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

该项目将重点关注墨西哥革命（1910-1920）期间铁路和铁路工人的作用，以便系统地分析运输在空间生产和民主社会变革中的作用。虽然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各个阶段发挥了重要的作用，往往是决定性的作用。这个项目的重点是铁路工人和他们的工作条件，以了解交通基础设施如何对社会变革至关重要。这样一来，它将为国家认同形成的过程提供新的见解，并为劳工史、运输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索引了各种档案材料，并创建了原始的历史GIS数据集，未来的学者可以以此为基础。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。尽管这场革命已经被广泛地记录下来，但从历史和地理的角度来看，铁路、铁路工人和铁路基础设施的使用在很大程度上仍未被探索。本研究融合了政治经济学、行动者网络理论和劳动地理学的理论概念，并采用档案研究、人物学和历史GIS相结合的混合方法来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，这个项目旨在理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。

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.