Owners of the Map: Mobility and Mobilization among Motorcycle Taxi Drivers in Bangkok

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the connection between spatial mobility and political mobilization among motorcycle taxi drivers during the 2010 protests in Bangkok. Through the study of their multiple roles, both as transport operators and as political mobilizers, I explore the nexus of mobility and mobilization and analyze motorcycle taxi drivers as central political actors in contemporary Thailand. In this sense, the article focuses on investigating the historical emergence of "technique of mobilization" based on modulation and control over mobility. I analyze acts of disruption of movement along major infrastructures as moments of time-space modulation as well as transformative strategies that set in motion alternative messages and configure new modalities of political mobilization. Focusing on such techniques, both in the 2010 Red Shirts protest and in other Thai political mobilizations, I explore the solidification of spaces of mobility as major political arenas for political struggles in contemporary Thailand. [Thailand, mobility, political protest, time-space compression]

Placing Transport Workers on the Agenda: The Conflicting Logics of Governing Mobility on Bishkek's Marshrutkas

“…Second, contributing to a still marginal set of literature focused on transport workers and urban mobilities (Parsons and Lawreniuk ; Sopranzetti ), we attempt to broaden the focus of the critical urban transport and mobilities literature by highlighting the struggles and cleavages that structure informal transport workers’ positions and livelihoods. When discussing questions of mobility‐related inequalities, access and justice, we indicate the need to acknowledge how mobility governance affects not only citizens broadly conceived but also and particularly the factual mobility providers.…”

“…; Parsons and Lawreniuk ) in global South cities, or looking at subaltern mobilities using the example of dollar cabs in the Western context (Best ). Such research has brought a range of important topics onto the research agenda, including questions about the agency of precarious transport workers (Agbiboa ) and the ways neoliberal policy projects can affect workers’ incentives to mobilise collectively (Paget‐Seekins ), importantly illustrating the significant political mobilisation power of mobility operators (Sopranzetti ). This article builds on and contributes to this still peripheral but important critical subsection of urban transport and mobilities research.…”

“…; Parsons and Lawreniuk ) and North (Best ). These publications articulate the consequences of neoliberal transport politics (Paget‐Seekins ) and transport worker's precarity, but also their subversive agency (Agbiboa ), and capacity for political mobilisation (Sopranzetti ).…”

“Together We Can”: Redefining Work in Nairobi's Urban Transportation Sector

“…Matatu operators are, in practical and symbolic ways, an important representation of a changing urban environment that is steeped in risk and economic precarity. They join other urban transport operators who are increasingly organized and mobilizing their unique position as transport operators, who “through filtering mobility…they reclaimed their centrality as owners, transformers, and gate‐keepers of both representational and physical spaces of the city” (Sopranzetti , 139). They are also among the population of workers who are often used as a foil, constructed as flawed and backward, in order to garner foreign and domestic investments into improving the current system or replacing it with a new and improved models and megaprojects (Klopp ; Rizzo )…”

Taxi Drivers, Infrastructures, and Urban Change in Globalizing Mumbai

“…Recent scholarship on non‐Western cities makes significant contributions to this literature. It illustrates how taxis produce and reinforce political, public, aesthetic, and intimate forms of sociality (Gustafson ; Hickey ; Notar ; Sanina ; Sopranzetti ). This emerging scholarship is important for arguments I make here.…”