Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities

Bissell, David

doi:10.1080/17450100701381581

Cited by 305 publications

(231 citation statements)

References 56 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

211

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Only a small number of items are to hand, everything else is compressed and packed away, and so there is little possibility for things to do. Packed passengers are highly mobile and equipped for waiting (Bissell, 2007;Gasparini, 1995). In contrast, unpacked passengers are a reconfiguration of person and property into a shape well-equipped for travelling.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alongside other research concerned with objects on-the-move and their temporal and spatial effects (Bissell, 2007;Laurier, 2004;Laurier and Philo, 2003), this paper explores the missing masses of things (Latour, 1992) When does a train journey begin? As an ethnographer it began with negotiating access and permission from the train operating company.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The art and craft of train travel

Watts

2008

Social & Cultural Geography

140

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Current theories concerning the social and material construction of time and space have little to say concerning the specific things and people involved. For example, how do times and spaces get made on a train -with passengers, train seats, tables, and views through the window? Through a travelogue of one train journey across England, this paper explores the art and craft of train travel, and the making of a particular time and space. The paper draws together science studies approaches to socio-material relations, and geographical concerns with socio-spatiality, to discuss passengers as spatially distributed persons and property. Reflecting on ethnographic evidence in the form of quotations and photographs woven through the text, it demonstrates how these heterogeneous passengers craft their travel times as an effect of their travel time use; how socio-material interactions with pens, papers, puzzles and electricity pylons make time. Following Michel Serres, it also suggests how passenger time is not a simple flow but a percolation, and how these passenger times coalesce in train carriages to form communities. The paper is itself a journey, in the form of words and images, which begins and ends with the imaginary, social, and material work of making a destination.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The art and craft of train travel

Watts

2008

Social & Cultural Geography

140

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…16 This dialectical contradiction between mobility and immobility is argued to be productive of a range of phenomena including "social complexity," "global restructuring," "securitization of borders," individual subjectivities, and indeed new mobilities. In studies forwarding this prolifically "productivist model" of the mobility/immobility dialectic, 17 I did not encounter a theoretical discussion of what the authors mean by the term "dialectic." This lack of interest in defining the dialectic is even true of studies that aim to "transcend and fold through" the "relational dialecticism of (im)mobility."…”

Section: Mobility and Immobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Gatherings of Mobility and Immobility

Arora¹

2014

Transfers

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In retelling the history of “criminal tribe” settlements managed by the Salvation Army in Madras Presidency (colonial India) from 1911, I argue that neither the mobility–immobility relationship nor the compositional heterogeneity of (im)mobility practices can be adequately captured by relational dialecticism espoused by leading mobilities scholars. Rather than emerging as an opposition through dialectics, the relationship between (relative) mobility and containment may be characterized by overlapping hybridity and difference. This differential hybridity becomes apparent in two ways if mobility and containment are viewed as immanent gatherings of humans and nonhumans. First, the same entities may participate in gatherings of mobility and of containment, while producing different effects in each gathering. Here, nonhumans enter a gathering, and constitute (im)mobility practices, as actors that make history irreducibly differently from other actors that they may be entangled with. Second, modern technologies and amodern “institutions” may be indiscriminately drawn together in all gatherings.

show abstract

“…These are: the politics (Paterson, 2007) and governance (Merriman, 2006) of automobility; automobility's transformation of society (Latimer & Munro, 2006), space (Czegledy, 2004;Huijbens, 2007) and temporality (Baudrillard, 1988;Bissell, 2007;Hutch, 2007;Neumann, 1993;Virillo, 1986Virillo, , 1997, and what is commonly referred to as the automobility "system" (Bohm, 2006;Urry, 2004)-in its most influential iteration this is a path-dependent and self-reproducing system that, according to John Urry, the most influential scholar in the field, comprises six key components: the quintessential manufactured object (the car); the major item of individual consumption after housing, an extraordinarily powerful complex; the predominant form of "quasi-private" mobility; the dominant culture that sustains major discourses of what constitutes the good life; and the single most important cause of environmental resource-use (Urry, 2004, pp. 25-26).…”

Section: Automobility and The Bodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Marx Was a Bad Driver: Alienation to Sensuality in the Anthropology of Automobility

Dawson¹

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Contemporary automobilities research is characterised by a fundamental paradox-recognition of driving as a sensate experience alongside a tendency to emphasise the driver's sensory disengagement from, rather than engagement with the bodily, social and environmental contexts with which s/he interacts. In this article, which builds on previous empirical work I have published, only now in a more theoretical and comparative directions, I undertake three tasks. I locate automobilities researches' concern with the senses in its broader contexts of substantive enquiry-namely, the "Mobilities Paradigm" and the social scientific study of the "Senses". I posit the theoretical basis of the representation of sensory disengagement in driving in automobilities research, specifically in post-war Marxian thought and its critique of Capitalist Modernity and concern with alienation. Lastly, I review three anthropological case studies that represent sensory engagement in driving, one from Palestine, one from Turkey and my own from Bosnia and Herzegovina. I go on to suggest that the approach they share, which is indicative of a growing trend towards the anthropological study of automobilities, is valuable in two ways. It is a corrective to the inappropriate representation of sensory disengagement that is a characteristic of most automobilities research. Also, through its ability to convey sensory engagement in driving, I argue that it provides important insights on the contemporary nature of enduring, but now increasingly mobile social phenomena such as, as in these particular cases sectarian enclosure, class segregation, and ethnic-national transition.

show abstract

Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities

Cited by 305 publications

References 56 publications

The art and craft of train travel

The art and craft of train travel

Gatherings of Mobility and Immobility

Why Marx Was a Bad Driver: Alienation to Sensuality in the Anthropology of Automobility

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About