State Spaces and Boundary Infrastructures

• In Event: Beyond Boundary Objects and Immutable Mobiles - New Ways of Thinking about the Movement of Knowledge III: Co-Production of Knowledge

Abstract

The everyday function of the Chinese rail network requires that tens of millions of individuals deliver themselves to precisely the right place at the right time. The discursive-material system that enables the rail network to function consists not just of the signs and spaces of the stations and carriages, but of the fluencies and flows of the passengers. Knowledge is firmly situated in place to enable people to move. Investigating this infrastructure thereby inverts the typical question of STS, rendering “how does knowledge move?” into “how does mobility become known?” What ways of being in the world does it generate, and how are they known?

Based on six months of participant observation within the Chinese rail system and interviews with Chinese travelers, this research aims to synthesize the work of STS thinkers like Haraway and Barad on discourse and materiality with the work of theorists like Lefebvre on state and space. This research investigates how rail infrastructure both joins and fractures national communities and state spaces, existing simultaneously as monumental re-workings of society and as an invisible backdrop for everyday life. This research recuperates the practices of rail passengers as not just performance, generative of meaning, but as a form of work, producing material change at scales ranging from the embodied to the national. Chinese rail is hidden in plain sight as it subtly but pervasively reorganizes the spaces of the Chinese nation.

Author

• Dylan P Brady, University of Oregon