport modalities. We also consider, in contrast, the neutralisation or overlooking of the endemic and most familiar form of obstruction: traffic congestion. By unsettling the sovereign claims of auto-freedom, we argue for a shift in attentiveness to the alternate possibilities of urban sociality that might arise when uses for roads other than driving can be conceptualised.

About the speaker

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College. He is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Ian is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society for the Arts.

Ian is the author of numerous books, edited collections, theoretical and empirical papers, and works of civic engagement on security, public and private policing; sensibilities towards dis/order and justice; penal policy and culture; crime control and political ideologies, and the democratic purposes of criminology. His current work coalesces around aspects of environmental harm. His latest co-authored book – Ecologies of Security: Everyday Disorder in a Climate-Changed World – is due out in October 2026, with Bristol University Press.

Ian is presently in receipt of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2025-2028) for a project entitled ‘Car harms: Automobility and the objects of criminology’. The project seeks to use the car, and systems of automobility, as a vehicle through which to explore what it means to practice criminology in the midst of a climate breakdown. Ian is also teaching a graduate seminar on ‘Criminology and the car’. A background article for this project has been published in the Annual Review of Criminology, as well as a brief paper on 15 minute cites and auto-freedom.

Ian has, in recent years, been a member of the Advisory Board for the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales and of the Research Advisory Board of the Canada/Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission. Ian was Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice from 2016 to 2025.