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

在我博士研究的基础上，这项奖学金将使我能够显著推进对运输物流从业者和政策专业人士如何在基础设施环境中管理个人运动的学术理解。通过推进后勤力量的概念，我的博士论文确定了对城市基础设施和交通基础设施采取更细致入微方法的迫切需要。这种方法结合了乘客的具体体验，超越了速度、经济效率和网络安全的战略理想。在这次合作中，我将重点关注具体形式的后勤力量如何引发对“亲属美学”实践的理解，个人通过这种实践穿越和感知城市基础设施空间。我将利用我对伦敦地铁的详细实证研究，研究如何结合使用新旧技术，通过管理乘客与所经过环境的感官互动，来影响火车或车站乘客的行为。在这样做的过程中，这些技术有助于构成一种特殊的治理技术，一种设计和监视空间的方法，这种方法不太关心使人们快速或有效地移动，而更多地是鼓励他们在移动时注意特定的风险和（商业）机会。在论文中，我声称这种治理的逻辑技术可能具有特定的社会政治影响，通过流动性的感官体验再现或加剧各种不平等。我将利用这项奖学金在学术界和非学术界的听众中传播我的研究成果，特别关注与交通政治有关的学者和政策实践者，以及那些促进日常交通基础设施使用的人。在研究期间，我的目标是展示交通基础设施不仅仅是需要提高效率的“网络”，而是各种各样的工人和乘客居住的多感官环境。我的目标是研究如何通过关注亲属美学的概念来解决交通和运输方面的不平等问题，研究不同群体如何感知、体验和居住交通基础设施。我将概述为什么社会科学学者应该对新的“智能”技术将使我们的移动更快、更高效的简单说法持谨慎态度。这些技术不仅仅是为旅程提供便利，而是越来越多地应用于让乘客做某些特定的工作，无论是对可疑活动保持警惕，关注服务变更，“点击”到站台墙上的网站广告，或者，视情况而定，三者的结合。为奖学金计划的写作、网络和传播活动将使我能够促进对亲属美学政治及其对更广泛的交通、基础设施和城市空间的社会经济愿景和决策的影响的更广泛的共同理解。

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.