Doctoral Dissertation Research: Railroads, Railroad Workers, and Geographies of Social Change

博士论文研究：铁路、铁路工人和社会变革的地理

• 批准号: 1459108
• 负责人: James Biles
• 金额: $ 1.59万
• 依托单位: CUNY Graduate School University Center
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-03-15 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1459108&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Railroads; Railroad

This project will focus on the role of railroads and railroad workers during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) in order to systematically analyze the role of transportation in the production of space and democratic social change. Although the Mexican Revolution is usually thought of as a series of agrarian revolts, the railroad and railroad workers played an important and often decisive role at various stages of the Revolution. This project focuses on railroad workers and their working conditions in order to understand how transportation infrastructures are fundamental to social change. In so doing it will offer new insights into the process of national identity formation and make novel theoretical contributions to labor history, transportation geography, and critical social theory. An additional benefit of this study is the indexing of a variety of archival materials and the creation of original, historical GIS datasets that future scholars can build upon. As a defining moment in the country's history, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920 continues to shape the politics and culture of Mexican society. Although the Revolution has been extensively documented, the role of the railroads, railroad workers and the use of rail infrastructure remain largely unexplored from an historical, as well as a geographical, perspective. This work blends theoretical concepts from political economy, actor-network theory and labor geographies and uses a mixed methods approach that combines archival research, prosopography and historical GIS to reconstruct the socio-spatial environments of railroad workers. By analyzing railroads and railroad workers as active agents in the Revolution this project aims to understand how a means of accumulation like the railroad became an instrument to achieve democratic social change.

该项目将侧重于墨西哥革命(1910-1920年)期间铁路和铁路工人的作用，以便系统地分析运输在生产空间和民主社会变革中的作用。尽管墨西哥革命通常被认为是一系列的土地起义，但铁路和铁路工人在革命的不同阶段发挥了重要的、往往是决定性的作用。该项目的重点是铁路工人及其工作条件，以了解交通基础设施如何成为社会变革的根本。这样做将为国家认同的形成过程提供新的见解，并对劳动史、交通地理学和批判社会理论做出新的理论贡献。这项研究的另一个好处是为各种档案材料编制索引，并创建原始的、历史的地理信息系统数据集，供未来的学者使用。作为墨西哥历史上的一个决定性时刻，1910年至1920年的墨西哥革命继续塑造着墨西哥社会的政治和文化。虽然这场革命已被广泛记录在案，但铁路、铁路工人的作用以及铁路基础设施的使用在很大程度上仍未从历史和地理角度加以探讨。这项工作融合了政治经济学、行为者网络理论和劳动地理学的理论概念，采用档案研究、人口学和历史地理信息系统相结合的混合方法重建铁路工人的社会空间环境。通过分析铁路和铁路工人在革命中的积极作用，该项目旨在了解像铁路这样的积累手段如何成为实现民主社会变革的工具。