Splintered Mobilities as Viral Vector: Mobility Justice and Racial Kinopolitics

Covid-19 has made self-evident the insidious effects of infrastructural splintering, especially in the United States, which are the outcome of the very processes first identified by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin 20 years ago. Splintered infrastructures have left behind unequal access to safe streets, public transit, urban green space, social distancing, and remote work, revealing deep racial, ethnic, and class disparities in risk exposure and vulnerability. Inequitable mobilities within splintered infrastructural contexts are key contributing factors to the vast racial and ethnic disparities seen in SARS-CoV-2 exposure and death rates in the United States. This brief commentary on the intersection of infrastructure studies and critical mobility studies argues that a racial justice perspective offers an understanding of the materialities of injustice at multiple sites and scales that have shaped the pandemic in such uneven and detrimental ways. Focusing on the US context, it centers the racialized kinopolitics of American history at the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the unmaking of splintered urbanism—or a dream of universal infrastructure—pandemic recovery requires mobility justice as a reweaving of fugitive planning represented by critical ideas such as commoning, Marronage, and the undercommons.