Towards decolonial human subjects in research on transport

Schwanen, Tim

doi:10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2020.102849

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 108 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This paper takes a mixed-methods approach to interrogating the governance and mediation of mobile public space in Cape Town. The findings draw upon empirical data from GABS’s Conditions of Carriage , in addition to public realm ethnography (Jones, 2021) through participant observation of the embodied passenger experience (Schwanen, 2020). The mixed-method approach draws firstly on a quantitative content analysis of the Conditions of Carriage using NVivo 12.0.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public space on the move: Mediating mobility, stillness and encounter on a Cape Town bus

Rink

2022

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As a public space, the environment of public transportation services is maintained by an ordered set of rules and conditions. Such rules and conditions are prescribed by law as they are in generally-accepted norms of social behaviour within public space. Through the examination of the Conditions of Carriage that govern bus transportation in Cape Town, South Africa, using Golden Arrow Bus Services, this paper seeks to highlight the myriad ways that urban public space on the move is mediated, negotiated and controlled through rules of conduct that differentiate mobile public space from its counterpart in the environment outside the bus. Understood as a mundane part of the social life of the city and its inhabitants, mobility in the form of public transportation is constituted by micro-communities whose publics are in a constant state of flux and negotiation. Using analysis of the Conditions of Carriage and an ethnographic case study of bus passengering, this paper demonstrates how the Conditions mediate the situated and lived assemblage of actors in mobile public space that is a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public space on the move: Mediating mobility, stillness and encounter on a Cape Town bus

Rink

2022

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Transport and planning research which relies on economics or behavioural science tends to understand the mobile subject as categorised by road user, segmented by demographics, and individualised as a consumer making rational mobility choices, primarily to reduce travel time or cost (Doughty and Murray 2016). For Schwanen (2020), drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, these paradigms within transport research maintain a view of the mobile subject as Homo economicus or Homo psychologicus.…”

Section: Theorising Mobile Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This dominant concept of the embodied cycling subject reproduces racialised, gendered and neoliberal presumptions of what it means to be human. Within dominant liberal (Western and state-sanctioned) understandings, mobility justice is sought for othered bodies through redress, redistribution, recognition, or inclusion into selfdetermined modern subjecthood (Stein 2018) and desired forms of mobility, health and wellbeing are tied to (economic) growth (Schwanen 2020). These conceptions seek inclusion for the other into liberal subjecthood, without questioning the injustice and violence actively reproduced through state-sanctioned racial capitalism (Pulido 2016).…”

Section: Theorising Mobile Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, enfleshment allows for understanding mobile subjects: as inherently exposed and entangled (with other humans/more-thanhumans); as actively configured through both matter and meaning; and as a materialisation of relations of power across multiple space-times. I focus on enfleshment to disrupt dominant conceptions of embodiment embedded and reproduced within transport research (Schwanen 2020) and in dominant cycling practices and advocacy. This dominant conception is based on a Western liberal understanding of the modern subject rooted in racial hierarchies and coloniality, where the body is understood as a "deracinated", degendered blank slate (Weheliye 2014), reducible to the biological (McKittrick 2015a).…”

Section: Theorising Mobile Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Cycling Lungs: Understanding Mobile Subjectivity as Enfleshed

Davidson

2021

Antipode

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Scholarship and advocacy on mobility justice needs to attend carefully to how presumptions about mobile embodiment are reproduced. This paper critically assesses some of the presumptions about the mobile subject within cycling interventions that focus on behaviour and infrastructural change. Bringing material and Black feminist theory together with ethnographic fieldwork on urban cycling in Los Angeles in 2014-2015, I suggest mobile subjectivity can be understood through the process of enfleshment, rather than centring on individualised cycling embodiment. Imagined through the cycling lungs, enfleshment allows for a mobile subjectivity that is inherently exposed in highly uneven ways; configured through matter and meaning; and a materialisation of relations of power distributed across space and time. Thinking with enfleshment contributes to cycling advocacy, mobility justice and geographical theory on the body by shifting how mobile subjects are understood and how difference, justice and the politics of the street are imagined and practised.

show abstract

“…Divorced from social policy, transport planning in African cities has, from the colonial era through the contemporary move toward 'global cities,' focused narrowly on large-scale motorized modernization projects to the neglect of pedestrian and non-motorized mobilities, the heterogeneity of road usages, and the affordances of existing popular infrastructures (Grieco 2011;Rizzo 2017;Uteng and Lucas 2018). This situation calls for decolonized knowledge about transport -decentering traditional assumptions concerning the subjects of mobility and expanding the conceptual categories through which mobility infrastructures are recognized, planned, and valued (Schwanen 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobilizing social reproduction: gendered mobility and everyday infrastructure in Abidjan

Doherty

2021

Mobilities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the everyday mobilities of mothers in Yopougon, Côte d'Ivoire to analytically center mobility in the study of social reproduction. Yopougon, Abidjan's largest commune, is on the cusp of a major overhaul of its transportation network intended to better integrate it into the city. Planned through a conventional vision of economic productivity that privileges commuting over other forms of travel, this restructuring risks deepening gendered exclusions in urban mobility. Mothers of young children, a sub-category of passengers who perform the bulk of the work of social reproduction and who experience multiple competing demands on their time that structure their mobilities in particularly illustrative ways, have been overlooked in transport planning. Drawing on mobility diaries and visual research methods, I illustrate how urban transport systems are implicated in the everyday practices of intergenerational care and social reproduction and how, in turn, these practices themselves become forms of urban infrastructure. These mobile practices of social reproduction disclose critical affordances and barriers in existing popular transport systems and reveal the breadth of gendered practices, relations, and materialities that are constitutive of mobility infrastructures but marginalized by a narrow policy focus on the transport sector.

show abstract

Towards decolonial human subjects in research on transport

Cited by 15 publications

References 108 publications

Public space on the move: Mediating mobility, stillness and encounter on a Cape Town bus

Public space on the move: Mediating mobility, stillness and encounter on a Cape Town bus

Cycling Lungs: Understanding Mobile Subjectivity as Enfleshed

Mobilizing social reproduction: gendered mobility and everyday infrastructure in Abidjan

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About