Wal*Smartification: Documenting the Superimposition of Dockless Shared Electric Scooters on Fayetteville, Arkansas / Devin Shepherd and Juliette Walker
Arkansas is a place whose recent past and imminent future are determined by major corporations; nowhere is this more true than in Northwest Arkansas, home to what are colloquially known as the Big Three: Tyson Foods, J.B. Hunt, and Walmart Inc. Given even this broadly painted backdrop, it will perhaps be unsurprising that the way the Arkansas electric scooter law, Act 1015, is written, means that municipalities may reasonably regulate e-scooter companies, but they are not permitted to ban them. What I am proposing, alongside artist and collaborator Juliette Walker, is to contribute to this conference a risograph-printed publication that will critically examine—through photographs, a coordinated map, and at least one essay—the phenomenon of foisting e-scooters upon the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Part of the critical text will connect the undemocratic appearance of smart scooters in this locality to a larger trend of corporations abusing asymmetrical information access and capitalized power to domineer localities across the nation in a way that was famously pioneered by a logistically savvy household name from this very region. The visual discrepancies between scooters and the preexisting logic of the built environment will also illustrate the lack of planning and care behind the hastily deployed electric scooters. In general, I am hoping to provide a semiotic analysis alongside a phenomenological one, in booklet form, figuring the space of a small city as a palimpsest whose latest layer is, as is traditional, what seems to be the smart repurposing of an ostensibly disused space. Printing this publication with a risograph printer means that this publication with all of its information, in both the form of text and image, can be reproduced quickly and at a large scale. Therefore, these publications, like the “smart” e-scooters, can be dispersed with ease.
Bios: Devin Shepherd is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Arkansas. Juliette Walker is a graduate student in the MFA visual arts program at the University of Arkansas.
