Uneven Mobilities

Abstract

This article studies the Hope–Princeton Highway, a regional route in the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, through the lens of uneven mobilities. Bringing together insights from infrastructure studies, mobility studies, and settler colonial studies, uneven mobilities is a concept that historicizes mobility research in terms of colonial and carceral logics. Using this concept, the article provides insight into political actors, namely incarcerated forced laborers of Japanese descent, whose unjust confinement and forced labor on this infrastructural route remained unacknowledged until recently. The article relies on a range of archival sources that engage the visual culture of the highway and the subtle linkages between an imagined scenic landscape and an imagined multicultural Canada. The article also narrates this highway route by constructing pictorial and landscape relationships of colonialism and carcerality, linking it to uneven mobilities and economic development through the ubiquitous highway road sign—a contemporary initiative to mark and interpret sites of historical and cultural importance along this and other BC routes. The article then explores the infrastructural politics of this route at the scale of the body to highlight modes of resistance. This article advances a tentative theory of uneven mobilities by centering so-called road disturbances through acts of resistance such as rest, play, and work stoppages to reveal how uneven mobilities are entwined with the production of embodied subjectivities.