Kin-aesthetic politics: Logistical Power and the Governance of Urban Infrastructural Mobilities

Building on my doctoral research, this fellowship will enable me to significantly advance academic understandings of how practitioners and policy professionals in transport logistics aim to govern the movements of individuals in infrastructural environments. By advancing the concept of logistical power, my PhD thesis identified an urgent need for more nuanced approaches to urban infrastructure and transport infrastructure. Such approaches incorporate the embodied experiences of passengers and move beyond the strategic ideals of speed, economic efficiency, and network security. In this fellowship I will focus on how specific forms of logistical power entail an understanding of the 'kin-aesthetic' practices through which individuals move through and sense urban infrastructural spaces. I will draw upon my detailed empirical research on the London Underground to examine how both new and older technologies are utilised in combination to influence the behaviour of passengers in trains or stations by managing their sensory interactions with the environments they pass through. In doing so, these techniques help constitute a particular technique of governance, a way of designing and monitoring space that is less about making people move quickly or efficiently, and more about encouraging them to pay attention to particular risks and (commercial) opportunities as they move. In the thesis I claimed that this logistical technique of governance could have specific socio-political effects, reproducing or exacerbating inequalities of various kinds through the sensory experience of mobility.

I will use this fellowship to communicate the findings of my research both within academic circles and amongst non-academic audiences, paying particular attention to their for academics and policy-practitioners concerned with the politics of mobilities, and those facilitating access to transport infrastructure on a daily basis.

During the fellowship I aim to show that transport infrastructures are not just 'networks' which need to be made more efficient, but are multi-sensory environments inhabited by a wide variety of workers and passengers. I aim to examine how inequalities in access to mobility and transport can be addressed through an attention to the concept of kin-aesthetics, examining how transport infrastructures are sensed, experienced and inhabited by different groups. I will outline why social science scholars should be cautious about simple claims that new, 'smart' technologies will make our mobilities faster and more efficient. Rather than simply facilitating journeys, these technologies are increasingly applied to get passengers to do certain kinds of work, whether that means being alert to suspicious activity, staying tuned for service alterations, 'clicking through' to a website advertised on a platform wall, or, as the case may be, a combination of all three. The writing, networking and dissemination activities planned for the fellowship will enable me to facilitate a greater shared understanding of kin-aesthetic politics and its repercussions for socio-economic visions and decisions concerning transport, infrastructure, and urban space more broadly.