Article ID: CBB099842429

Introduction: Precarious Connections: On the Promise and Menace of Railroad Projects (December 2020)

unapi

Peter Schweitzer (Author)
Olga Povoroznyuk (Author)


Transfers
Volume: 10
Issue: 2-3
Pages: 137-151


Publication Date: December 2020
Edition Details: Special section: On the promise and menace of Railroad Projects
Language: English

This introduction attempts to situate railroads, which have rarely been the object of ethnographic attention, within current debates of anthropology and related disciplines. While mobility is certainly one dimension of human-railroad entanglements, the introduction calls to explore political, social, material, and affective lives of railroads in Europe and Asia as well. Often, connections provided by railroads are precarious at best: enveloped in state and local politics, they appear to some as promise and to others as menace. Planning, construction, decay, and reconstruction constitute the temporal and material life cycle of these infrastructures. Attending to particular ethnographic and historical contexts, the introduction aims to demonstrate how railroads, these potent symbols of modernity, continue to be good to think with. (The version of record is December 2020, though the actual publication date is May/June 2020.)

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Includes Series Articles

Article Avishek Ray (December 2020) Walking as a Metaphor: COVID Pandemic and the Politics of Mobility. Transfers (pp. 103-109). unapi

Associated with

Article Adrian Deoancă (December 2020) (Dis)Connected Rail: Infrastructural Suspension and Phatic Politics in Romania. Transfers (pp. 152-174). unapi

Article Sigrid Irene Wentzel (December 2020) State of Uncertainty: Educating the First Railroaders in Central Sakha (Yakutiya). Transfers (pp. 175-194). unapi

Article Maria-Katharina Lang; Baatarnaran Tsetsentsolmon (December 2020) Connected or Traversed?: Plans, Imaginaries, and the Actual State of Railway Projects in Mongolia. Transfers (pp. 195-211). unapi

Article Robert J. Simpkins (December 2020) The Cadences of Rails: Unscheduled Stops in Tōkyō's Spaces of Flow. Transfers (pp. 212-229). unapi

Article Mateusz Laszczkowski (December 2020) Railway Territorialities: Topology and Infrastructural Politics in Alpine Italy. Transfers (pp. 230-249). unapi

Article Olga Povoroznyuk (December 2020) (Re)Constructing the Baikal-Amur Mainline: Continuity and Change of (Post)Socialist Infrastructure. Transfers (pp. 250-269). unapi

Article Katie Maher (December 2020) Traveling with Trained Man: Decolonizing Directions in Railway Mobilities. Transfers (pp. 83-102). unapi

Article Heather Anne Swanson (December 2020) Why Railroads Now?: Anthropology of Infrastructure and Debates around “Green” Transit. Transfers (pp. 270-282). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB099842429/

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Authors & Contributors
Baatarnaran Tsetsentsolmon
Guillermo Guajardo Soto
Andrey Vozyanov
John E. Mohr
Olga Povoroznyuk
Ildikó Zonga Plájás
Concepts
Land transportation
Mobility
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Infrastructure
Railroads
Technology and society
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
Places
Romania
Russia
Estonia
Tokyo (Japan)
Mexico City (Mexico)
Ukraine
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